Resources ›How much does online advertising cost
Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads — real numbers, no fluff. If you are a business owner or manager trying to understand how much to budget and what to expect, this guide is for you.
The first thing to understand: there is no fixed price. The cost of online advertising depends on your industry, competition, seasonality, the quality of your landing page and what results you want to achieve.
What you can control are two things: the ad budget (money that goes directly to the platform) and the management cost (what you pay an agency or specialist).
Google Ads works on an auction basis. You pay per click (CPC) and the price varies significantly depending on the keywords you target.
CPC average for Romania: ~$0.40 (Statista, 2023). Costs vary widely by industry — competitive verticals like legal, finance and real estate can be 10–20x more expensive than eCommerce.
Note: CPCs in Bucharest are typically 20–30% higher than other Romanian cities.
Data from Glopal (Google Shopping partner), Romania market.
Shopping is consistently cheaper than Search for eCommerce. Romania's Shopping CTR (0.55% average) outperforms the UK and US on the same categories.
Below these thresholds, the platform cannot gather enough data to optimize and results will be inconsistent.
Meta Ads works differently from Google: you are not targeting search intent, but audiences. The main cost metric is CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) or CPC, depending on the campaign objective.
Romania has some of the lowest Meta CPMs in Europe. Estimated CPM: ~$0.60 (The SR Zone, 2025). Note: Romania-specific Meta data with disclosed methodology is limited — treat these as directional figures.
Meta Ads is best suited for creating demand and remarketing, not for capturing existing demand. If people don't know your product exists, Meta is where you find them. If they are already searching, Google is more efficient.
LinkedIn is the most expensive advertising platform, but also the most precise for B2B. You target by job title, industry, seniority and company — impossible to replicate on other platforms.
No Romania-specific LinkedIn benchmark data exists publicly. The figures below are EMEA averages (Closely Blog, January 2026) — the closest available proxy. Romanian costs likely fall below the EMEA average given the smaller audience size.
Recommended minimum budget: 600–1,000 EUR/month. Below this amount, data is insufficient for optimization. LinkedIn makes economic sense when the value of a new client is high (SaaS products, consulting, B2B services with large contracts).
The ad budget is only part of the equation. Cost per result depends on:
Landing page quality
A weak page can double your cost per conversion compared to an optimised one. Ads bring traffic — the page makes the sale.
Industry competition
The more advertisers bidding on the same keywords or audiences, the higher the prices. Competitive industries (insurance, real estate, clinics) have significantly higher costs.
Product or service margin
A product with a 15% margin cannot sustain the same cost per conversion as one with a 50% margin. The ad budget must be calibrated against the real economics of your business.
Seasonality
Black Friday, Christmas, or peak seasons in your industry push CPC costs up by 30–200%. A well-planned budget calendar makes a real difference.
A Google Ads or Meta Ads specialist with real experience costs 800–1,600 EUR/month net in Romania (2026). Add employer benefits, tools, training and supervision — the real cost is 1,200–2,400 EUR/month, and that person typically manages a single account.
Agencies typically work with one of these pricing models:
Agency advantage: experience across multiple accounts and industries, access to comparative data and tested structures. Disadvantage: they do not know your business as well as a dedicated employee.
The simple rule: the ad budget must be recoverable from the first conversions. If you sell a product with a 20 EUR margin and the cost per conversion is 30 EUR, the campaigns are not profitable no matter how much you optimise.
Before allocating any budget, answer these three questions:
What is the average value of a new client for me?
At what cost per conversion do I remain profitable?
How many new clients per month can I handle operationally?
Starting from these answers, the right budget is calculated — not guessed.
Sources
We will not give you a generic number. We discuss your margin, objectives and competition and set a budget that makes economic sense.
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