Once ads have run for a few weeks, the natural question is whether the cost per click, or the cost per lead, is normal. It deserves an honest answer. I do not publish a table of UK averages on this page, because I have not found a dated, public, UK-specific source for Google and Meta costs that I would stand behind. What I can give you is a way to build a benchmark that is actually yours, and a set of checks for any figure someone else hands you.
This page is for owners and in-house marketers running, or about to run, Google Ads or Facebook and Instagram ads in the UK. If you need a budget for the whole marketing mix, that is a different question; this is about judging the costs inside your ad accounts.
Why most published ad benchmarks mislead a UK advertiser
The benchmark reports that circulate most widely are, in my reading of them, mostly compiled from American advertiser accounts and quoted in dollars. A US average cost per click converted at today’s exchange rate tells you very little about bidding on “emergency plumber Croydon” or “family solicitor Leeds”. Different competitors sit in a UK auction, different search habits drive it, and the mix of businesses in the sample is rarely disclosed.
Even a report that is genuinely UK-based can mislead for four other reasons.
- Definitions vary. On Meta, “CPC (all)” counts any click on the ad, including likes and profile taps, while CPC (link click) counts only clicks through to your site. A “lead” may mean a form fill, a phone call longer than a minute, or a qualified enquiry your sales team accepted. Two reports using the same label can be measuring different things.
- The mix is hidden. An average across all sectors blends cheap brand searches with expensive legal and finance terms. A London-only campaign sits in a different auction from one covering Cumbria.
- Averages are pulled by extremes. A handful of accounts in a high-cost sector can drag a mean upwards. A median, the middle value, is more useful, but few reports give one.
- Dates matter. Auction prices move with competition, season and platform changes. A figure without a month and year attached is close to useless.
There is also a UK-specific complication. Under UK GDPR and PECR, analytics and advertising cookies need consent, so a visitor who declines your banner may never be recorded as a conversion. Google’s consent mode and Meta’s own modelling fill some of that gap, but how much depends on your set-up. Your in-platform cost per lead can therefore look higher than the true figure, and a benchmark taken from accounts with different consent handling is not comparing like with like.
Build your own benchmark from four numbers
The benchmark that matters is not what other businesses pay. It is what you can afford to pay, and whether your account is moving towards or away from that. Four numbers get you there, and every one of them comes from your own accounts and your own sales records.
| Number | How to work it out | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per click | Spend divided by clicks (on Meta, use link clicks) | Google Ads campaign view; Meta Ads Manager with the link-click column added |
| Click-to-lead rate | Leads divided by clicks | Your conversion columns, checked against the enquiries that actually reached you |
| Cost per lead | Spend divided by leads, or cost per click divided by click-to-lead rate | Calculated from the two figures above |
| Lead-to-customer rate | New customers divided by leads, over the same period | Your CRM, booking system or a simple spreadsheet of enquiries and outcomes |
The first three tell you what the ads cost. The fourth, your lead-to-customer rate, tells you what those ads are worth, and it is the one most businesses never measure. Without it, a low cost per lead can hide a campaign full of time-wasters, and a high one can hide your best source of work.
Turn the four numbers into a ceiling
Multiply the gross profit from an average new customer by your lead-to-customer rate. The answer is the most you can pay for one lead and break even on the first sale. To show the arithmetic only, with made-up numbers that are not a benchmark for anyone: if a new customer brings £600 of gross profit and one lead in five becomes a customer, each lead is worth £120 to you. A cost per lead under that is profitable on the first sale; above it, the campaign relies on repeat business to pay back.
If your customers come back, use their value over the relationship rather than the first sale. My lifetime value and acquisition cost calculator does that sum and shows how long a customer takes to pay back what you spent winning them.
Give the numbers enough time
A week of data is noise. I want at least a month, and ideally enough leads that one good or bad day does not swing the cost per lead by a third. Compare each month with the same month last year where you have it, because seasonality moves UK costs: retail auctions tighten in the run-up to Black Friday and Christmas, and many service sectors have their own busy months.
Where to find UK cost signals before you spend anything
If you have no history to build from, you can still get a UK-specific read on costs from the platforms themselves, for your own keywords and audiences rather than someone else’s averages.
