Abstract We consider the action of Mandelbrot multiplicative cascades on probability measures supported on a symbolic space. For general probability measures, we obtain almost a sharp criterion of non-degeneracy of the limiting measure; it relies on the lower and upper Hausdorff dimensions of the measure and the entropy of the random weights. We also obtain sharp bounds for the lower Hausdorff and upper packing dimensions of the limiting measure. When the original measure is a Gibbs measure associated with a potential of certain modulus of continuity (weaker than Hölder), all our results are sharp. This improves results previously obtained by Kahane and Peyrière, Ben Nasr, and Fan. We exploit our results to derive dimension estimates and absolute continuity for some random fractal measures.