Facebook & Instagram Ads Benchmarks by Industry

These are Meta (Facebook & Instagram) benchmarks for two metrics: CPC (cost per click) and CTR (click-through rate — the share of people who click after seeing your ad). The figures combine Facebook and Instagram, because most Meta campaigns run across both placements at once, and they come from traffic-objective campaigns.

Find your industry and compare each column to your own account. Across all industries the averages are about a $0.70 CPC and a 1.7% CTR — the baseline to read your own numbers against.

Two details shape these numbers. First, they combine Facebook and Instagram — most advertisers use automatic placements, so Meta spreads a campaign across both and the reported cost blends them; a feed-only or Stories-only campaign can differ. Second, they come from traffic-objective campaigns, optimised for clicks. If you run conversion-objective campaigns instead, Meta optimises delivery differently and your CPC and CTR can shift — so always compare like-for-like.

The most expensive Meta clicks are in finance & insurance (~$1.22), personal services (~$1.00) and home & home improvement (~$0.99) — higher-value, more competitive audiences.

The cheapest are in shopping, collectibles & gifts (~$0.34), sports & recreation (~$0.41) and arts & entertainment (~$0.49), where visual, impulse-friendly products earn clicks cheaply. Even the priciest Meta click, though, is a fraction of a typical Google Search click — which is the real headline of this table.

Put this table next to our Google Search benchmarks and two gaps stand out:

• Clicks are roughly eight times cheaper — a ~$0.70 Meta CPC versus ~$5.42 on Google Search — because a social click interrupts someone mid-scroll rather than answering a query they typed.
• CTR is much lower — about 1.7% on Meta versus 6.6% on Search — for the same reason: fewer people click an ad they weren't looking for.

The exception is shopping, whose ~4.13% CTR is the highest on Meta — visual products shown to the right audience get clicked far more than average. Neither platform is "better"; they do different jobs, and their numbers should never be compared head-to-head.

You'll notice there's no CPM column, and that's deliberate. Unlike click and conversion metrics, Meta CPM isn't published reliably at the industry level — the figures that circulate come from aggregators that disagree widely. Rather than publish numbers we can't stand behind, we leave it out. For CPM, see our Facebook CPM by country table (where reliable data does exist) or the CPM calculator.

These figures come from WordStream / LocaliQ Facebook advertising benchmarks, averaged across many real accounts — so treat each number as the middle of a range, not a fixed target. For how to judge whether your own figures are good, see what a good CPC is and what a good CTR is.