- Google’s Keyword Planner. Inside a Google Ads account, the Keyword Planner shows a low and a high “top of page bid” range for each keyword. Set the location to the UK, or to the towns and boroughs you actually serve, and the account currency to pounds. Treat the ranges as rough; what you pay depends on your ad quality, your landing page and who else bids that day.
- Auction Insights, once you are live. The Auction Insights report shows which competitors appear alongside you and how often. It shows no costs, but it explains why they move: a new, aggressive competitor arriving is a common reason for a rising cost per click.
- Meta’s set-up estimates. When you build an ad set, Ads Manager shows an estimated audience size and, for some objectives, estimated daily results for your budget. These are forecasts from Meta, not guarantees, but they are drawn from UK audiences you have defined yourself.
- Your own earlier campaigns. Even a short test from two years ago is closer to your market than a national average. Check that tracking worked at the time before you trust its lead figures.
How to judge a benchmark someone hands you
Agencies, software vendors and articles all quote average costs. Before you compare your account with any of them, I would ask these questions of the figure.
- Which country, and which currency? A dollar figure from a US sample is the wrong market, however it is converted.
- Which month and year? Without a date, you cannot tell whether it reflects current auctions.
- Which platform and campaign type? Search, Performance Max, display and YouTube on Google behave very differently, as do lead form ads and website conversion ads on Meta.
- What counted as a click and a lead? Link clicks or all clicks; form fills, calls, or qualified leads only.
- Brand or non-brand? Searches for your own business name are cheap and convert well, and including them flatters any average.
- How many accounts, and is it a mean or a median? A small sample with a mean is easily skewed.
- VAT included or not? Make sure you compare your figure with theirs on the same basis.
If a source cannot answer most of these, I would not use it to judge your account.
Patterns that hold without numbers attached
These are not data. They are patterns I would expect to see in UK accounts, and they are useful for deciding where to look first.
- Clicks from Google Search usually cost more than clicks from Facebook and Instagram, because the person is already looking for what you sell. A higher cost per click on Search is often still the cheaper route to a paying customer.
- Meta lead form ads tend to produce cheaper leads than sending people to a website form, and those leads tend to be weaker. Judge them on lead-to-customer rate, not cost per lead alone.
- London and the larger cities usually cost more per click than smaller towns for the same service, because more businesses compete for the same searches.
- High-value services where one customer is worth thousands, such as legal, financial, private medical and some trades, carry higher costs per click. That is the auction pricing in the customer’s value, not necessarily a badly run account.
- Costs in the first weeks of a new campaign are unstable. Both platforms describe a learning period while their bidding systems gather conversion data.
When your costs look too high
Split the problem into its parts before deciding the ads are failing. Each of the four numbers points to a different fix.
A high cost per click
On Google, look at Quality Score for your main keywords, at how broadly your keywords are matched, and at the search terms report for irrelevant searches you are paying for. On Meta, a high cost per link click usually means the creative is not stopping people as they scroll, or the same audience has seen it too many times.
A low click-to-lead rate
This is usually the landing page rather than the ads. Check that the page repeats the promise in the ad, loads quickly on a phone and makes the next step obvious. My landing page checklist for paid traffic covers what I look at.
A cost per lead that does not match reality
Before changing anything, confirm the platform is counting real enquiries. Duplicate tags, conversions firing on page load and missing consent signals are common on UK sites, and each distorts the figure. This walk-through on how to check your conversion tracking works sets out the tests I run.
Plenty of leads, few customers
Look at lead quality by source, the speed of your follow-up and whether the ad attracts the customer you want. Here, the ads may be fine and the gap sits between the enquiry and the sale.
What I will add to this page
I will add UK cost figures here when there is a public source that names its sample and dates its data, linked so you can check it yourself, and I will only ever publish a client’s figures with that client’s agreement. Until then, the most reliable benchmark available to you is the one built from your own accounts above.
Next steps
If you want a second pair of eyes on whether your costs are reasonable, send me your last three months of spend, clicks, leads and customers. I will tell you which of the four numbers is the weak one and what I would change first. If you want the accounts run for you, see my monthly Google Ads management and Facebook and Instagram ads management.
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