As a marketer in Malaysia or Singapore, you look at your ad dashboards daily. You see thousands of Ringgit or Dollars being pumped into Shopee Ads and TikTok Shop Paid Boosting. The charts go up, the impressions look massive, and your team tells you everything is optimised.
But is that ad spend translating into actual, bottom-line profitability?
With platform commission fees sitting between 4% to 6% across Malaysia and Singapore, and customer acquisition costs climbing across the board, relying on vanity metrics like impressions or clicks is a fast track to bleeding cash. You need to know if your team is spending the right money on the right channels.
What is ROAS Really?
If you want to evaluate your marketplace performance accurately, you must look at one ultimate metric: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
ROAS measures the gross revenue generated for every single dollar or ringgit you spend on advertising. The formula is straightforward: divide your gross revenue generated from ads by your cost of ad spend. If your team spends RM10,000 on TikTok Shop Ads and it brings in RM40,000 in sales, your ROAS is 4x.
Why ROAS matters more than impressions: Impressions tell you how many people saw your ad. ROAS tells you whether that visibility is actually making you money. In a marketplace with 4-6% commission fees, a good-looking 2x ROAS may mean you are losing money on every order once fees, fulfilment, and product cost are factored in.
The Real Marketplace Benchmarks for Malaysia and Singapore
Many internal teams claim a 2x ROAS is good, but given modern platform transaction fees and shifting consumer habits, a 2x ROAS might actually mean your brand is losing money on every order. Based on aggregated data from active local campaigns, here are the benchmarks to hold your team to:
Shopee Paid Ads (Intent Search)
Industry average in MY/SG: 1.8x to 2.5x
NextsClick high-performer benchmark: 3.5x+ via strict negative keyword and match-type pruning
TikTok Shop Ads (Live and Video Commerce)
Industry average in MY/SG: 2.0x to 3.0x
NextsClick high-performer benchmark: 4.2x to 5.6x leveraging hyper-local multi-cultural content hooks
If your current dashboards are consistently hovering at or below the baseline industry averages, your team is leaving an immense amount of money on the table.
Red flag: If your team celebrates hitting 2x ROAS without accounting for platform fees, fulfilment costs, and product margin — you may already be running at a loss without realising it.
Your Team is Busy, Not Specialised
Why do most in-house teams struggle to beat these benchmarks? It is not due to a lack of effort. It is because marketplace advertising has become highly specialised.
To hit a 4x+ ROAS on TikTok Shop in Malaysia, you need deep data optimisation: mapping out high-converting multi-cultural content hooks, adjusting bids based on real-time Payday peaks, and monitoring creative fatigue daily. In Singapore's premium retail space, you have to ruthlessly optimise unit economics to combat high CAC while driving up Average Order Value.
- Real-time bid management — Marketplace CPCs shift hourly based on competitor activity and platform auction dynamics. In-house teams rarely have the bandwidth to adjust bids throughout the day.
- Creative fatigue monitoring — On TikTok Shop, ad creatives can saturate your audience within 5-7 days. Without daily monitoring and creative rotation, ROAS drops sharply.
- Negative keyword pruning on Shopee — Without aggressive negative keyword management, Shopee intent search campaigns bleed budget on irrelevant queries that never convert.
- Payday and seasonal peak optimisation — Malaysia's Payday cycle (25th-5th) and Singapore's payday calendar create predictable high-intent windows. Brands that do not increase bids strategically during these windows lose to competitors who do.
Find out exactly where your ad budget is going
We will audit your Shopee and TikTok Shop accounts and show you where spend is being wasted — for free.
Claim Your Free AuditStop Guessing. Get a Guaranteed ROAS Lift.
You should not have to wonder if your marketing budget is being spent efficiently. At NextsClick Digital, we are a performance marketing and e-commerce growth agency built for metrics-driven founders and retail brand managers in Malaysia and Singapore.
Our dedicated team specialises in full account management for TikTok Shop and Shopee. Because we live in these dashboards daily, we are confident and contractually guarantee that we will increase your ROAS.
Let us prove our value first by performing a comprehensive audit on your active accounts. We will dive deep into your Shopee and TikTok Shop ad accounts to expose exactly where your budget is being wasted — and show you how to instantly unlock higher ROAS.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions from brand managers and founders about marketplace ad performance in Malaysia and Singapore.
The industry average in Malaysia sits at 1.8x-2.5x for Shopee and 2.0x-3.0x for TikTok Shop. However, once you factor in platform commission fees (4-6%), fulfilment costs, and product margin, a 2x ROAS often means you are breaking even or losing money.
Our benchmark for well-optimised accounts is 3.5x+ for Shopee and 4.2x-5.6x for TikTok Shop. If you are consistently below these numbers, there is significant room for improvement.
Declining ROAS despite higher spend is usually caused by audience saturation (your creative has fatigued), inefficient keyword targeting, or budget being pushed into lower-converting placements by the algorithm.
Scaling ad spend without addressing the underlying structural issues will always lead to diminishing returns. The fix requires granular optimisation — not just more budget.
Shopee Ads are primarily intent-driven — users are actively searching for products, so keyword targeting and bidding strategy is everything. The biggest levers are negative keyword pruning, match-type control, and listing quality.
TikTok Shop Ads are discovery-driven — creative quality, hook strength, and audience targeting matter most. The content must stop the scroll within 2 seconds and lead to a seamless purchase. Both platforms require very different skill sets to optimise effectively.
Our free audit covers a full review of your active Shopee and TikTok Shop ad accounts: current ROAS vs. benchmarks, budget allocation by campaign type, keyword efficiency and wasted spend, creative fatigue analysis, and a prioritised list of the top fixes that will have the biggest impact on profitability.
You will walk away with a clear, actionable picture — no obligation to proceed further. Sign up here to get started.
Yes. We contractually guarantee an improvement in your ROAS when we take over full account management. This confidence comes from the fact that we manage marketplace accounts daily at scale across dozens of brands in Malaysia and Singapore.
We do not take on every brand. Before we commit, we run the free audit to make sure there is genuine headroom to improve — so that when we do guarantee results, we can actually deliver them.
NextsClick is a results-driven growth marketing agency helping D2C and consumer brands scale through paid media, TikTok commerce, marketplace management, and AI-powered SEO. Based in Kuala Lumpur, operating across Malaysia and Singapore.
