Content Overview
Cheaper clicks, pricier leads. That’s the Facebook Ads story for 2025.
WordStream’s fresh benchmarks show traffic campaigns getting more efficient while lead-generation costs jumped ~21% year-on-year to $27.66.
Here’s how we tackle it at Distl:
- Benchmark the market.
- Set a hard account-level cost-per-conversion target tied to your margin.
- Evaluate close rates and customer lifetime value ongoing.
- Scale while the account holds that line.
Facebook still undercuts Google on lead costs (CPL $27.66 vs Google’s $70.11), but careless scaling will torch profit if you aren’t monitoring lead quality and your campaign budget across different platforms.
Facebook Ad Costs in 2025, Compared to 2024
YoY Data across 1000+ accounts, all set to lead objective.
Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/facebook-ads-benchmarks-2025
Attention and eyeballs are affordable, action costs more than it did last year. Getting someone to click through to your site is cheap. Getting them to actually fill out a form and become a lead is more expensive than it was last year.
What you need is a plan anchored to a cost per lead you can actually afford, not what some benchmark says is “average”, more on how we structure this for our clients below.
Facebook Cost Benchmarks in 2025
Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/facebook-ads-benchmarks-2025
Are Facebook Leads Cheaper than Google Ads?
Facebook is still cheaper then Google Ads based on the raw cost per lead numbers. Facebook Lead Ads average $27.66 per lead vs $70.11 on Google across the same industries, again according to Wordstream PPC benchmark data so it’s a fair comparison, and CPCs are lower on Facebook too.
That gap is big enough to notice, but it doesn’t tell you which channel is making you money so don’t panic until you’ve investigated the whole lead journey.
Meta often generates more form fills, but a chunk are low-intent thanks to auto-filled Lead Ads and duplicates. Meta lead forms are brilliant don’t get me wrong, but don’t evaluate on raw numbers.
Google on the other hand captures active intent and people who are already looking for your service more often than paid social media, so contact rates, booking rates and close rates are typically higher. Cheaper doesn’t automatically mean better.” – Ryan Wilson, Marketing Lead
Important Note: Are CPL Benchmarks Even Useful?
Benchmarks are useful for spotting trends, but they can hide what really matters. “Lead” can mean different things, depending on your conversion tracking it could mean a simple on-platform form tap, a full website enquiry, a booked call, or a phone call no one picked up.
How Do I Know if Facebook Leads or Google Ads Leads are More Profitable?
The comparison has to happen inside your CRM, not the ads dashboard or an industry report. Track as much as the journey as possible, ideally you’d pull some version of the below:
- Contact rate (can we reach them?).
- Qualification rate (do they fit?).
- Appointment/quote rate.
- Win rate and revenue per lead.
When you calculate cost per qualified lead/opportunity, cost per actual sale and profit per channel, the “Facebook is cheaper” narrative sometimes flips. Make sure you’re aware of your CPL, but also your conversion rates that you can track back to individual platforms to help plan your marketing spend.
Ideally, set up a robust CRM pipeline with consistent stages, pass UTMs + GCLID/FBCLID into the record and ideally push offline conversions (and values) back to platforms. If you have enough data, optimise budgets for cost per qualified opportunity or cost per sale, not CPL. The simple option for this is to invest in something like Hubspot or a CRM with baked in features that allow you to send only qualified conversions back to Google and Meta to learn from, but you can do it manually.
Important note: If you’re generating less than ~30 qualified opportunities or sales per month, then unfortunately you aren’t big enough to have this luxury just yet.
What SMBs are planning to spend in 2025/26
The LocaliQ 2025 SMB Trends report shows strong ongoing investment in lead generation ads, with over half of small businesses planning to maintain or increase spend. This tells us competition isn’t going anywhere and if anything, it could be heating up.
Looking at the current channel mix gives us more context about where the pressure’s coming from. According to LocaliQ’s marketing statistics, 52% of SMBs use organic social media marketing, 47% run social ads, and 40% invest in search ads. These aren’t mutually exclusive, most successful businesses run multiple channels simultaneously, which means you’re competing for attention across the board.
What does this mean for your 2026 strategy? Competition’s heating up across every channel. Prices will keep shifting as more businesses pile into digital advertising. The businesses that win won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets, they’ll be the ones with the clearest understanding of their profitable CPL threshold.
That’s why you need benchmarks to set your profitable target, not chase someone else’s average.
Distl’s Paid Media Rhythm
Our job is to sit on your side of the table. We don’t care about vanity metrics, only your bottom line.
1) Benchmark & Baseline
We start with two things:
- Market benchmarks (as a rough guide, not gospel), and
- Your past performance (what actually happened).
From there we outline where we’d lean in, what we’d pull back, and the broad cost-per-lead range we expect to hit initially. Typically we need to rebuild campaigns from scratch for clients to adhere to best practices and what we’d recommend.
2) Strategy & Targets
We present your plan: audiences, creative angles, landing page experience, and a target per enquiry that aligns with your commercial reality. It’s directional, not technical and our goal is these are clear enough for your team to feel confident about where the money’s going and why.
3) Run & Optimise to the Target
Everything we do is about reaching (or beating) that target:
- Launch, learn, and tighten quickly.
- Keep what works, cut what doesn’t.
We share updates on exactly what we changed and why we changed it monthly.
4) Scale, with Guardrails
When the target holds, we scale. As your reach widens, cost per lead can rise (broader audiences are naturally less qualified). That’s expected, and managed. We scale only while it stays profitable for your business, with clear thresholds for pausing, reallocating, or refreshing creative.
Our working rhythm:
- Kickoff: Benchmark, baseline, strategy, launch plan, initial target range.
- Monthly: What we did, what we learned, what we’re changing next as well as the impact on enquiries, bookings and revenue indicators. Essentially it’s a simple “are we on track for your business goals?” check.
- Quarterly: What are your new business goals? Do you have new offers? Are there creative platforms you should explore? We talk through your business plans with all relevant stakeholders and if needed, adjust our goalposts.
Ready to grow?
Our approach protects your profit: we don’t scale if your account-level CPL goal isn’t profitable, and we keep it there. No exceptions, no excuses. This isn’t about being conservative; it’s about being sustainable. Growth that loses money isn’t growth, it’s just expensive market share.
Our clients running Facebook Ads management beat industry CPL by 20-40% because we treat your budget like our own. Check our case studies if you want proof – real businesses, real results, real ROI.
Ready to set your CPL target and build a plan to hit it?
We’ll map your profitable CPL in your first month and show you exactly how we think you can get there.
Ryan Wilson
Marketing Team Lead
