Pick your industry and channel to see a real, sourced cost-per-lead — pulled from named primary-research reports, never blended or guessed. Then add your close rate and deal size to turn it into the number that actually matters: cost per customer.
Benchmarks are a reference point, not a guarantee. Real performance depends on your offer, audience, creative and landing pages — the things we obsess over. Every figure shown carries its source and date; combinations without a verifiable source say so plainly.
We'll pull your actual cost per lead and cost per customer from your accounts — and tell you honestly where you beat the benchmark and where you're leaving money on the table.
Most "2026 CPL by industry" numbers you'll find online are recycled from blog posts that cite other blog posts, with no disclosed methodology and no date. We built this differently. Every figure here comes from a named, dated source — WordStream/LocaliQ's large, disclosed-sample studies for Google Search and Meta, First Page Sage for B2B cross-channel cost per lead, and The B2B House for LinkedIn — and each result tells you exactly where it came from, its sample, and when we last verified it.
There are two distinct lenses here, and we never average across them: the platform conversion CPL (what a lead costs on one ad platform) and the qualified-B2B-lead CPL (what a sales-ready lead costs across all your paid or organic channels). They measure different things — which is why a B2B legal lead can read as $131 on Google Search but $784 as a cross-channel qualified lead. We show both, labelled, and explain the difference. And we never invent a figure: if no source covers a combination, the calculator says "insufficient data" and points you to the channels we do have — never a confident-looking guess.
A cheap CPL means nothing if those leads don't close, and an expensive CPL can be a bargain if every customer is worth $50,000. That's why this tool nudges you past CPL toward cost per customer — the number your CFO actually cares about.
We show every formula with your numbers substituted in — no black boxes.
Curious exactly how we source, map and verify every number? Read the full methodology.
Named, dated sources: WordStream/LocaliQ for Google Search and Meta (a large, disclosed-sample study), First Page Sage for B2B cross-channel cost per lead, and The B2B House for LinkedIn. We never average figures across sources, and we never interpolate a number we don't have. Each result shows its source, sample and "as of" date inline, and flags lower-confidence sources whose sample size isn't disclosed. See the methodology page for the full list.
Because we won't show a number we can't source. Platform CPL and qualified-B2B-lead CPL come from different studies covering different industries, so some cells — a consumer category on a B2B channel, say — have no verifiable figure. We say so and point you to the channels we do have data for, rather than inventing one.
Divide the CPL by your lead-to-customer close rate. A $100 CPL at a 20% close rate is a $500 cost per customer. Enter your close rate and deal size above and the calculator shows the full formula plus an ROAS estimate.
No. Benchmarks are a reference point, not a promise. Your real CPL depends on your offer, targeting, creative and landing pages. Use these figures to sanity-check a plan, then talk to a human to pressure-test it.
Benchmark data last verified Jun 2026. Think a number looks off? Flag it for us — we'd rather fix it than be wrong.
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