2026 Paid Media Efficiency Benchmarks: CAC, ROAS and Payback by Channel
Median CAC, blended ROAS and payback periods across 412 anonymized advertiser accounts, split by channel, spend band and business model.
Leads the research team behind Paid Lens benchmarks, confidence scoring and model evaluation. More from Maya Oyelaran
Benchmarks are useful for one thing: telling you whether your number is strange. They are useless as targets. This study reports medians and interquartile ranges from anonymized Paid Lens accounts so you can see where your own economics sit in the distribution.
Method
We aggregated 412 accounts with at least six continuous months of connected advertising and CRM data. Spend is normalized to monthly figures. CAC is calculated on new customers, not platform-reported conversions. Payback uses contribution margin, not revenue.
- Window: rolling 12 months ending June 2026
- Spend bands: $5K–$25K, $25K–$100K, $100K+ per month
- Models: ecommerce, B2B SaaS, services
- Excluded: accounts with incomplete CRM connections or fewer than 30 conversions per month
What the distribution shows
The gap between the 25th and 75th percentile is consistently wider than the gap between channels. In plain terms: how well an account is managed explains more variance than which platform it runs on.
Channel choice explained roughly a fifth of CAC variance. Measurement quality and budget discipline explained most of the rest.
Ecommerce
Median blended CAC held roughly flat year over year, while platform-reported ROAS drifted upward — a strong signal that reported conversions are being over-credited rather than that acquisition got cheaper.
B2B SaaS
Pipeline-weighted CAC is the only number that behaved consistently. Accounts measuring on MQLs showed a median cost per MQL that fell while cost per closed-won rose — the classic lead-quality trap.
How to use this
- Compute your own CAC on the same definition: all acquisition cost over new customers.
- Compare your trend to your own prior two quarters first.
- Only then compare against the band medians.
- Investigate any metric that sits outside the interquartile range for two consecutive months.
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Written by Maya Oyelaran
Head of Marketing Data Science
Maya runs marketing data science at Paid Lens, where she owns the methodology behind published benchmarks and the confidence scoring applied to every recommendation in the decision queue.
Frequently asked questions
- How were these benchmarks calculated?
- From anonymized, aggregated Paid Lens accounts spending between $5K and $500K per month, over a rolling 12-month window. Medians are reported rather than averages to limit outlier distortion.
- Should I target the median?
- No. Use the median as a sanity check on your own trend. Business model, margin and sales cycle move the acceptable range more than channel does.