Every stat on this site has a source.

[1.1]Local radio: a 30-second spot commonly runs ~$100-$300 in small markets, ~$300-$800 in mid-size cities, and ~$1,000-$5,000+ in major-metro drive time; weekly schedules range from under ~$1,000 in small towns to ~$8,000+ in large metros; radio CPM commonly ~$5-$15.

[1.2]Geofencing display advertising commonly runs ~$3.50-$15 CPM (video ~$15-$25; CTV-geofencing ~$20-$50 CPM); most managed monthly budgets range ~$1,500-$10,000, with setup fees often ~$500-$2,000.

[1.3]CTV / OTT advertising commonly runs ~$25-$45 CPM (premium authenticated inventory can reach ~$55-$65); many platforms start at ~$500-$1,000/month, and some have no minimum.

[1.4]Typical 2026 local CPM ranges by channel: streaming TV ~$15-$35, paid search ~$20-$80, paid social ~$8-$15, radio ~$5-$15, and out-of-home ~$3-$10 (cost per thousand people reached).

[1.5]Paid search (Google Ads) is billed per click, not per thousand impressions: the average cost per click across industries is $5.42 (2026). Cost per click and cost per lead vary widely by industry.

[1.6]Meta (Facebook + Instagram): average cost per click ~$0.87 and CPM ~$16.06 (November 2025). By campaign objective, Facebook CPC runs ~$0.70 for traffic campaigns and ~$1.92 for lead campaigns (2025).

[1.7]LinkedIn: B2B cost per click commonly runs ~$10.48-$15.72 depending on the quarter (Q1 lowest, Q3 highest). LinkedIn is among the most expensive per-click channels because the targeting is job title, seniority, and company level.

[1.8]TikTok: platform minimum budgets are $50/day at campaign level and $20/day at ad-group level (the lifetime ad-group minimum is $20 x scheduled days). Average CPM ran ~$6.21 in June 2025, with heavy seasonal swing.

[1.9]Snapchat: average CPM ~$8.39 (June 2025), with high month-to-month volatility (January 2025 ~$6.01; April 2025 ~$12.04).

[1.10]Streaming audio (Spotify / Pandora / iHeart): CPM commonly ~$10-$35, averaging ~$20. Podcast advertising commonly runs ~$20 CPM pre-roll and ~$25 CPM mid-roll.

[1.11]Targeted display CPM depends on the inventory tier: the Google Display Network averages ~$3.12 CPM, open-exchange programmatic ~$5.85, and curated private-marketplace inventory ~$8.20 (2026 cross-industry averages). Standard static banners average ~$2.85 CPM. Cross-network display viewability averages 72% — meaning roughly 28% of display impressions never meet the industry standard of being half-visible for one second — and display converts at ~0.71% against ~4.40% for paid search.

[1.12]YouTube: CPM commonly ~$5-$10 for most advertisers. YouTube is usually bought per view rather than per impression — see the TrueView cost-per-view citation (~$0.02-$0.04 CPV) in the Channel effectiveness section.

[1.13]Paid search (Google + Microsoft Ads): average conversion rate 8.18% and average cost per lead $66.69 across all industries (2026). Average cost per click is $5.42 — more than double the $2.32 of ten years ago.

[1.14]Paid social (Meta lead campaigns): average conversion rate 7.72% and average cost per lead $27.66 across all industries. Cost per click is $1.92 for lead campaigns and $0.70 for traffic campaigns.

[1.15]Advertising agency management fees run 10-20% of monthly ad spend as the industry standard, and 20-25% at the smallest spend levels ($1,000-$5,000/month). The median US agency retainer is about $3,000/month. A fee of 5% of spend or less is a red flag for set-and-forget management.

[1.16]How advertising agencies get paid, measured among large national advertisers: 82% of surveyed marketers use a fee-based compensation method in at least one agency agreement, up from 68% in 2016. Labor-based fees — billing for the hours agency staff spend — remain the dominant form overall, and 76% of smaller advertisers use them. Among the largest advertisers, those spending $500 million or more a year, 53% now use fixed or output-based fees (a negotiated price for a defined set of deliverables, regardless of hours), up from 5% in 2016. Use of performance incentives alongside fees fell to 41%, from 48% in 2016 and 61% in 2013. Fees are not the only structure in use: in the previous edition, the ANA found use of traditional media commissions had climbed back to 12% of respondents from 3% in 2010, used primarily for media services. The question worth asking anyone who buys media for you is which structure you are in, and what the total comes to.

[1.17]In the open-web programmatic marketplace, a meaningful share of an advertiser's dollar is consumed before it buys an impression anyone can see. Studying 21 large advertisers' actual impression-level data, the ANA found that about 36 cents of every dollar entering a demand-side platform reached the consumer as a fraud-free, viewable, measurable impression that was not on a made-for-advertising site. Transaction costs — DSP and SSP fees — took 29 cents, and another 35 cents went to non-viewable, invalid, unmeasurable, or made-for-advertising traffic. The ANA sized the recoverable waste at $22 billion, one dollar in four of the $88 billion open-web programmatic market. That was the December 2023 baseline; the ANA's quarterly benchmark put the market-level figure at 43.3% in Q1 2026, with the best-performing advertisers converting 54.0% of spend into qualified impressions and the worst 32.1%. AMENDMENT — WHAT SEPARATES THE TOP FROM THE BOTTOM (same source, Q1 2026): the ANA found the gap between higher- and lower-performing advertisers is driven far more by media productivity than by transaction costs — transaction costs differed by 2.4 percentage points between cohorts, media productivity losses by 19.4. Higher performers lost 19.0% of spend to media quality issues; lower performers lost 38.4%, and the report states the lower-performing cohort loses more than two-thirds of every dollar before it reaches the end consumer. Adjusted for quality, the higher-performing cohort paid $7.46 per thousand qualified impressions against $19.04 for the lower — a $1.95 difference in headline CPM becoming an $11.58 difference in TrueCPM once waste is accounted for. The ANA's stated conclusion: quality, not cost, is the primary differentiator in programmatic performance.

[1.18]Billboard advertising cost benchmarks (out-of-home): national planning average roughly $2,500-$4,000 per four-week cycle, with rural boards from a few hundred dollars per month and digital faces typically 30-50% above comparable static; quotes vary with traffic counts (Geopath), visibility, demand, and seasonality. The 2025 national average is $3,953 per four-week campaign, with $1,000-$5,000 per month typical in small-to-mid-size cities.