Marketing Benchmarks Guide

A guide to how marketing benchmarks should be used, organized by historical, industry, channel, cohort, and goal-based categories, with a five-point checklist (source quality, cohort matching, intent, recency, metric definition) for deciding whether a benchmark actually applies to your situation. Cites a median landing page conversion rate of 6.6% across 41,000 pages, with SaaS at 3.8% and financial services at 8.4%.

• Landing page conversion: 6.6% median across all industries (41,000 pages analyzed); SaaS runs lower at 3.8%, financial services higher at 8.4%
• Most websites convert visitors at 1-4% — treat that as the normal range before assuming something is broken
• Newsletter click-to-open rate (CTOR): 6.81% median, with 10-15% considered a healthy range
• Before applying any external benchmark, check it against 5 criteria: source quality, cohort match, intent match, recency, and whether the metric is even defined the same way
• A benchmark from the wrong cohort (different traffic source, different buyer intent, stale data) can be actively misleading rather than just unhelpful

• • Deciding whether a SaaS landing page's conversion rate is actually underperforming or just below the all-industry median
• • Building a checklist for evaluating any external benchmark before citing it in a plan or board deck