What Is a Good Cost Per Purchase for Meta Ads? (2026 Benchmarks)
Cost per purchase is one of the most important metrics in any Meta Ads account, but it is also one of the most misunderstood. A $30 cost per purchase might be excellent for one brand and catastrophic for another. Whether your cost per purchase is good or bad depends entirely on your product price and your margin.
How to calculate your target cost per purchase
Maximum cost per purchase = Average order value multiplied by gross margin
For example: product price $80, gross margin 50%, maximum cost per purchase = $80 x 50% = $40. At $40 you break even on ad spend. To leave room for overhead and profit, your target should be 50% to 70% of your maximum, so $20 to $28 in this example.
Cost per purchase benchmarks by product category
Fashion and apparel: $15 to $45. One of the most competitive categories on Meta. Strong visual creative and clear offers are the primary lever for staying at the lower end of this range.
Beauty and skincare: $12 to $35. High emotional purchase motivation and strong UGC performance make beauty one of the best-performing categories on Meta.
Home goods and furniture: $25 to $80. Higher consideration purchase with a longer decision cycle. Retargeting is particularly important in this category.
Health and supplements: $20 to $60. Subscription models significantly reduce effective cost per purchase because repeat orders are built into the economics.
Food and beverage: $15 to $50. Subscription and consumable products tend to see lower effective costs per purchase because lifetime value is high.
Why your cost per purchase might be high and how to fix it
Your landing page conversion rate is low. This is the most overlooked driver of high cost per purchase. If you improve your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, your cost per purchase drops by 50% without touching your ad account.
Your creative has fatigued. Check your ad frequency. If cold audience frequency is above 2.5, introduce new creative.
Your audience is too broad or too cold. Allocate 20% of budget to retargeting add-to-cart and checkout abandoners, where costs per purchase are typically 50 to 70% lower than cold audiences.
You are optimising for the wrong conversion event. Always verify your campaign objective is Sales and your conversion event is set to Purchase.
The bottom line
A good cost per purchase is one that is below your margin-based target and leaves room for your other business costs. Calculate your maximum cost per purchase, set a target at 50 to 70% of that maximum, and use it to evaluate every campaign decision.
We offer a free Meta Ads account review that includes a full cost per purchase analysis against your specific margins. We are based in Oshawa, Ontario, working with ecommerce brands across Toronto and Canada. We also have a full breakdown of what a good ROAS looks like for Meta Ads in Canada. We also manage Google Ads for brands scaling on both platforms.