Reach the customers who were never going to search for you

Across industries in 2026 the median cost per thousand impressions sits around $14.19, up roughly 20% from the year before. Median cost per acquisition lands near $38, though the range is enormous: education converts around $8 while legal services can exceed $180.

Cost per click averages roughly $0.78 on traffic campaigns and $1.92 on lead generation. What actually determines your number is your offer, your creative, and your margin, not the platform average.

Per click, usually yes, and often by a wide margin. Meta lead generation clicks average around $1.92 against roughly $5.26 on Google Search.

The cheaper click is not automatically the better buy. Someone searching for a plumber at midnight is ready to hire. Someone scrolling Instagram is not, so more of those cheaper clicks are needed to produce one customer. Compare cost per booked job, never cost per click.

Median return on ad spend across industries sits near 1.93x, with e-commerce around 1.86x. Strong accounts run 3x or better.

Whether that is good depends entirely on your margin. A 2x return on a product with 70% margin is healthy. The same 2x on 25% margin loses money. We will work out your break-even number before setting a target, because a benchmark you cannot afford is worse than no benchmark.

Both work. Video generally performs better on Reels and Stories, and static images still hold up well in Feed, particularly for offers where the message matters more than the demonstration.

The more useful question is volume. One perfect video that runs for six weeks will underperform six decent ones rotated as each fatigues. Consistency of output beats production value more often than people expect.

The cross-industry average lifespan before fatigue is about 8.4 days. Apps and impulse products decay faster, around five days. Considered purchases and B2B can hold twelve or more.

In practice that means new creative should be entering rotation weekly or close to it. The signals to watch are falling click-through rate alongside rising frequency and cost per result.

Either, and usually a mix. We work with whatever you already have, existing photos, job-site footage, customer videos, and edit it into ad-ready formats. We build graphics and variants as the account needs them.

When the account needs genuinely new material we run on-site content days and travel to you anywhere in the country. That production work is a separate service from ad management. In the ideal setup it happens on a monthly rhythm so the account never runs dry, and we will tell you honestly whether your existing material can carry the campaign in the meantime.

Advantage+ is Meta’s automated campaign type. It takes over audience selection, placement, and budget distribution, and in most accounts it produces meaningfully lower cost per acquisition than manual setups.

It is not universally correct. Automation needs conversion volume to learn from, so very small budgets or rare conversion events often do better with manual control. It also gives you less visibility into what is working. We use it where it earns its place.

Enough for the algorithm to gather signal, which usually means a minimum of around $1,000 to $1,500 a month in ad spend for a local service business, and more for e-commerce where you are testing multiple products.

Below that the campaign never exits the learning phase and the data is too thin to act on. If your budget is under that, we will normally suggest putting it into search first and coming back to social when there is more to work with.

The first two weeks are learning. The algorithm needs conversions to optimise against, and early results are not representative of anything.

Weeks three to six are where a well-built account starts to stabilise. Meaningful judgement takes about ninety days, because that is long enough to see several creative cycles and separate a winning angle from a lucky week.

Yes. We are Michigan based and run accounts for clients nationwide, and we travel for content production. Paid social is geography-agnostic on our end, and we regularly run campaigns targeting markets we are not sitting in.