Two auctions share one average
Brand terms on Google Search return 10-20% CTR; non-brand terms return 2-4%. Judging a non-brand campaign against the blended 5-7% average makes healthy campaigns look weak.
Expected CTR, CPC and profitability
Google Search ads average a 5-7% click-through rate across industries, while Meta feed placements run closer to 1%. A US click can cost fifty cents in retail or fifteen dollars in legal, so raw numbers mean little until they are set against the right range. This reference lays out those ranges and the three calculations — conversion rate, learning budget and break-even ROAS — that decide whether a campaign can ever be profitable.
Read these first
Scroll the strip sideways — 6 cards.
Brand terms on Google Search return 10-20% CTR; non-brand terms return 2-4%. Judging a non-brand campaign against the blended 5-7% average makes healthy campaigns look weak.
E-commerce and retail clicks run $0.50-2.00, finance and education $3-8, and legal, insurance and home services $5-15. Judge the CPC inside its industry band, not against a universal number.
Meta feed placements average 0.8-1.2% CTR while Stories and Reels run 1-3%, at the same $5-15 CPM. Compare each ad set to its own placement's range before calling it underperforming.
Google Ads' default window credits a conversion to a click for up to 7 days, and to a view for 1 day. Results reported this week partly describe clicks from last week.
Past 3-4 impressions per user per week on Meta prospecting, CTR commonly falls 15-25% from launch. The fix is new creative or a wider audience, not a higher bid.
Healthy targets are 70%+ on brand terms and 20-30% on generic terms. Below 15% on generics, the budget is the limit and no ad improvement will move the number.
This reference records no dated events; the timeframes that matter are recurring — 50 conversions per week to exit learning, a 7-day click attribution window, and 3-4 impressions per user per week before fatigue.
| Channel and placement | Typical click-through rate | Typical cost (US) | Typical conversion rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search — all industries | 5-7% | CPC $0.50-$15 by industry | 2-5% |
| Google Search — brand terms | 10-20% | set by the industry band | 2-5% |
| Google Search — non-brand terms | 2-4% | set by the industry band | 2-5% |
| Google Search — finance and education | within the non-brand band | CPC $3-$8 | 2-5% |
| Google Search — legal, insurance, home services | within the non-brand band | CPC $5-$15 | 2-5% |
| Google Search — e-commerce and retail | within the non-brand band | CPC $0.50-$2.00 | 2-5% |
| Meta — feed placements | 0.8-1.2% | CPM $5-$15 | 1-3% |
| Meta — Stories and Reels | 1-3% | CPM $5-$15; $5-$20 for video views | 1-3% |
On Google Search the cross-industry average is 5-7%; on Meta, plan around 0.8-1.2% in feed and 1-3% in Stories and Reels.
The Google average hides a wide split. Brand terms — searches that already contain the advertiser's name — return 10-20% CTR, because the intent is navigational. Non-brand terms, where the ad competes for an undecided searcher, return 2-4%. A blended account figure between those bands diagnoses nothing; the comparison has to be made within each campaign type.
Meta's lower figures are structural, not a sign of failure. Feed ads interrupt content the user came to see, so about one click per hundred impressions is the norm, and Stories and Reels roughly double or triple that. A Meta campaign measured against the search average will always look broken; measured against its own placement range, it may be exactly on target.
Use the ranges as a diagnostic band, not a goal. A non-brand search campaign at 3% CTR sits inside its band; the same campaign at 1.5% has a relevance or creative problem worth fixing before any budget is added.
US Google Search CPCs run from $0.50 in e-commerce to $15 in legal and home services; Meta inventory is priced per thousand impressions at roughly $5-15.
Search CPCs are set by the value of the customer being fought over. Finance and education clicks cost $3-8; legal, insurance and home services cost $5-15, because a single signed client can be worth thousands; e-commerce and retail cost $0.50-2.00, because order values are smaller.
Meta sells attention by the thousand: feed, Stories and Reels run at a US CPM of roughly $5-15, and video-view campaigns at about $5-20. An implied cost per click falls out of the arithmetic — at a $10 CPM and a 1% CTR, a thousand impressions yield ten clicks, or $1.00 per click.
The bands exist for sanity-checking. A retailer paying $6 per non-brand click is outside the $0.50-2.00 band and should fix targeting before scaling; a law firm paying $9 is inside its band and should be judging conversion rate instead.
This page assembles published benchmark ranges for paid search and paid social and derives its budget and break-even figures from them by plain arithmetic. No campaign data is collected here and no single advertiser's account informs the numbers. Where a figure is derived rather than published — the $3,750 weekly learning budget, for instance — the calculation is shown beside it.
Where the numbers come from
The ranges reflect commonly published US benchmarks for Google Ads and Meta Ads across industries; they describe averages across many advertisers, not any individual account.