Facebook Benchmarks
For United States Startups

Facebook remains one of the vastest and complex, albeit the most expensive, growth channel. To date, 67% of US adults have FB profiles.

Click-Through Rate
[Unique]

Click-To-Action Rate
[Unique]

Cost Per Click
[Average]

Cost Per Mille
[Average]

Cost Per Like
[Average]

Cost Per Install
[Average]


Marginalia


The benchmarks above represent mean values for US-based Facebook Advertising campaigns to date. The exact values vary depending on the state, city, industry, targeting, ads formats, etc. Facebook Ads benchmarks shared here do not take into account Facebook Audience Network and Facebook Messenger. Despite Facebook efforts, they remain much more expensive and much less effective communication subchannels. Add them only if your ad is a ‘Unicorn’ itself.

The events of previous years, like ad bot-frauds exposures, Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal and ‘Facebook Marketing Apocalypse’, affected Facebook Ads benchmarks in quite a dramatic way. Especially, for the US market.

How did I get those numbers? As I’ve been doing marketing since 2000 I’ve had a chance to accumulate big and small data from corporations, small ventures, own startups, open Google crawlers and API’s, white- and gray-hat marketing communities, helpful insights from colleagues. The final actual numbers for the metrics you see are the results of qualitative research. That means, first, I have an average (mean quantitative) values, and then manually match it with expert numbers (median qualitative). If both data fit - we’re good. If expert numbers go out - I adopt Bayes' law and Daniel Kahneman’s methods to balance the data.

Bear in mind, all those marketing benchmarks and startup metrics below relate to the United States market only. Though they can be applied to other T1 countries (US, UK, CA, AU, NZ), these metrics don’t represent traction benchmarks for startups and companies in T2 and T3 regional markets.


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