The Intent Gradient: the closer an ad sits to a question someone just typed, the more often it gets clicked. A Google search ad is clicked about 25 times as often as a display banner.
Fig. 1
The Intent Gradient
Typical click-through rate (CTR) by ad channel, on a log scale: the latest benchmark from each data owner (left) and one agency dataset across seven platforms (right). Search ads, which answer a typed query, sit at the top; feeds, banners and video, seen in passing, sit lower.
Left: each rung is a different publisher's benchmark, with its own sample, period and definition, so compare orders of magnitude, not decimals; the top rung is about 74 times the bottom one (PPC.co calculation). Right: medians from 150,000+ campaigns run by 7,000 agencies on AgencyAnalytics, data period not stated. The order holds in both. For comparison, Adsy's average of nine published Google search ad benchmarks is 3.52%.
Search ad CTR runs from 5.56% to 12.75% by industry
Average Google Ads CTR by industry, search campaigns, 2026, %. Even the lowest industry beats every social and display benchmark.
LocaliQ (WordStream) customer campaigns on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. The all-industry figure is 6.64%. LocaliQ does not state the data period on this page; industry names are shortened.
Median display ad CTR by industry, LocaliQ campaigns, Apr 2025–Jun 2026, %
7,074 LocaliQ display campaigns across 350+ properties including Google, YouTube, Meta and Yahoo; formats include banners and video. LocaliQ says its "averages" are medians. The page gives no all-industry figure.
For the same B2B advertisers, search ads get 9.4× LinkedIn's CTR
B2B ad CTR by channel, Metadata advertisers, calendar 2025, %. Google Ads vs. LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram ads.
Advertisers per channel: Google Ads 56, Facebook 71, LinkedIn 138, Instagram 49 (153 in all). Metadata calls these medians across advertisers; in its dataset each CTR matches CPM ÷ CPC, which suggests pooled ratios. The 9.4× multiple is PPC.co's (6.33 ÷ 0.67).
Six Facebook ad CTR benchmarks span 0.79% to 2.70%
Facebook (Meta) ads CTR as published by six data owners, %. Each label shows how many times the lowest figure it is.
Benchmarks differ in objective (traffic vs. leads), audience (B2B, DTC, local business), click definition (all clicks vs. link clicks) and statistic (median vs. mean). The 3.4× spread is PPC.co's calculation (2.70 ÷ 0.79).
The paid CTR gap on AI Overview searches has halved since January 2025
Google paid search CTR by month, queries with vs. without an AI Overview (AIO), Jan 2025–Feb 2026, %
AI Overview shown No AI Overview Gap (No AI Overview − AI Overview shown)
Seer Interactive, 53 brands, all query intents. A query's AIO status comes from its latest results-page snapshot and is applied to every month. The gap fell from 11.34 points to 5.64 (PPC.co calculation), mostly because CTR without an AIO fell.
Email click rates range from 0.88% to 3.25%, depending on the platform
Average email click-through rate per delivered email, all industries, as published by five email platforms, %
2025–26 data2023 data
Each platform's users, industries and counting rules differ. Omnisend and Klaviyo serve mostly ecommerce brands. The 3.7× spread is PPC.co's calculation (3.25 ÷ 0.88).