73% of in-house PPC teams are now committed to keeping management internal, up from 44% just two years ago. But 88% of those teams run 5 people or fewer, 90% say they can’t find qualified talent, and half are still tracking budgets manually in spreadsheets. In-housing is winning the argument and losing the execution.
We pulled the most recent named PPC research available, from LocaliQ/WordStream, ALM Corp’s State of PPC survey, fraud0’s billion-session fraud analysis, and platform earnings reports, and checked every figure against a live source. Where a stat only traced to a secondary aggregator with no disclosed methodology, we flag it rather than present it as settled.
Key Takeaways
- Cross-industry Google and Microsoft Ads averages sit at 6.64% CTR, $5.42 CPC, 8.18% conversion rate, and $66.69 cost per lead.
- 73% of in-house PPC teams are committed to staying internal, up from 44% two years ago, but 90% report difficulty finding qualified talent.
- 98% of PPC professionals use Google Ads, 84% use Meta, and 66% use LLMs as their primary problem-solving resource on the job.
- Click fraud runs higher on paid social (20.6% invalid traffic) than paid search (7.0%), cutting against the common assumption that Google is the primary fraud battleground.
- 71% of PPC professionals run no dedicated click-fraud prevention software, despite invalid traffic commonly running 20% to 30% of spend industry-wide.
- For B2B SaaS specifically, the average Google Ads account runs a 3.60% CTR, $6.81 CPC, and $84 blended cost per lead, a different profile from the blended cross-industry average.
PPC Benchmarks by Platform
- Average CTR across Google and Microsoft Ads is 6.64%, average CPC is $5.42, average conversion rate is 8.18%, and average cost per lead is $66.69, the first year-over-year decline in cost per lead in five years. (LocaliQ/WordStream, June 2026 )
- Overall Google Ads CTR rose from 1.83% to 2.22%, a 21.31% year-over-year gain, across 21,000-plus accounts, while conversion rate fell 0.96% and cost per acquisition rose 4.41% over the same period. (Optmyzr via Search Engine Journal, 2026 )
- Median LinkedIn Ads CTR in 2025 was 0.52%, with a median CPC of $3.94 and typical US CPCs running $8 to $10. Q3 delivered both the best engagement (0.96% average CTR) and the highest average CPC ($15.72), 1.5x Q1’s rate. (HockeyStack Labs, 2025 LinkedIn Ads Benchmark Report )
- LinkedIn crossed $5 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time in the quarter ended December 2025, up 11% year over year, driven by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. (GeekWire, early 2026 )
- Alphabet’s Q2 2026 Google advertising revenue rose 14.5% to $81.6 billion, with Search revenue growing 17% to $63.3 billion. (Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings, July 2026 )
Our take: the CTR gain paired with a falling conversion rate in Optmyzr’s data is worth sitting with. More people are clicking, and a smaller share of them are converting. That’s consistent with AI Overviews absorbing low-intent clicks and pushing higher-intent traffic elsewhere, which means a rising CTR alone isn’t the win it used to be.
PPC Benchmarks by Industry Vertical
All figures below come from LocaliQ and WordStream’s 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks report, based on thousands of campaigns tracked across April 2025 to March 2026. (LocaliQ/WordStream, June 2026 )
- Attorneys and Legal Services has the highest CPC of any industry at $9.87 and the highest cost per lead at $131.63.
- Arts and Entertainment has the lowest CPC at $1.63, the highest CTR at 12.75%, and the lowest cost per lead at $26.84.
- Animals and Pets posts the highest conversion rate at 16.22%, followed by Automotive Repair, Service, and Parts at 15.51%.
- Career and Employment and Furniture have the lowest conversion rates, at 3.05% and 2.99% respectively.
- Cost per lead decreased overall for the first time in five years this year, though it still rose in 13 of 23 industries, by an average of roughly 5% year over year, down sharply from a 25% average increase the year before.
PPC Automation and AI Bidding Adoption
- 98% of PPC professionals use Google Ads, 84% use Meta, and 66% use large language models as their primary problem-solving resource on the job, per a global survey of 1,306 PPC professionals. (ALM Corp, State of PPC 2026, March 2026 )
- 59% use ChatGPT for ad copy, 39% for keyword research , and 34% for script writing. Only 21% use autonomous AI agents, and 58% of those cite quality concerns. (ALM Corp, March 2026 )
- 43% of PPC professionals list AI as a top priority, down from being the #1 priority in 2024, suggesting AI adoption has plateaued into routine practice rather than remaining a novelty. (ALM Corp, March 2026 )
- 50% of PPC professionals regularly use Performance Max, with 56% citing its black-box targeting as their top frustration and 41% citing opaque attribution. (ALM Corp, March 2026 )
- AI usage for writing ads grew from 42% to 56% between Q4 2023 and Q4 2024, a 33% increase, and the average Google Ads account now runs 5.4 scripts simultaneously. (ALM Corp, State of PPC 2025/2026 )
Our take: AI adoption in PPC has clearly moved past the hype phase. It’s now infrastructure, not a differentiator, which is exactly why “top priority” ranking fell even as usage kept climbing. If your agency pitch still leads with “we use AI,” that’s table stakes now, not a selling point.
