Customer acquisition costs are rising steadily, and marketing activities are consuming ever larger budgets in e-commerce. One of the key drivers is the growing advertising activity of Chinese shopping platforms, which have become serious competition for Polish online stores. Another factor is the changing way people use the internet—driven by the rapid development of AI tools and the dynamics of social media.
“Advertising costs have started to rise significantly. In 2024, average CPC (cost per click) increased by around 25%, the fastest growth since the post-COVID period. From what I and the wider industry observe, one major reason is the heavy activity of Chinese players such as Temu,” Mateusz Haber, founder and CEO of JustIdea Agency, told Newseria.
Temu Floods Meta With Ads
According to a Sotrender report, Temu was already the leader in 2024 in terms of the number of ads across Meta’s entire ecosystem. The platform exceeded 124,000 ads at the time, while other top advertisers published “only” tens of thousands. The 2025 report points to an even sharper acceleration: Temu’s number of ads rose by more than 430% year-on-year. The total surpassed 660,000 ads, accounting for over 30% of all ads served on Meta last year.
“Today, Temu is the main competitor for 90% of e-commerce companies in Poland. In the case of our premium brand, across every European market where we sell our clothing products, Temu is our number one competitor. It ranks far above Zalando, ASOS, H&M, or Zara, which is a curious anomaly,” Haber argues.
A Real Rival to Allegro—and Not Alone
In individual months of 2025, Temu competed strongly for the top position with Poland’s e-commerce giant Allegro. Mediapanel data shows that Temu recorded 18 million visitors in March and more than 19 million in November. In the top ten e-commerce platforms, Temu is joined by two other Asia-based marketplaces—AliExpress and Shein—each with a multi-million visitor base as well.
A Temu report published under the Digital Services Act (DSA) indicates that in the first half of the year, the number of visitors across all EU countries averaged 115.7 million per month.
AI Changes How People Search—and Shrinks Traditional Ad Space
At the same time, the expansion of generative AI is altering how users discover information and make decisions.
“On the other hand, generative AI and the way people now consume content and chat with AI tools means they visit portals less often and search for things differently. This contributes to advertisers losing traditional ad space and access to audiences—through display advertising or search ads,” the JustIdea Agency CEO notes. “That pushes ad rates higher, so as performance marketers we can’t wait for a new advertising channel—ads inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Google Overview, or Perplexity.”
The creators of these tools have already signaled that they plan to open up to advertising. Solutions have also been tested that move popular AI tools closer to the role of a shopping assistant.
“AI is already influencing our purchasing decisions. More than 40% of buying decisions are supported through conversations with AI, so it’s crucial to ensure visibility in AI. You can do it in many ways, but brand and reputation are becoming increasingly important. Publishing in high-quality, well-known outlets effectively influences how you appear in generative AI,” Haber explains.
Faster Content, More Formats: Social Media Sets the Pace
The changing content-consumption model is also transforming the form of advertising messages themselves—and social media plays a central role. According to gemiusAdReal data and the “Social Media 2025” report, Facebook generates an average of about 15 billion ad contacts per month. In recent years, TikTok has joined the top tier (around 6.8 billion monthly), building massive reach thanks to short, highly engaging video formats.
“We’re definitely at a point where users expect very fast messages and very fast content. Today, people no longer say a video must capture attention in the first three seconds, but in the first two. We’re all overstimulated by the volume of content—on TikTok and Instagram alike—and every platform encourages us to produce as much content as possible,” the expert says.
TikTok’s guidelines published in June 2025 on creative best practices for advertising effectiveness recommend using three to five different creatives per ad group and three to five diversified ad groups per campaign. The platform also notes that it is always better to use creatives that differ significantly from one another—especially during testing.
“We should mix messages, create a dozen ad variations, feed them into the algorithm, and see what gets the best clicks,” advises the founder and CEO of JustIdea Agency. “Generally, whatever performs extremely well organically will likely also be the strongest in performance marketing and paid ads. So we’re at a moment where we need to produce more and more advertising content—not only graphics, but also, to a large extent, fast, highly engaging video materials.”
