How to use these benchmarks
Benchmarks are a reference point, not a target. Find the industry closest to your business, compare your own numbers against it, and treat a large gap as a prompt to investigate rather than proof that something is wrong. Your audience, offer, creative, seasonality and bidding all move these figures, so a metric that sits below benchmark on one campaign can be perfectly healthy on another. Use them to sanity-check a plan and spot outliers — then trust your own account data over any published average.
What's a good CTR, CPC, CPM, and conversion rate?
"What's a good number?" always depends on the platform and industry. Using the tables above as a guide:
- CTR — Google Search click-through rates commonly run in the mid-single digits (around 5–7% on average), while Facebook and Instagram feed CTRs are typically closer to 1–2%.
- CPC — from a few cents on broad social audiences to around $10 on high-intent search terms in competitive fields like legal, home improvement and finance.
- CPM — Meta CPMs sit in the low-to-mid teens in higher-income markets and only a dollar or two in lower-cost regions; broad display is cheaper still.
- Conversion rate — varies widely with offer and landing page, commonly from around 3% to over 10% by industry.
For your exact industry, read the figure straight from the tables above rather than relying on a single universal number.
What moves ad benchmarks
Every benchmark is the middle of a wide range. The biggest drivers:
- Industry & competition — more advertisers bidding on the same audience pushes costs up.
- Seasonality — costs climb in Q4 as advertisers compete for holiday attention.
- Targeting — narrow, high-intent audiences cost more per impression but often convert better.
- Ad quality & relevance — platforms reward engaging ads with lower prices.
- Platform & format — search, social, display and video price and perform differently.
Published reports also update over time, so re-check your own account data regularly — a benchmark from another year or region may not reflect your reality.