Our Q2 2026 client benchmarks: what good looks like now
Aggregate numbers from across our client base this quarter — what moved, what got more expensive, and where the averages are worth ignoring entirely.
Benchmarks are useful for one thing: telling you whether a number is unusual enough to investigate. They are useless for target setting, because your business is not the average of ours. Read the ranges, not the means.
Paid media got more expensive, again
Costs per click rose across every channel we buy, with the sharpest movement in competitive B2B categories. Accounts that held their cost per qualified lead flat did so by improving conversion after the click rather than by bidding smarter — landing page work outperformed bid strategy work by a wide margin this quarter.
Organic is slower to start and better to own
Programmes launched twelve or more months ago materially outperformed anything launched inside six. That is not new, but the gap widened: the compounding is getting steeper, which rewards the accounts that did not abandon the strategy in month four.
The single strongest predictor of organic performance in our data is not budget or team size. It is how long the programme has been allowed to run without a change of direction.
Where the averages mislead
- Conversion rate — spread across accounts is so wide that the mean describes nobody. Compare against your own trailing quarter instead.
- Email performance — heavily distorted by list hygiene. An account that pruned inactive contacts looks worse on list size and better on everything else.
- Social engagement — depends more on category than on execution quality.
What we are changing next quarter
More budget into conversion work before more budget into traffic. On most of the accounts we reviewed, the cheapest available growth was not another channel — it was fixing the page the existing traffic already lands on.
