Non-branded B2B search CPCs are up about 29 percent year over year, and the average account quietly wastes over $1,100 a month. Rising CAC is almost never a budget problem. It is a structure problem. Here are the five levers that move it, each tied to a public benchmark, in the order an operator runs them on a real account.
The auction did get more expensive. Non-branded B2B search CPCs rose about 29 percent year over year to an average of $5.34, and click-through rate fell to 4.04 percent over the same window (Dreamdata). So part of the climb is real and outside your control.
But the bigger number is the leak inside the account. The average Google Ads account wastes $1,127.54 a month (WordStream, 2025). Search Engine Land reported the same one-quarter-of-budget figure back in 2013. A decade apart, the same diagnosis: roughly 25 percent of the spend leaks out on traffic that was never going to convert.
That is the good news. A leak is fixable, and it is bigger than the CPC inflation you cannot control. So when CAC climbs, the move is not spend more, and it is not pause everything. It is to fix five structural levers in order. They run in dependency order: the conversion signal feeds the bidding strategy, the bidding strategy needs clean campaign structure, and structure only holds with disciplined keywords. To see which of the five your account is leaking on in about a minute, run the free Smart Bidding audit.
If Google only sees the lead, it will buy you more leads. Most of them never become revenue.
Business Services leads cost $93.69 each at a 4.85% conversion rate (WordStream / LocaliQ, 2026). A lead is not a customer. When Smart Bidding optimizes to raw form fills on a long sales cycle, it pours budget into the traffic that books demos and never buys.
Source: WordStream / LocaliQ, 2026 Search Advertising BenchmarksTell Google which conversions are worth more, then let it bid toward value instead of volume.
Google has reported a median 14% increase in conversion value when advertisers move from Target CPA to Target ROAS at a similar return on ad spend. Volume bidding treats a $2,000 trial and a $200,000 enterprise deal as the same event. Value bidding does not.
Source: Google Ads Help, Target ROAS biddingThey have opposite economics. Blending them hands Smart Bidding a meaningless average.
Non-branded B2B search CPCs rose about 29% year over year to $5.34, while click-through rate fell to 4.04% (Dreamdata, Aug 2024 to Jul 2025). Non-brand is the expensive, top-of-funnel third of the budget. Brand is cheap and high-intent. One bidding strategy cannot serve both.
Source: Dreamdata, B2B Google Search Ads BenchmarkThe single highest-leverage habit in the account, and the one most people skip.
Accounts with at least one negative keyword convert at 13% on average, versus 4.6% for accounts with none, close to a 3x difference. Yet 25% of accounts have never added a single negative (WordStream, 15,000+ accounts, 2025).
Source: WordStream, Google Ads Performance Study, 2025Broad match is a loan against your budget. Only take it with collateral.
The average account wastes $1,127.54 a month, and broad match running without tight negative lists is a primary driver (WordStream, 2025). At a $5.34 non-brand CPC, every loose match type compounds the leak faster than it did a year ago.
Source: WordStream, Google Ads Performance Study, 2025The free Smart Bidding Audit connects Google Ads read-only and returns a scorecard on these exact levers in about a minute: a score out of 100, plus a FIX / WATCH / PASS read on the settings quietly burning budget. $50M+ in managed paid ad spend behind the method. Want the full picture? The $129 Diagnostic returns an operator-written paid-media brief in 24 hours.
Read-only · No card · Disconnect anytime · No sales call required
See also: the 40-item Google Ads audit checklist · best B2B SaaS Google Ads agencies and audit tools · GTMVP vs a PPC agency.
Every non-GTMVP figure above is public and named. GTMVP’s own numbers are its operator track record, labeled as such. The sources:
Non-branded B2B search CPCs rose roughly 29% year over year to an average of $5.34, while click-through rate fell to 4.04%.
Average Google Ads cost per lead is $66.69 at an 8.18% conversion rate. Business Services leads cost $93.69 at a 4.85% conversion rate.
The average account wastes $1,127.54 a month. Accounts with at least one negative keyword convert at 13% versus 4.6% for accounts with none, and 25% of accounts have never added a single negative.
Google has reported a median 14% increase in conversion value when advertisers switch from Target CPA to Target ROAS at a comparable return on ad spend.
Small and mid-sized businesses waste about a quarter of their paid search budget, a finding that has held from 2013 through the 2025 account data.