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First-party data  ·  Accounts I manage

Benchmarks measured on real accounts.

Most paid-media benchmarks are survey data. Someone asks a few hundred marketers what they pay, averages the answers, and publishes a number nobody can trace. These are different. Each report is read out of live accounts I hold credentials on, in a fixed window, and published under rules that survive an adversarial read: no client named, N stated next to every figure, and ratios rather than revenue.

Five reports published  ·  Refreshed on a schedule, not rolling

01   Published

Service businesses

Home Services Cost Per Lead by Trade

Cost per lead by trade across the home-services accounts I manage, in a fixed quarterly window. Roofing runs dearest and the median sits at $163 in Q3 2026. Two accounts that over-counted in July now report honest conversion rates after their tracking was fixed, and their cost per lead went up, which is what fixing tracking does.

  • 11 Accounts (N)
  • $163 Median CPL (N = 9)
  • 2 of 11 Tracking broken

Q3 2026 edition, 1 July to 30 September. The July 2026 figures stay on the page, marked superseded.

Read the CPL report

Cross-industry

Google Ads Benchmarks: 33 Live Accounts

Cost per click, cost per lead and account health across 33 Google Ads accounts in healthcare, home services, local services and ecommerce. The search terms report showed a median 52% of account spend, and of the spend it did show, a median 30.7% went to terms with two or more clicks and no conversions. Budget, not Ad Rank, capped most accounts.

  • $8.53 Median CPC (N = 33)
  • 52% Spend visible in terms (N = 11)
  • 23 of 31 Capped by budget

Q3 2026 edition, 1 July to 30 September. Refreshed quarterly.

Read the Google Ads benchmarks

Healthcare

Healthcare Google Ads Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead, click-through and impression share across eight healthcare Google Ads accounts, including specialties the big vendor panels leave out. In these accounts a healthcare lead is a phone call, so cost per lead mostly measures what each account counts as a call. All eight ran Search only, and all eight lost at least 29% of their search impression share to budget.

  • $39.54 Median CPL (N = 6)
  • 100% Median call share of leads (N = 8)
  • 8 of 8 Search only

Q3 2026 edition, 1 July to 30 September. Refreshed quarterly.

Read the healthcare report

Meta Ads

Meta Ads CPM by Placement

CPM and link click-through by placement and by optimization goal across 18 Meta ad accounts, mostly local service businesses. Marketplace sells the cheapest impressions and the weakest clicks. Half the accounts optimized for no conversion event at all, and the cheapest website leads leaned hardest on Audience Network.

  • $6.03 Pooled CPM (N = 18)
  • 0.27% Marketplace link CTR (N = 12)
  • $89.33 Median web CPL (N = 6)

Q3 2026 edition, 1 July to 30 September. Refreshed quarterly.

Read the Meta CPM report

Ecommerce

The Ecommerce Tracking Accuracy Benchmark

How far apart the ad platform, the analytics import and the store platform sit on the same purchase, in the same window, on the same account. Three concurrent purchase tags on one store disagreed by 30.1% over their common live window, and the account bid on whichever one read highest. On two of three accounts, part of what the Conversions column counted was add-to-cart rather than a sale.

  • 30.1% Tag spread (N = 1)
  • 16.6-17.2% Counted carts (2 of 3)
  • 99.4-99.8% All-conv. noise (3 of 3)

Measured 2026-05-13 to 2026-08-10. N = 3 on the ads side, N = 1 on the full reconciliation.

Read the accuracy benchmark

02   The standard

What a number
has to survive.

These five rules are why the reports can be cited. They also cost real findings: several figures I wanted to publish were cut because a sector descriptor or an exact volume count would have identified the account.

  1. 01

    My book, not a survey

    Every figure comes from an account I hold credentials on, read through the platform API in the window stated. Nothing is sourced from a vendor report, an industry average, or a survey of what marketers say they spend.

  2. 02

    N is stated next to the number

    A finding measured on one account is labelled N = 1 on the page, next to the figure, not in a footnote. Several of the most striking numbers in these reports are single-account observations, and they are marked as such so you can weight them yourself.

  3. 03

    No client is named

    Accounts appear as letters or as trades. Sector descriptors stay general on purpose, because a descriptor precise enough to be interesting is often precise enough to identify the account against the case studies published elsewhere on this site.

  4. 04

    Ratios, not revenue

    Counts, percentages and ratios get published. Spend, revenue and order values do not. A cost per lead is a unit price and it is publishable in aggregate. What a given brand turns over is theirs.

  5. 05

    The window is fixed, not rolling

    A rolling window quietly rewrites the number every time someone loads the page, which makes the report impossible to cite. These use a fixed window and get refreshed on a schedule, with the previous figures marked superseded rather than deleted.

03   Being measured now

What lands next.

Two more are in measurement. A seasonal efficiency report on what the fourth quarter does to return on ad spend, which starts from the finding that on the account I have measured across two of them, the highest-volume quarter was also the weakest one. And a home and furniture brand report covering median CPC, Shopping share of spend and Performance Max mix by spend band. Neither is published until the sample is large enough to state an N I am willing to defend.

The first finding out of the seasonal work is already written up: what three years of purchase-only data say about the fourth quarter.

Want this run on your account?

I will tell you which
of your numbers are real.

Thirty minutes on the phone. I read your conversion setup the same way I read the accounts in these reports, and you leave knowing which of your reported numbers describe money and which describe carts.

Book a strategy call Read the Tracking Stack hi@connercrowe.com