Benchmarks
Australian marketing benchmarks, graded honestly
Every metric here gets graded ranges: Leading, Competitive and Developing, set by operator judgement and labelled as judgement. Where we publish a point figure, it's because we actually measured it, with the sample size disclosed.
Most benchmark content launders one market's survey averages into another market's targets. We'd rather give you a wide, honest band than a precise number nobody measured.
Graded ranges, by metric
Judgement bands for the operational metrics people actually ask about. Each page carries the grading table, what moves the bands and how we set them. Tap the band you sit in on any page and your grades collect back here.
Graded ranges
Website conversion rate
Competitive: 1% to 3% ecommerce, 2% to 5% lead generation
Graded by business model, with the traffic-source and device shifts that move the bands.
See the bands →
Graded ranges
Google Ads: cost per click (CPC) and click-through rate (CTR)
Competitive CTR: 2% to 5% on commercial search intent
Graded by search intent, not industry. CPC graded as cost tiers because a high CPC isn't a performance verdict.
See the bands →
Graded ranges
Email marketing: open, click and unsubscribe
Competitive opens: 15% to 30% consumer, 25% to 45% B2B
Graded by list type across all three metrics, with unsubscribe bands running the opposite direction.
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Graded ranges
Marketing budget as a percentage of revenue
Competitive: 4% to 8% established, 8% to 15% growth-stage
Graded by growth stage, because the same percentage is over-spending for one business and under-investing for another.
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Graded ranges
Marketing team size by revenue stage
Competitive: 2 to 4 in-house marketers at $2M to $10M revenue
Graded headcount bands from under $2M to past $50M, with the agency-versus-in-house trade-off spelled out.
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Graded ranges
Social media engagement rate
Competitive: 1.5% to 3.5% Instagram, 0.5% to 2% Facebook
Graded per platform, because a 2% rate means completely different things on Facebook and TikTok.
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Measured from our own dataset
These pages are different. They report real Marketing Score data from the 728 Australian businesses we've hand-scored across six dimensions, with the sample size on every claim.
Our data
What a good Marketing Score looks like, by industry
Industry averages run 49.3 to 74.5 out of 100
Real measured averages across 70 industries, from 728 hand-scored Australian businesses. The leaders, the laggards and the national spread.
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Our data
B2B vs B2C marketing benchmarks
Measured across 221 B2B and 441 B2C businesses
Where the two actually differ on the six dimensions, and where the gap is a story B2B tells itself.
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Our data
Marketing maturity patterns by industry
Which industries are wide open and which have converged
Within-industry spread between leaders and laggards, reported only where we have enough scored businesses to say it.
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How these pages work
Two kinds of page, clearly separated. Graded-range pages publish judgement bands for operational metrics like conversion rate and open rate. Our per-industry samples are too small to publish reliable point averages for those, and we won't present someone else's overseas survey as an Australian measurement. So we grade instead: wide, honest ranges set from running accounts, cross-checked against published studies, labelled as judgement.
Our data pages publish real measurement: Marketing Score averages, spreads and cross-cuts from businesses we individually scored, always with n= disclosed. The full methodology lives at How We Score.
Then grade against your industry
A metric band tells you what typical looks like. Your industry's Atlas profile tells you what the businesses you actually compete with score across all six dimensions.
Highest-scoring industries on Atlas
The rough grade is here. The real one is in your data.
Our take reads your actual numbers against your industry and tells you what to do about them, in writing, from a senior operator.
Get our take