Charts: Conversion Rates by Ad Channel

Benchmarking digital marketing campaigns is a good way to track their effectiveness. Monitoring conversion rates will help optimize the creative, target market, placement, and channel. But a better indicator of marketing success is the cost per conversion.

In July 2020, Wordstream, the ad-management platform, published the average conversion rates and costs-per-conversion of its users across Google, Facebook, and Bing. The cheapest cost-per-conversion for retail consumer categories came from Facebook Ads at $27.70. Google Ads Display had the highest at $99.59.

However, it’s important to analyze the data against overall goals. The purpose of display ads is to increase brand awareness, not drive immediate conversions. Google Ads Search had the highest conversion rate at 4.2 percent. To measure the return on display advertising, monitor the lift in overall sales from all channels.

Calculating the return on investment per marketing channel depends on the average purchase value, which varies by the channel and, importantly, by the device. Statista reported average online B2C order values by device as follows.