What does “good” Google Ads performance actually look like?

There is no benchmark that tells you whether your Google Ads account is doing well. A good CTR on a brand campaign would be a disaster on a generic one. A £470 cost per lead is excellent for a business selling £40,000 software and ruinous for one selling £200 jobs.

The honest answer is that “good” is whatever beats your own previous three months at the same or better margin. Everything else is context, and the published industry averages are the weakest context available.

Why are published Google Ads benchmarks so unreliable?

You have probably seen the tables. Average CTR by industry, average conversion rate by sector, average cost per click for legal or retail or home services. Three things are wrong with them.

They average across account structures that are not comparable. An account running mostly brand keywords will report a CTR three or four times higher than one running mostly generic terms, because people searching your company name click your ad. Both accounts might be well run. The number tells you about the keyword mix, not the quality of the work.

They hide the thing that actually matters. Conversion rate is a ratio, and a ratio can be improved by making the denominator smaller. Cut your traffic to only the safest, most obvious searches and every efficiency metric improves while the business gets smaller. We have seen accounts celebrated for a falling cost per acquisition that were quietly shrinking.

They are always out of date. A benchmark published this year is describing last year’s auction, before the current round of automation changed how budget gets allocated.

None of that means measurement is hopeless. It means you should be measuring against yourself.

What is a good ROAS for an ecommerce account?

The only defensible answer starts with your gross margin. If you make 60p of gross profit on a pound of revenue, you break even on media at roughly 1.7x return on ad spend. If you make 25p, you need about 4x just to stand still. Anyone quoting a target ROAS without asking your margin first is guessing.

Once you have that floor, the question becomes whether the account is moving in the right direction over a meaningful window. Two live examples, both with the period stated.

A European beauty brand spending around EUR 85,000 a month across nine European markets grew revenue 84% year on year, from EUR 2.01m to EUR 3.70m, with return on ad spend moving from 4.90x to 6.16x. That is January to July 2026 against the same seven months of 2025. Inside that, the UK market is the more interesting number: revenue up 21% on 18% less media spend, with ROAS going from 3.79x to 5.58x.

Photo ID Card People runs at 9.3x, with conversions up 25% and cost per acquisition down 17% across the rolling twelve months to July 2026.

Those two are both healthy accounts and their ROAS figures differ by a factor of nearly two. Neither number is “the benchmark”. The gap is product margin, price point and market maturity, not execution quality.

What is a good cost per lead for a B2B account?

For lead generation the published benchmarks are worse than useless, because almost all of them count form fills. A form fill is not a lead. It is a row in a database that may or may not turn into a conversation.

The number worth tracking is the cost per lead that reaches a real sales stage, which means the figure has to come out of your CRM rather than your ad account.

Workpro, a UK B2B software business, doubled its paid search leads from 12 to 24 at an 18% lower cost per lead, £472 against £577, comparing August to December 2025 with the same five months of 2024. The figure that mattered more to them: leads reaching Opportunity or Customer stage went from 2 to 13. Those numbers come from the client’s HubSpot on an any-touch paid search attribution, not from Google Ads conversions.

Worth being straight about the caveat, because a figure without one is a sales pitch. That window closed in December 2025, and the account has been harder since, with contacts down and cost per contact up over the last six months. Both things are true. A five-month window that went well does not describe how an account is going now, which is exactly why every figure on this page carries its dates.

What if your numbers look fine but the business is not growing?

This is the most common version of the problem, and it usually means the account is measuring something that is not money.

We have taken over accounts spending six figures a month where conversion value was reading somewhere between zero and a few pounds, month after month, while spend climbed. Every in-platform metric could be made to look acceptable. None of them meant anything, because the platform did not know what a sale was worth, so its bidding was optimising towards a number that bore no relation to the business.

In that situation there is no benchmark to hit. There is only measurement to rebuild: getting real transaction values into the account, separating the conversion actions that represent revenue from the ones that represent a button press, and only then letting the bidding work against them. It is unglamorous, it takes a few weeks, and until it is done every figure in the account is decoration.

A surprising number of accounts fail at this first step while producing confident monthly reports. If your platform numbers look healthy and your bank balance disagrees, start here rather than with the campaign settings.

So what should you actually measure?

• Your own trailing baseline. Same metric, this quarter against the previous one and against the same quarter last year. Seasonality is real, and month-on-month comparisons in a seasonal business mostly measure the calendar.
• Contribution, not ratios. Revenue or qualified leads minus media cost minus cost of goods. An account that grows profit while ROAS falls slightly is usually doing better than one holding ROAS by spending less.
• The share of budget going to demand you did not already have. Brand traffic mostly converts regardless. If the account’s results depend on it, growth is capped.
• Whether the numbers survive the CRM. For anything with a sales process, the ad platform’s conversion count is a leading indicator, not a result.

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