Marketing benchmarks, with the sources and the caveats attached

Start here: there is no UK cost-per-click benchmark

This is worth stating first because it contradicts roughly every other page you will find on the subject. There is no published, independent, industry-level cost-per-click or cost-per-lead benchmark for the United Kingdom. Not from Google, not from a regulator, not from a research body.

The Competition and Markets Authority got closest. In its 2020 online platforms and digital advertising market study it compelled the actual figures from Google and Microsoft under statutory information notices — annual data from 2010 to 2019 and monthly data from 2017 to 2019. It is the best UK evidence that exists, and the CPC values are redacted in the public version. What survives is the direction of travel: UK search advertising revenue grew from roughly £2.1bn in 2010 to £7.3bn in 2019, and cost per click was “fairly stable but has increased somewhat over time from a low point in 2012 to a peak in 2015”.

So when a UK agency page shows you a tidy table of “average UK CPC by industry”, it is one of three things: their own client data presented as a market average, an American dataset with the dollar signs swapped for pound signs, or another agency's page copied. We checked a dozen of them and found no fourth category.

Source: Competition and Markets Authority, Online platforms and digital advertising market study, Appendix C: Market Outcomes, 2020. UK. Data obtained directly from Google and Microsoft under s174 notices. Absolute CPC values redacted in the published version; data ends 2019.

Meta ads: why we are not giving you a table

The same publisher produces a Facebook benchmark report, and we have chosen not to reproduce it as a table because we do not think it is stable enough to plan against.

The leads-objective figures rest on 726 campaigns split across fifteen industries, so several rows sit on a handful of accounts. Between the 2023–24 edition and the 2024–25 edition, the reported cost per lead for legal services moved from $104.58 to $18.17. Home improvement moved from $24.29 to $41.26. Those are not market shifts, they are small-sample noise. In the current edition the legal cost per lead is identical to the arts and entertainment figure, which is the kind of coincidence that tells you the underlying base is thin.

The cross-industry averages are the only numbers we would repeat with a straight face: a median cost per lead of $27.66 and a conversion rate of 7.72% across all industries, US, for 1 April 2024 to 30 June 2025. Even those carry the same medians-of-campaigns caveat as the search table. There is no UK equivalent. Vendor dashboards claiming UK Meta figures draw on their own customer base, publish no per-country sample size, and in at least one case we checked, presented cost per lead in pounds and cost per thousand impressions in dollars on adjacent pages for the same market.

Source: WordStream (LocaliQ), Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2025, published 15 September 2025, covering 1 April 2024 to 30 June 2025. Sample: 726 US campaigns on the leads objective. No CPM data is published in that report.

Speed to lead: the real dates

This is the area where the gap between what gets quoted and what the research says is widest, and it matters because speed of follow-up is one of the few things a small firm can fix this week.

The famous Harvard Business Review piece is from March 2011. It audited 2,241 US companies and analysed 1.25 million leads across 42 firms. It found an average first response time of 42 hours, that 23% of companies never responded at all, and that firms responding within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead than those waiting just over an hour, and more than sixty times more likely than those waiting a day.

The study underneath it — the source of the “five minute rule” that half the CRM industry is built on — was presented in October 2007. It covered three years of data, roughly 2004 to 2007, from six companies, and was co-authored by the chief executive of a company selling lead-response software. Its headline findings are odds ratios from a logistic model: the odds of contacting a lead called within five minutes versus thirty minutes are a hundred times higher, and the odds of qualifying one are twenty-one times higher. Those are routinely repackaged as “you are 100 times more likely to make a sale”, which is not what an odds ratio says.

A more recent secret-shopper exercise tested 433 B2B software companies in 2017 and found only 7% responded within five minutes and 55% never responded within five business days. It was run by a company selling live chat software, and it is B2B software rather than trades, so read it as a comment on how bad average follow-up is rather than as a number that transfers to your business.

Sources: Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, Harvard Business Review, March 2011 (article paywalled; figures verified from a full copy of the text). Oldroyd and Elkington, Lead Response Management Study, presented 16 October 2007, six companies, ~15,000 leads, US. Drift response-time audit, published February 2017, 433 B2B software companies.

Questions about the numbers

What is the average cost per click in the UK for my trade?

Nobody can tell you, and anybody who quotes you a figure is either reading their own account or converting an American number without saying so. Google does not publish CPC by industry, the CMA obtained the real UK figures under statutory powers and redacted them in the public report, and no independent UK dataset exists. The honest answer is to pull the forecast for your own keywords in your own radius.

Then why publish benchmarks at all?

Because a range with its limits attached is more useful than nothing, and far more useful than a confident number with no source. The US medians below tell you roughly how verticals rank against each other and where the spread is wide. They do not tell you what you will pay in Southampton, and this page never claims they do.

Should I expect to hit these conversion rates?

Treat them as a rough floor for a well-built account rather than a target. The spread between verticals in that table is mostly a difference in what each account counts as a conversion, not a difference in advertiser skill. An account counting newsletter signups will beat one counting booked jobs every time, and be worth less.

Is the five-minute response rule real?

The finding is real, the framing is usually wrong. It comes from a 2007 study of six companies, co-authored by the chief executive of a firm selling lead-response software, and the headline figures are odds ratios rather than probabilities. Fast follow-up genuinely wins work. The specific multipliers people quote at you are about twenty years old and should be treated as directional.

Individual claims, checked one at a time

Several of the figures discussed above get their own page, following the citation trail back to whatever is actually at the end of it:

• Is there a UK cost-per-lead benchmark? — no published independent source exists, and the regulator that obtained the real figures redacted them.
• “SEO leads close at 14.6%” — quoted everywhere, attributed to four different publishers, traceable to no study.
• The five-minute lead response rule — a real 2007 study of six companies, reporting odds ratios rather than probabilities.
• Industry conversion rate benchmarks — American data, counting an event most trade websites do not have.

Related

• All claims checked
• How we build campaigns
• Glossary of terms
• Our own measured results
• Google Ads management
• Sector economics, one at a time