The question, "How much can you make with online marketing?" is the wrong question for a modern e-commerce business. It's a question rooted in a simpler, less accountable era of digital advertising. For the Head of Marketing or the e-commerce Founder reporting to a demanding CFO, the real, high-stakes question is: "How much of that revenue can I definitively prove is a result of my marketing investment?"
The difference between the two questions is the difference between speculative spending and strategic, scalable growth. In the high-stakes world of e-commerce, where ad spend can easily top €100K per month, the margin for error is razor-thin. This article is not about the theoretical ceiling of online marketing revenue; it's about the attributable, incremental revenue that satisfies the finance department and unlocks the next round of budget.
The primary challenge facing e-commerce marketers today is the "Attribution Discrepancy." This is the frustrating reality where Meta reports one ROAS, Google reports another, and the final number in Shopify's ledger is a third, often lower, figure. This fragmentation leads to a crisis of confidence, particularly with the CFO or investors.
The discrepancy arises because each platform uses a different, self-serving attribution window and model. They are designed to claim credit, not to provide an accurate, holistic view of the customer journey. To move past this, you must adopt a system that unifies this data and applies a single, objective model.
For years, the industry relied on the Last-Click model, which is simple but fundamentally flawed. It gives 100% of the credit to the final touchpoint, ignoring the crucial awareness and consideration phases. The modern e-commerce marketer must transition to models that reflect the true complexity of the customer path:
The pursuit of incremental revenue is the key to maximizing what you "make" with online marketing. If a channel's reported ROAS is 4.0x, but its incremental ROAS is only 1.5x, you are overspending and cannibalizing sales that would have happened anyway. The goal is to find the channels that drive genuinely new, additional sales.
The theoretical revenue ceiling for online marketing is limitless, but your practical, profitable ceiling is constrained by the quality of your data and your ability to act on it. For the "Scale-Up Struggler" (e-commerce brands spending €100K-€200K/month), the ceiling is often hit prematurely due to three core data failures:
To break through this ceiling, you must unify your data. A dedicated attribution solution acts as the single source of truth, reconciling platform data with your CRM and e-commerce platform (like Shopify) to provide a clean, un-biased view of performance. This shift transforms marketing from a cost center into a predictable, scalable revenue engine.
To speak the CFO's language, you must frame your marketing performance not in terms of impressions or clicks, but in terms of Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). The true measure of what you "make" is the CLTV:CAC ratio.
A successful e-commerce marketing strategy is one that optimizes for a healthy CLTV:CAC ratio (typically 3:1 or higher). This requires understanding the full-funnel impact of every euro spent. For example, a prospecting campaign on TikTok might have a low immediate ROAS, but if it consistently drives high-CLTV customers, it is a vital, high-value investment. Without accurate, multi-touch attribution, this crucial insight is lost, and the channel is prematurely cut.
To further your understanding of how to maximize attributable revenue, consider these related topics:
The future of online marketing is not about making more, but about proving more. As privacy restrictions tighten and platform data becomes less reliable, the ability to demonstrate the causal link between a marketing action and a revenue outcome will be the single greatest competitive advantage.
This is where advanced methodologies, such as those focusing on causal inference in marketing, become essential. They allow marketers to isolate the effect of a single variable (e.g., a new ad creative or a budget increase) from all other confounding factors. This level of scientific rigor is what the CFO demands and what separates a guessing game from a predictable growth model.
In conclusion, the answer to "How much can you make with online marketing?" is: "As much as your data allows you to prove." By investing in robust, unbiased attribution and adopting a CFO-centric mindset focused on incremental, attributable revenue, you can confidently scale your ad spend and secure your place as a strategic partner in the business, not just a spender of funds.