PPC Management: Agency vs. In-House
- 73% of in-house teams are now committed to keeping PPC management internal, up sharply from 44% two years earlier, but 88% of those teams have 5 or fewer people and 90% report difficulty finding qualified talent. (ALM Corp, State of PPC 2026, March 2026 )
- 53% of PPC professionals say managing PPC is harder than it was two years ago, versus 16% who say it’s easier. 50% still track budgets manually in Google Sheets or Excel, and 71% use no dedicated click-fraud prevention software at all. (ALM Corp, March 2026 )
- 20% of clients are considering replacing agency work with AI tools, according to the same survey of 1,306 professionals. (ALM Corp, March 2026 )
Our take: in-housing is winning the strategic argument and losing the execution argument at the same time. Teams are choosing to bring PPC in-house faster than they can staff or tool it properly, which is a real gap between decision and readiness worth watching if you’re the one making that call.
Click Fraud and Invalid Traffic in PPC
- An analysis of 1.2 billion onsite sessions and 10.78 billion ad impressions found 21.3% of onsite traffic invalid, excluding search-engine crawlers, and 9.75% of conversions invalid. (fraud0, Unmasking the Shadows 2025 )
- Paid social carried 20.6% invalid traffic, versus 7.0% for paid search, in the same dataset, cutting against the common assumption that Google is the primary click-fraud battleground. (fraud0, 2026 )
- 31.4% of ad impressions landed on made-for-advertising sites, and invalid users averaged just 1.2 page views and a 26-second session, versus 181 seconds for real users. (fraud0, 2026 )
Our take: budget shifting toward Meta, TikTok, and other social platforms is budget shifting toward the higher-fraud channel, not the lower-fraud one, according to this data. Combined with 71% of PPC professionals running no fraud protection at all, that’s a real, quantifiable blind spot most PPC audits still skip over.
PPC Statistics for SaaS Companies
The benchmarks above are blended across every industry. Here’s what PPC actually looks like specifically for B2B SaaS, from our own trailing-12-month analysis of 65+ SaaS accounts we manage. (PipeRocket Digital, Google Ads Benchmarks, August 2026 )
- The average B2B SaaS Google Ads account runs a 3.60% CTR, $6.81 CPC, 2.57% conversion rate, and $84 blended cost per lead.
- Non-brand search costs SaaS advertisers $207 per lead, roughly 6x the $34 cost of a brand-search lead, driven mostly by a 4.4x gap in click price rather than conversion rate.
- Performance Max delivers the cheapest SaaS leads at $25, with the highest conversion rate of any campaign type at 6.53%, ahead of Search at $143 per lead.
- Technical SaaS advertisers (dev tools, security) pay $855 per lead, close to 7x the $126 that GTM and martech SaaS companies pay.
- SaaS Google Ads accounts got more efficient year over year, with conversion rate up roughly 48% while CPC held flat, pushing blended cost per lead down 36%.
Our take: SaaS runs colder on CTR (3.60%) than the blended cross-industry average (6.64%), but the CPC gap is much smaller ($6.81 vs $5.42). SaaS keyword pools are narrower and more competitive than retail and legal categories that inflate the blended average, so a lower CTR on a SaaS account is usually just the category norm rather than a red flag.
What This Means for Your PPC Strategy in 2026
- Benchmark against your own industry, never the blended average. A $1.63 CPC and a $9.87 CPC both feed into the same cross-industry number that means nothing for your specific vertical.
- Treat AI tools as infrastructure over a differentiator. Adoption has plateaued into routine use. Competing on “we use AI” no longer sets you apart.
- Budget for fraud protection on social before search. The data shows social carrying nearly 3x the invalid-traffic rate of search, yet most teams still direct fraud-prevention effort at Google first.
- If you’re building an in-house team, staff it before you commit to it. Adoption of in-housing is outrunning the ability to hire for it industry-wide.
If you want PPC benchmarks built from real B2B SaaS accounts instead of blended cross-industry averages, our Google Ads benchmarks report and SaaS PPC team can show you where your own numbers stand. Talk to us .
