Paid search is a workhorse for eCommerce—but lately it’s getting harder to make the math work. Costs-per-click keep creeping up, and unless your conversion rate rises with them, your return on ad spend (ROAS) shrinks. There’s another lever, though: competitive product descriptions that help attract and convert traffic without cost-per-click. Consider comparing your ROAS to the return on content spend–or the ROCS metric.
What’s ROAS
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) measures revenue generated per dollar of ad spend. Formula: Revenue from ads ÷ Advertising cost. Recent industry benchmarks suggest eCommerce advertisers commonly see ROAS average 4x range. While your results may vary, with competitive margin pressures, it’s harder and harder to stay profitable with ad spend.
What’s ROCS
ROCS (Return on Content Spend) measures the incremental revenue attributable to content investment. Unlike ads—where we typically assume revenue is incremental—content already exists on most product pages. So ROCS should be calculated on incremental lift: (Incremental revenue from new/updated content) ÷ (Content cost). In practice, teams estimate incremental impact by running a controlled test and measuring the before/after changes for each group.
An example
DynEcom ran a controlled content test for a large medical and sanitation eCommerce site. Products were randomly assigned to either the Test group (fresh, original competitive content) or the Control group (unchanged). After 10 weeks, Test outperformed Control across key metrics:
- +31% more Google search impressions (vs. Control)
- +8% more organic traffic
- +11% more sales revenue
- +5% higher conversion rate
- +6% longer page engagement
- +9% higher average order value
All eCommerce Marketers think the same way. They are interested in the above metrics, but what they really care about sales. This is where ROCS enters. DynEcom charged $0.50 per product per month, and successfully generated $15.21 per product per month in sales more than the control group. This translates into a 31x ROCS.
How DynEcom can help
DynEcom starts every engagement by building a similar side-by-side test. We generate competitive content optimized for both traditional and AI search and then compare that to a control group to isolate the benefit of content. We offer this service for free under the assumption that if we can generate a strong return, the client will happily fund expanding the effort.
If your paid search ROI is under pressure, pairing ROAS with ROCS diversifies your growth mix, compounds organic visibility, and lifts conversion for every channel—not only ads.
Sources & Further Reading
Benchmarks: eCommerce ROAS ranges today: First Page Sage’s 2025 ROAS report by industry shows eCommerce PPC ROAS around 2.05:1, underscoring pressure on ad efficiency. https://firstpagesage.com/reports/roas-statistics/
Benchmarks: Google Ads performance trends: WordStream’s 2024–2025 Google Ads benchmarks highlight rising CPCs and shifting conversion rates across industries. https://www.wordstream.com/blog/2024-google-ads-benchmarks
Macro CPC context: Business of Apps aggregates 2025 CPC estimates across major ad platforms, useful for planning assumptions. https://www.businessofapps.com/ads/cpc/research/cpc-rates/
Market evidence of rising CPC pressure: Reuters reported steep competition and higher CPCs during peak retail periods due to aggressive bidding tactics. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/black-friday-online-marketing-costs-jump-bidding-war-with-temu-shein-2024-11-27/
Content quality guidance: Google’s documentation on creating helpful, people‑first content emphasizes originality and usefulness over duplication. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
Method: measuring incremental lift: MIT Sloan’s primer on difference‑in‑differences explains how to estimate treatment effects by comparing changes in test vs. control groups. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?DocumentID=4894
DynEcom competitive content case study: Controlled test results and cost/return math are summarized in this case study. https://dynecom.com/case-study/