Marketing Benchmarks That Tell You Something

Benchmarking marketing performance means comparing your results against a meaningful reference point, whether that’s your own historical data, a competitor’s known metrics, or an industry standard, so you can judge whether what you’re doing is working or just happening. Done well, it’s one of the most commercially useful things a marketing team can do. Done badly, it produces the kind of comfort blanket reporting that keeps budgets intact while businesses quietly stagnate.

The problem isn’t that marketers don’t benchmark. Most do. The problem is that they benchmark the wrong things, against the wrong reference points, and draw the wrong conclusions from what they find.

Why Most Marketing Benchmarking Misses the Point

I spent years running agency teams where benchmarking was treated as a reporting ritual rather than a strategic tool. We’d pull industry averages from a platform’s own published data, compare a client’s click-through rate against a sector median, and present a slide that showed they were “above average.” Everyone felt good. Nobody asked whether the metric we were benchmarking actually connected to revenue growth.

That’s the first trap. Benchmarking activity metrics, impressions, clicks, open rates, engagement rates, against industry averages tells you almost nothing about commercial performance. It tells you whether your execution is roughly in line with the market. It doesn’t tell you whether your marketing is growing the business.

The second trap is using platform-published benchmarks as if they’re objective. When a paid social platform tells you the average conversion rate in your sector is 2.1%, that number is derived from the platform’s own data, which skews toward advertisers who are already active on the platform, in categories where the platform performs well, with budgets large enough to generate statistically meaningful data. It is a perspective on performance, not a definition of it.

Good benchmarking starts with a cleaner question: compared to what, and for what purpose?

What Should You Actually Benchmark?

There are three categories of benchmark worth caring about, and most marketing teams underuse two of them.

Internal benchmarks compare your current performance against your own historical results. This is the most honest starting point because it controls for your specific audience, your channel mix, your creative quality, and your market position. If your email open rate was 28% last quarter and it’s 21% this quarter, something has changed. That’s worth investigating regardless of what the industry average says.

Competitive benchmarks compare your performance against specific named competitors where you have credible data. This is harder than it sounds. Most competitive data is either estimated, delayed, or incomplete. Tools that provide share-of-voice data, organic visibility scores, or social engagement comparisons give you a directional read, not a precise one. The value is in spotting relative gaps, not in claiming precise parity or advantage.

Market benchmarks compare your performance against the broader category or sector. These are most useful for identifying structural headroom. If your category is growing at 12% annually and your revenue is growing at 4%, the benchmark is telling you something important about market share loss, regardless of how good your cost-per-click looks.

The mistake most teams make is relying almost entirely on market benchmarks for tactical metrics, things like CTR and CPA, while ignoring internal benchmarks for strategic metrics like market share, share of voice, and customer acquisition rate relative to category growth. That’s backwards.

If you’re thinking about benchmarking as part of a broader go-to-market planning process, the wider Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers how measurement connects to commercial planning across the full funnel.

The Lower-Funnel Benchmarking Problem

Early in my career I was deeply invested in lower-funnel performance metrics. Cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, conversion rate. I built reporting frameworks around them, defended budgets with them, and used them to justify channel decisions. I was good at it. I was also, I now think, overconfident about what those numbers were actually measuring.

A lot of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. Someone who has already decided to buy your product and types your brand name into Google is going to convert at a high rate. That’s not a marketing achievement. That’s demand capture. When you benchmark your paid search conversion rate against a sector average and find you’re performing well, you may simply be confirming that your brand has enough existing awareness to generate high-intent searches. The benchmark is measuring the strength of your brand, not the efficiency of your paid search.

This matters for benchmarking because it means lower-funnel metrics are systematically flattering for established brands and systematically punishing for newer ones. If you’re benchmarking a challenger brand’s CPA against a category leader’s CPA, you’re not comparing like with like. The category leader is harvesting years of brand investment. The challenger is paying to build awareness and convert simultaneously.

The market penetration framework from Semrush is a useful lens here: growth comes from reaching new audiences, not just converting existing intent. Benchmarking that only measures conversion efficiency misses the question of whether you’re reaching enough people in the first place.

How to Set Up a Benchmarking Framework That Means Something

When I was turning around a loss-making agency, one of the first things I did was strip out the reporting we were doing for internal performance management and rebuild it around a small number of metrics that were directly connected to commercial outcomes. The same principle applies to marketing benchmarking.

Start with the commercial outcome you’re trying to influence. Revenue growth, market share gain, customer acquisition volume, retention rate. Then work backwards to identify the marketing metrics that are most directly connected to that outcome in your specific context. Not in general. In your business, with your channel mix, in your category.

For each metric, define three things before you look at any data:

• The reference point: What are you comparing against? Your own historical performance, a named competitor, or a category average? Be specific. “Industry average” is not a reference point. “The median CTR for B2B SaaS email campaigns in Q1 2025, sourced from a named provider” is a reference point.
• The threshold for action: At what level of underperformance would you change something? If you don’t know the answer before you look at the data, you’re not benchmarking, you’re just measuring.
• The confounding variables: What factors could make this comparison misleading? Seasonality, budget changes, audience composition shifts, competitive activity. Acknowledge them before presenting the benchmark, not after someone challenges the conclusion.

This sounds procedural, and it is. But it forces a discipline that most marketing teams skip. The discipline of deciding what a benchmark means before the number is known, rather than rationalising it after.

