What Is a Good CPC for Facebook Ads? (2026 Benchmarks)
In LocaliQ / WordStream’s 2025 benchmarks, Facebook ads averaged $0.70 per click for traffic campaigns and $1.92 for lead campaigns across all industries, with industry averages spanning $0.34 (shopping, traffic campaigns) to $9.78 (dental, lead campaigns). Whether YOUR number is good depends on what a click is worth to you.
The table below lists average Facebook cost per click by industry, taken from LocaliQ / WordStream’s 2025 benchmark study — each row links the source that published it, and anything we could not verify was dropped. The spread is wide for a reason: a dental practice bidding for high-intent patients competes in a very different auction than a gift shop driving cheap traffic.
Before comparing yourself to any row, work out what a click is worth to you: roughly, what you can afford to pay for a customer multiplied by how often a click becomes one. An expensive click that produces patients is a bargain; a cheap click that produces nobody is pure waste.
CPC benchmarks by industry
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Want the raw numbers? Download the full benchmark dataset (CSV) — every row with its source attached.
When this number is misleading
Cheap clicks are not cheap customers
CPC tells you what traffic costs, not what results cost. On conversion campaigns, judge cost per result and ROAS instead — chasing the cheapest click usually means buying the people least likely to ever purchase.
Retargeting and prospecting CPCs are not comparable
Warm audiences who already know you click far more readily than cold prospects, so an account-wide average blends two different markets into one misleading number. Compare each campaign type against its own history, not against a single blended figure.
Placement and audience mix move CPC on their own
Shifting budget between Feed, Stories, Reels, and Audience Network changes your average CPC without your ad or offer getting any better. A CPC drop after a placement change is a mix shift — check whether results moved before celebrating.
Paying more per click than your industry row?
A high CPC is usually a delivery problem before it is a creative problem: narrow or overlapping audiences, ad sets stuck re-entering learning, and low quality rankings all force Meta to charge you more for the same click. Our delivery troubleshooting guide walks the same checklist we use when auditing accounts.
Fix a high CPC: troubleshoot deliveryMethodology
Every figure on this page is hand-compiled from the cited public benchmark reports listed below. Data years vary by source (2024–2025), and every table row links the source that published its number — if a figure could not be verified against a live public source, it was dropped rather than estimated.
What these tables do not include: no Meta delivery estimates, and no Kelpi first-party campaign data yet. They describe published industry averages, not a prediction of what your account will do.
- LocaliQ / WordStream Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2025 (2025)
- Triple Whale Facebook Ad Benchmarks (ecommerce) (2025)
- Gupta Media social ads cost tracker (2025)
Compiled and last reviewed: June 13, 2026. Citations are re-verified on Kelpi’s quarterly content refresh.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a good CPC for Facebook ads in 2026?
- Against LocaliQ / WordStream’s cited 2025 averages — $0.70 per click for traffic campaigns and $1.92 for lead campaigns — anything below your industry’s row is doing well. But CPC is only an input: a good CPC is one that produces leads or sales for less than you can afford to pay for them.
- Why is my Facebook CPC so high?
- The usual suspects are narrow or overlapping audiences, creative that has stopped earning engagement, and campaigns repeatedly knocked back into the learning phase — all of which raise what Meta charges you per click. Work through the delivery fix guide.
- Is a $1 CPC good for Facebook ads?
- It depends on the campaign type and industry. A $1 click sits above LocaliQ / WordStream’s $0.70 all-industries traffic-campaign average but well below the $1.92 lead-campaign average — and in dental, where the cited lead-campaign average is $9.78, it would be exceptional. Judge it against your industry row and what a click is worth to you.