What “good” looks like at $10k to $250k/month spend

Benchmark ranges by monthly spend

Read each row as a starting point, not a target. The leak column is the share of monthly spend the audits found leaking at that size. The attribution gap is how far reported returns ran above the real blended return, the overstatement the attribution field guide explains. The last column is the median annual finding for audits in that band.

Smaller budgets: buying problems

Under $75k a month, the most common leaks are about what the budget buys: broad targeting, wasted spend and tracking that drifted as campaigns were added. They are the fastest to fix, because the fix sits inside the ad accounts, and the leak share is highest here, so every recovered dollar is a large part of the budget.

Larger budgets: economics problems

Above $75k a month, the leak moves out of the ad accounts. Channel mix, incrementality and finally pricing and unit economics take over: the media is often well run, but it is selling offers whose margin no longer covers their cost. The share falls; the dollars rise.

Seven trigger points: healthy vs flagged

• Wasted ad spend: healthy is under 10% of budget; our audit median is 18.7%; worst quartile exceeds 31%.
• CAC payback (SaaS): healthy under 14 months; audits that flag it average 19.
• Email/CRM revenue share (ecommerce): healthy 25 to 30%; audits that flag it find under 12%.
• Retargeting frequency: healthy under 3.5 impressions/week per user; flagged accounts run 8+.
• Lead response time (services): healthy under 15 minutes; the firms we audit average hours, worth 20 to 40% of booked calls.
• Failed payment recovery (subscription): healthy above 50%; flagged accounts recover under 20%.
• Attribution overclaim: healthy under 110% of actual revenue; flagged accounts exceed 120%.

Every figure above is measurable from read only access in under a week, which is exactly what the audit does, across all five leak categories at once.

Two patterns hold across the base: the leak percentage falls with scale, but the absolute leak grows, and the dominant category shifts from buying problems (targeting, wasted spend) to economics problems (pricing, retention). All medians are computed against verified revenue data from the base of 74 audits.

Median finding by industry

The spread is narrower than most owners expect: from $47k in services to $83k in fintech, every industry’s median sits within a factor of two. What changes by industry is where the finding sits. Fintech and marketplaces leak through incentives and acquisition quality (Incentive spend acquired users who never funded); manufacturers through prices that never caught up with costs (Rising freight never reached the price list); services firms through intake and scoping (Intake was dropping a third of qualified calls).

How to use these numbers

Pick the two or three trigger points that apply to your business model and measure them this month. A single flagged metric is a question for your team; three flagged at once usually means the leaks are feeding each other. Then set your own MER and your margin leak estimate beside the band for your spend.

Benchmarks are a screening tool, not a verdict. A business can sit inside every healthy range and still carry a large leak in one product line, because an average hides it, the same way blended ROAS hides a weak campaign. The estimator models your industry in about 90 seconds, and the 2026 benchmark carries the full dataset with its population and limitations.