Share of Voice as a Structural Benchmark

One of the most underused benchmarks in marketing is share of voice relative to share of market. The principle is straightforward: brands that invest in visibility above their current market share tend to grow. Brands that invest below their share tend to shrink. This relationship isn’t a law, but it’s durable enough to be commercially useful as a planning benchmark.

When I was managing significant media budgets across multiple categories, share of voice comparisons were often more revealing than any channel-level performance metric. A brand could have excellent paid search efficiency and still be losing share of voice in organic search and earned media to a competitor investing more aggressively in content and PR. The performance metrics looked fine. The structural position was deteriorating.

Share of voice benchmarking requires honest data collection. For paid media, tools like SEMrush, Similarweb, and platform-level auction insights give you directional reads on competitive visibility. For organic search, share of voice can be estimated from keyword tracking across a defined topic set. For social, it’s messier, but monitoring tools can give you a reasonable approximation of relative brand conversation volume.

The benchmark question to ask is: is our share of voice growing faster or slower than our share of market? If it’s growing faster, you have a reasonable basis for expecting market share gains over time. If it’s growing slower, the performance metrics may look fine today while the business position erodes.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy in financial services makes a related point about the gap between short-term efficiency metrics and long-term market position. The same tension exists in almost every category.

Customer Benchmarks: The One Most Teams Ignore

There’s a version of marketing benchmarking that almost never appears in agency reporting decks, and it’s arguably the most important one: how does your customer experience compare to what customers actually expect?

I’ve worked with businesses that had genuinely strong marketing metrics, good acquisition costs, solid conversion rates, reasonable retention numbers, while sitting on a product or service experience that was mediocre at best. The marketing was doing its job. The business was propping up a fundamentally weak customer proposition with spend. You can sustain that for a while. You cannot sustain it indefinitely.

If a company genuinely delighted customers at every touchpoint, word of mouth alone would drive meaningful growth. Marketing becomes a multiplier of something real rather than a substitute for it. Benchmarking customer satisfaction metrics, NPS, CSAT, repeat purchase rate, referral rate, against your own historical performance and against category norms is one of the most commercially honest things a marketing function can do. It tells you whether the underlying business is worth marketing.

Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder touches on a related dynamic: when the product-market fit is weak, no amount of go-to-market efficiency compensates. Benchmarking customer outcomes surfaces this earlier than any channel metric will.

Benchmarking Across the Funnel Without Creating False Precision

One of the things I saw repeatedly when judging the Effie Awards was the difference between entries that demonstrated genuine commercial impact and entries that demonstrated impressive-looking metrics. The impressive-looking metrics were often the result of cherry-picked benchmarks: comparing performance in a strong period against a weak baseline, or benchmarking a narrow metric that happened to move while ignoring broader business outcomes that didn’t.

The antidote is benchmarking across the full funnel, not just at the points where your performance looks best. That means:

• Awareness: Are more people aware of your brand than this time last year? Is your unaided awareness growing relative to competitors?
• Consideration: Among people who are aware, are more of them considering you? Branded search volume, direct traffic growth, and category survey data all give partial reads on this.
• Conversion: Of the people who reach a purchase decision, what proportion choose you? This is where most benchmarking is concentrated, and where the misleading efficiency metrics live.
• Retention: Of the customers you acquire, how many return? How does your repeat purchase rate compare to your own historical baseline and to category norms?
• Advocacy: Are customers recommending you? Referral rates and organic branded search growth are imperfect but useful proxies.

You don’t need perfect data at every stage. You need honest approximations that tell you where the funnel is leaking relative to where it should be. Marketing doesn’t need false precision. It needs directional honesty.

Forrester’s intelligent growth model makes a useful distinction between metrics that measure activity and metrics that measure commercial momentum. The full-funnel benchmarking approach maps directly to that distinction.

The Practical Mechanics of Running a Benchmark Review

A benchmarking review doesn’t need to be a quarterly ritual that produces a 40-slide deck. The most useful benchmark reviews I’ve run were focused, uncomfortable, and short. Focused on three to five metrics that were directly connected to commercial outcomes. Uncomfortable because they surfaced underperformance that nobody wanted to present. Short because the goal was to make a decision, not to demonstrate analytical thoroughness.

Here’s a workable structure for a quarterly benchmark review:

• Select five metrics that connect directly to your commercial objectives. Not twenty. Five. If you can’t identify five metrics that connect to commercial outcomes, the benchmarking conversation needs to start with strategy, not measurement.
• Define the comparison for each metric before pulling the data. Internal historical baseline, named competitive reference, or verified category benchmark. Document the source and its limitations.
• Present the gap, not the number. The interesting question is not “our conversion rate is 3.2%.” The interesting question is “our conversion rate is 3.2% against a historical baseline of 4.1% and a category median of 2.8%. We’re above category but declining, and consider this we think is causing it.”
• Attach a decision to every benchmark. If the number is within acceptable range, say so and move on. If it’s outside the range, define what you’re going to change and by when. A benchmark with no decision attached is just a data point in a deck.

The Forrester analysis of go-to-market struggles in device diagnostics illustrates what happens when measurement frameworks are built around activity rather than outcomes: teams report on what they can measure rather than what matters, and strategic decisions get made on incomplete information.

If you’re building this kind of review into a broader growth planning process, the articles in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub cover the strategic context that benchmarking should sit within, from market entry to channel investment decisions.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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