The largest collegiate basketball tournament of the year provides an endlessly fun time to guess. From guessing who will get in to strategizing on the winner of each game to choosing upset teams (No. 12 seed for me!) to estimating the score of the final matchup, there’s no shortage of calculations to be made this March.
As much thrill as guessing can provide, when it comes to measuring the success of marketing efforts, there should be no estimations needed. Your organizational goals are set for a reason and results are crucial to showing the success of your efforts. But, how do you show the success of efforts if you just have numbers? At Freestyle, we work to find benchmarks to show how we stack up against others in certain industries or by channel.
Which is why we built this blog post just for you. Need a one-stop show for paid advertising metric benchmarks? We’ve got you. Though there are additional customized goals for certain industries or organizations (think ROI, conversions goals, etc.), here are some benchmarks available to help you get started measuring the success of a campaign or tactic within your marketing efforts.
Social media:
For awareness campaigns, social media ad platforms often calculate reach and impressions. These numbers don’t have benchmarks but each are defined below.
Impressions: The total number of times your content is shown to people. A single person can see the content multiple times, and each view counts as one impression.
Reach: The total number of unique people who see your content. Each person is counted only once, no matter how many times they view it.
| All industries (Facebook) | See all industry averages here. |
| Click-through rate | 0.90% |
| Conversion rate | 9.21% |
| Cost per click | $1.72 |
| Cost per action | $18.68 |
| All industries (Instagram) | See multiple social media platform benchmarks here. |
| Click-through rate | 0.22% – 0.88% (Stories: 0.33% – 0.54%) |
| Conversion rate | 1% |
| Cost per click | $3.35 (Stories: $1.83) |
| Cost per mille (Cost per thousand impressions) | $7.68 (Stories: $6.25) |
| All industries (X) | See multiple social media platform benchmarks here. |
| Click-through rate | 0.86% |
| Conversion rate | 0.77% |
| Cost per click | $0.58 |
| Cost per mille (Cost per thousand impressions) | $5.00 |
| All industries (LinkedIn) | See multiple social media platform benchmarks here. |
| Click-through rate | 0.52% |
| Engagement rate | 1.22% |
| Cost per lead | $98 |
| All industries (TikTok) | See all TikTok benchmarks here. |
| Video view rate | 100K+ followers: 5.5%, 10-50K followers: 2.8%, <5K followers: 22.45% |
| Engagement rate | 3.30% |
| Conversion rate | 3.4% |
Google Search
One of the tactics used heavily for lower-funnel efforts, Google Search has benchmarks that can vary considerably by industry. However, here are the all industry averages.
| All industries | See all industry averages here. |
| Click-through rate | 3.17% |
| Conversion rate | 3.75% |
| Cost per click | $2.69 |
| Cost per action | $48.96 |
YouTube
YouTube is a growing advertising space that depends heavily on many of the tactics already noted above; however, YouTube also has a visual component to measure. View rate measures the percentage of people who chose to watch your video when it was served to them. Cost per view is measured when someone watches more than five seconds of your ad or interacts with it.
| All industries | See all industry averages here. |
| Click-through rate | 0.65% |
| Cost per view | $0.026 |
| View rate | 31.9% (Generally, 15% or above is considered good.) |
| Cost per mille (Cost per thousand impressions) | $3.53 |
| Conversion rate | 1.4% |
Broadcast/Cable
With traditional broadcast marketing, we see limited metrics in terms of impressions and spots. However, the cost per 1,000 impressions should be between $10-15.
CTV/OTT
Connected TV is growing as a popular ads destination. And while cost per view is higher, better performance is usually the reason for it.
| All industries | |
| Cost per mille (Cost per thousand impressions) | $35 to $65 |
| Completion rate | 97% |
| Interactive content completion rate | 95% |
Display
Display click-through rates and cost per leads tend to be a lot lower and higher, respectively, than something like a search campaign. However, display can increase brand awareness efforts and create more conversions on other tactics in the long run.
| All industries | See all industry averages here. |
| Click-through rate | 0.12% |
| Cost per click | $4.78 |
| Cost per lead | $100.57 |
Leave the guessing to the madness in March. Ensure your marketing benchmarks are always ready to show the results of your marketing efforts, where optimizations are needed and to guide your paid advertising strategy. This blog post will always be here to help!