Pick your segment and a monthly customer goal. We’ll show a rough budget range based on aggregated benchmarks. Numbers are averages — your real numbers will vary with market, creative, and seasonality.
Common questions about how to read these numbers and apply them to your situation.
The numbers are medians from public 2025 reports — your actual cost per lead will likely fall within ±30-50% of the segment baseline depending on creative quality, offer strength, audience precision, and seasonality. Use the calculator to set a starting expectation, not a target. If your real-world numbers are 2× off these benchmarks in either direction, that's worth investigating; 30% off is normal variance.
Treat them as directional, not precise. They reflect typical agency-managed performance ratios — for example, Google CPL is roughly 1.5× Meta CPL on average, but a poorly-managed Google account can be 3× or worse. Your actual ratio depends on bid strategy, keyword quality, ad relevance score, and landing page conversion rate. Use the calculator to get to "roughly the right zip code," then validate against your own data.
For DTC, aim to recover CAC within 3-6 months from first purchase plus repeat orders. For SaaS, healthy payback is 12-18 months on annual contracts. For high-ticket professional services or healthcare with long patient lifetimes, 6-24 months is acceptable depending on retention. If your payback is over 24 months, either CAC is too high, LTV is too low, or both.
LinkedIn charges a premium because the audience is uniquely qualified by job title, seniority, and company. You pay 3-5× Meta CPC because each click is a verified professional, not a verified scroller. For B2B with $50K+ deal sizes, LinkedIn often delivers better blended ROI despite the higher cost-per-lead. For DTC or low-ticket consumer products, LinkedIn rarely makes economic sense.
Minimum meaningful test budget: 30-50 conversions. If your CPL is $50, that's $1,500-$2,500. If it's $200, that's $6,000-$10,000. Below that volume, you can't separate signal from noise. Most platforms also require a 2-3 week learning phase where the algorithm optimizes targeting; pulling spend before then misreads early-phase performance.
Three usual reasons. First, lead quality differences — a $20 CPL filled with bot leads is worse than a $60 CPL of qualified prospects. Second, attribution windows — if you're using last-click on Google but view-through on Meta, you'll see different "performance" for the same campaigns. Third, geography and seasonality — Q4 CPLs run 30-40% higher than Q1 in most categories, and US CPMs are roughly 2× European CPMs.