AdWords Benchmarking – CTR or Conversion Rates in AdWords

Updated March 3, 2025

Marketing Metric Madness

Marketing is metrics. As digital marketing has increased in importance, so has the role of data and statistics. In the past ,working out ROI from a Television or Radio ad was complicated and nearly impossible to measure. Now internet advertising has changed all that. Now the modern marketer is drowning in different metrics and data points. AdWords is a great example of this trend, with metrics like CTRs, CTCs, QS and many others. Understanding them is fairly straightforward, but benchmarking is a different thing. If your AdWords account has a CTR (Click Through Rate) or a Conversion rate of 5% should you be happy? Or should you be sad? The majority of business owners will only ever see their own account, so how can you hope to have an idea of what’s good and what’s not.

What’s A Good Percentage?

Here, we’ll review a list of industry-by-industry benchmarks for CTRs and Conversions so you can see if your account is doing well or not.

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AdWords Benchmarking

Interesting takeaways, in general, are the high conversion rates of professional service companies; Advocacy, Legal, Finance and Real Estate. All working in similar highly competitive areas, providing ‘professional’ advice to people, with conversion rates over 4%. Another interesting data point is the high CTR achieved by Dating & Personals.

These industries are fairly broad, but they should help you at least have an idea to see if what you’re doing is working. Remember that a benchmark is to help guide you. It isn’t something that you have to achieve or must exceed. Rather, it’s an indication of the level at which your account should be performing.

How does your account measure up? Are you above the average or below?