Google Shopping for food and drink brands: how to tell if the ads are actually paying

Every food and drink store we audit has Google Ads running, and almost none of them can say whether the ads make money. They can say the return on ad spend, because Google shows it. They cannot say whether that return is above the number at which an order covers its own cost, because nobody has worked that out.

Here is how to work it out, what the 2026 benchmarks say, and why the answer depends on the second order.

What the benchmarks say

Triple Whale's cross-channel data puts the median Google Ads return for food and beverage at 3.18x, with a cost per order of about $23.65. CorePPC reports a blended ecommerce Performance Max return of 4.8x and a food and beverage Shopping cost per click of around $0.52. Harucon's dataset of 31 accounts gives a much lower Performance Max median of 2.3x.

Then there is the awkward one. Based.marketing's analysis argues that once branded searches are removed, incremental Performance Max return typically lands at 2x to 4x. Someone searching your brand name was going to buy anyway. Google counts the sale.

So the honest range for a UK food and drink store is about 2x to 5x, and the honest incremental figure is at the bottom of it. Which only means something once you know your break-even.

Your break-even return

One number, and most stores have never calculated it.

Take the sale price of a typical order excluding VAT. Subtract the cost of the goods, the packaging, the delivery you pay for, and the payment fee. What is left is contribution. Divide it by the sale price and you have contribution margin.

Break-even return on ad spend is one divided by that margin. At a 40% margin, break-even is 2.5x. At 30%, it is 3.3x. At 50%, 2x.

Now look at your Google Ads return. If it is 2.2x and your break-even is 2.5x, every first order from ads loses money. Google will show you a green number the whole time.

Why first-order loss can still be right

For food and drink, the first order is rarely the point. A biltong buyer, a coffee buyer, a snack-box buyer comes back, and the 2026 repeat-purchase benchmarks put food and beverage twelve-month repeat rates somewhere between 28% and 45% depending on the definition, with most of the repeat happening in the first month.

So the real question is not whether the ad pays on the first order. It is whether the ad pays across the orders that follow, and that depends on whether the store has the flows that bring people back. Email and SMS for the second order is where that is decided, and it is why ads cannot be judged alone.

Where food and drink Shopping campaigns go wrong

From the accounts we take over, four things, in order of how often we see them.

Branded and non-branded in one campaign. The brand searches flatter the whole campaign's return, and the non-branded spend hides inside it. Split them. Judge the non-branded campaign on its own.

The feed. Titles that lead with the brand instead of the product, missing pack sizes, no GTINs, images that do not show the food. The feed is the ad in Shopping, and most feeds were set up once by whoever built the site.

No margin in the bidding. A 200g pack and a 1kg case have different margins and the same bid. Target return should be set by product group, from the contribution numbers above, not one figure for the account.

Nobody owns the number. The ads freelancer reports the return. The email person reports open rates. The agency that built the site reports uptime. Nobody is responsible for whether the store makes more money this month than last.

One plan, one person

That last one is the whole problem, and it is the one we fix. We took The Original Biltong Company from £96k to £265k in 12 months by running the ads, the site, and email and SMS as one plan, judged against one break-even number, with one person to call.

The audit is free. It includes your break-even return worked out from your own margins, your Google return with branded searches removed, and the three changes we would make first. Yours to keep.

Sources

Triple Whale Google Ads benchmarks by industry 2026, food and beverage median 3.18x; CorePPC Google Ads ecommerce benchmarks 2026; Harucon Google Ads benchmarks 2026, 31 accounts with over €500 spend; Based.marketing ecommerce ROAS benchmarks 2026 on incremental return. Repeat rates: 2026 repeat-purchase benchmark compilations for food and beverage. Vendor datasets, measured differently; read November 2026.