Irish retailers are spending more on paid media than ever — and getting less in return. Rising CPMs, post-iOS attribution fog, and increasing competition from international brands have made it harder to know what's working. This is a guide to structuring your paid media spend so that it actually drives profitable growth.
What Is the Best Paid Media Channel for Irish Retailers?
Direct answer
For most Irish home, interiors, garden and lifestyle retailers, Meta is the highest-ROI acquisition channel — visual format, broad Irish reach, and strong retargeting. Google Shopping is essential for capturing existing demand. Most Irish retailers should run both, not choose.
The question isn't really Meta vs. Google — it's understanding what each channel does and making sure you're using both for their respective strengths. Meta creates demand. Google captures it. If you only run one, you're either creating demand you can't capture, or capturing demand you haven't created.
The Irish market has a relatively small addressable audience (approximately 5 million people, of whom perhaps 1–2 million are relevant buyers for most retail categories). This means Irish Meta campaigns exhaust audiences faster than UK or US campaigns, and creative refresh is more important here than almost anywhere else.
Meta vs. Google: How to Split Your Budget
Budget allocation guidance
A typical starting split for Irish retailers: 60% Meta, 40% Google. Adjust based on your brand's search volume. If your brand has strong organic search traffic and existing intent, Google Shopping may deserve more. If you're building brand awareness in a crowded category, Meta gets more.
| Channel | Best For | Irish Market Notes | Typical Budget Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta (Facebook & Instagram) | Acquisition, brand building, retargeting | Strong for visual categories (home, interiors, garden). Audience sizes are smaller than UK — plan for more creative refresh. | 50–65% |
| Google Shopping | Capturing in-market demand | Essential if you have search volume for your products. High intent — but you need demand to exist first. | 25–35% |
| Google Search | Brand terms, category terms | Brand search campaigns are almost always profitable. Category terms can be expensive in competitive niches. | 5–15% |
| TikTok | Reach, lower CPM, younger demos | Growing in Ireland. Best for brands under 40 demographic, strong visual/video products. Creative demands are higher. | 0–15% |
| Discovery for home/interiors/lifestyle | Underused by Irish brands. High-intent discovery for home and interiors. Worth testing at low budget. | 0–10% |
How Much Should an Irish Retailer Spend on Meta Ads?
Budget guidance
Start with 3–5% of your target monthly revenue. Below €1,500/month, Meta's algorithm doesn't have enough volume to optimise for Irish audiences. Above €10,000/month, you need more sophisticated structure to maintain efficiency.
The minimum effective spend on Meta for the Irish market is approximately €1,500–€2,000/month. Below this, you don't generate enough conversion events for the algorithm to optimise, and you're essentially buying impressions without enough data to improve performance.
At €5,000–€10,000/month, you have enough volume to run meaningful A/B tests on creative and to separate prospecting and retargeting campaigns. This is where most Irish home and interiors brands should be operating if they're serious about acquisition.
Above €10,000/month, you need a full-funnel structure — separate campaigns for awareness, consideration, and conversion — and a regular creative testing cadence to avoid audience fatigue in the smaller Irish market.
When Does TikTok Make Sense for Irish Brands?
When to add TikTok
When your product has strong visual appeal and demonstrability, your audience skews under 40, and you can produce short-form video content consistently. Home transformation, before/after, and product demo content are natural fits. TikTok CPMs in Ireland are currently lower than Meta — but creative demands are higher.
The Irish TikTok ad market is still relatively underdeveloped compared to the UK and US — which means CPMs are lower and competition for attention is less intense. For Irish home and interiors brands with strong visual content, this is an opportunity worth exploring at a test budget of €500–€1,000/month before committing further.
The key constraint is creative. TikTok requires native-feeling, short-form video content — not repurposed Meta static ads. If you don't have the content production capability or resource to produce this consistently, TikTok will underperform regardless of budget.
How to Measure Paid Media Performance Post-iOS
The right metric framework
Stop relying on in-platform ROAS as your primary metric. Use Marketing Efficiency Ratio (total revenue ÷ total marketing spend) as your primary commercial metric. Supplement with post-purchase surveys and incrementality testing for channel-level decisions.
Meta's in-platform ROAS is typically overstated by 20–40% post-iOS privacy changes. If you're making spend decisions based on a reported 5x ROAS without cross-referencing to your actual revenue, you're likely over-spending on what looks like a winner and missing what's actually driving purchases.
A simple measurement framework for Irish retailers:
- Track MER weekly: total revenue ÷ total marketing spend across all channels
- Run a post-purchase survey ("how did you hear about us?") — at minimum 200 responses/month
- Compare new customer numbers month-on-month to validate acquisition claims
- Set a blended CAC target and track against it — not just in-platform ROAS
- Run channel incrementality tests (pause a channel for 2 weeks, measure revenue delta) before cutting spend
The Biggest Paid Media Mistake Irish Retailers Make
Most common and most expensive mistake
Spending on acquisition without a retention strategy. Buying customers once, failing to convert them to repeat buyers — then wondering why growing ad spend isn't growing profit. The fix is to treat retention and paid media as a single system, not separate functions.
The Irish home and interiors market has naturally long repurchase cycles — a customer might redecorate every 2–4 years. But within a category, there are often multiple purchase occasions: accessories, gifts, seasonal updates, consumables. The brands that win are the ones that use email, retargeting, and loyalty mechanics to stay present in those micro-occasions between the big purchases.
If you're spending €5,000/month on paid media and have no post-purchase email flow, you're essentially paying to acquire customers once and then leaving them for a competitor to re-acquire. That's the most expensive customer acquisition mistake in Irish retail.
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