When you track 21,425 Google Ads accounts across five consecutive quarters, patterns emerge that you simply cannot see from inside a single account. Some of those patterns confirm what experienced advertisers already suspected. Others are genuinely surprising. This is what the data from our State of Google Ads Q1 2026 Benchmark Report showed.

Fewer impressions across the board, every quarter

Google Ads looked fine on paper in 2025, with CTR climbing every quarter, CPCs barely moving, and ROAS holding steady. But if you were actually running accounts through that period, growth felt harder than any of those numbers suggested. Budgets weren’t stretching as far, and scaling campaigns took more effort for less return. And the reason for that becomes clear when you look beyond the headline metrics to what was happening with impression volume.

From Q1 2025 to Q1 2026, the platform served 5.65 billion fewer impressions across the 21,425 accounts in this study, down from 45.9 billion to 40.25 billion. That’s an 11% reduction in the available auction pool over twelve months, and it’s an important context for everything else in the data.

Impressions declined through Q2 and Q3, recovered briefly in Q4 with the seasonal lift, then fell sharply in Q1 2026 to the lowest point in the study. CTR went the other way — up every quarter, from 1.83% to 2.22%, a 21% gain that held across every segment.

What that tells us is that the platform got better at identifying which of the remaining impressions would generate a click, not that more people were engaging with ads. When the auction pool shrinks by 11%, getting more efficient with what’s left isn’t the same as having more room to grow.

Conversion rates softened across the board

The Q3 2025 numbers stand out across the full dataset: CVR peaked at 6.79%, CPA hit its study low at $12.58, and both figures were driven by a combination of lower summer auction pressure and strong post-spring intent at a point when impression volume hadn’t yet dropped to its floor. After that quarter, CVR retreated consistently, finishing at 6.20% in Q1 2026, down 0.96% year-over-year, while CPA ended at $13.27, up 4.41%.

Neither of those changes is large in isolation, but the direction matters. A shrinking impression pool, combined with softening conversion rates and rising acquisition costs, paints a picture of a platform where the conditions for scaling are getting harder.

Some of that CVR decline comes from how the campaign type mix shifted during the year. Performance Max grew 15.7% in campaign volume and Demand Gen grew 53.2%, and both formats work differently from Search. Performance Max runs across all of Google’s inventory simultaneously — Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, and Gmail — and when running with creative assets, it distributes spend across all of those channels, including the ones that historically convert at lower rates.

Demand Gen, as Google’s own documentation describes it, reaches people scrolling through YouTube, Discover, and Gmail who are not actively searching, using Maximize Clicks bidding to drive consideration goals like site visits. Search, meanwhile, lost 3.8% in volume over the same period. When the campaign mix moves that far in this direction over a single year, some CVR softening at the platform level is the predictable result.

Bigger spend did not mean better returns in 2025

Accounts spending $10,000 to $50,000 per month delivered 566% ROAS in Q1 2026. Accounts spending $50,000 or more per month delivered 377%. That gap held across all five quarters.

Mid-market accounts peaked at 610% ROAS in Q4 2025 — the highest figure of any spend tier in the dataset — and ran the lowest CPC of any tier across every quarter in the study. Enterprise accounts went in the opposite direction across every quarter, with ROAS falling from 391% to 377% and CPA rising from $14.26 to $16.00 without a single quarter where it came down. No other tier in the study showed that pattern. SMB and mid-market both saw CPA move seasonally, but enterprise CPA climbed regardless of what time of year it was.

At $50,000 or more per month, bidding at volume on competitive terms pushes CPCs up across the board. You win more impressions, but the conversion value of each additional impression falls as you spend further into the auction, which means the return per dollar decreases as the budget grows.

Mid-market sits in the range where there’s enough budget to compete for the placements that produce results, but not so much that the account is working against its own efficiency. SMB accounts show strong engagement — the highest CTR of any tier at 2.42% — but the budget ceiling limits how much of that engagement translates into results at scale, which explains why ROAS stays at 387% while mid-market runs at 566%.

To get more insights into the market performance for e-commerce and lead gen accounts, download the full report here.

The video numbers are an attribution problem, not a performance one

Video campaign CPA went from $25.97 to $227.95 year-over-year, ROAS dropped from 144% to 13.5%, and volume fell 31.6%. These numbers look like a complete breakdown in video advertising performance, but that’s not what happened.

Throughout 2025, Google migrated Video Action Campaigns into Demand Gen, completing the process in Q1 2026. As campaigns moved formats, they lost conversion attribution. The legacy Video campaigns that remained kept running but stopped recording conversions accurately, so reported CPAs were inflated while the actual activity shifted to Demand Gen.

YouTube inventory changed formats, and Demand Gen absorbed it, grew 53.2% in campaign volume over the same period, and improved its CPA from $8.59 to $7.35 in the process. If you’re still running legacy Video campaigns and the metrics look broken, this migration is the reason.

Q3 2025 produced the best Demand Gen results in the study — $5.50 CPA and 224.7% ROAS — consistent with the seasonal efficiency pattern that showed up across the full dataset that quarter. Here’s how all campaign types compared across the year:

*Video figures reflect attribution loss from platform migration, not real performance.

Search continues to hold the strongest CTR of any campaign type in the study at 12.15%, and remains the dominant format by volume.

Display lost 17.3% of volume, but the accounts still running it recorded their best results of the study period, with CPA falling from $4.53 to $3.22 and CVR improving from 5.06% to 6.99%. The advertisers who stuck with Display and managed it well outperformed the broader group that was running it before.

Performance across seven verticals

The platform average of 430.9% ROAS in Q1 2026 is a useful orientation point, but it doesn’t tell you much about your account unless your vertical happens to sit close to that figure.

Real estate went from 182.9% ROAS in Q1 2025 to 250.1% in Q1 2026, a 36.7% improvement year-over-year, with CPA falling 14.5% and CVR rising 25.4%. Search intent in real estate strengthened through 2025 as the market adjusted, and the advertisers who kept spending through that period captured the demand as it came back. It was one of the weaker-looking verticals a year ago and now shows the strongest improvement of any category in the study.

Style & Fashion runs at 800% ROAS with the lowest CPC in the dataset and CPA improving 10.8% year-over-year. For a vertical that gets described as crowded and expensive, those numbers tell a different story, and paid search in fashion is producing the best efficiency figures of any category in this study.

Tech & Computing has a CVR of 14.26% — more than double the next-highest vertical — and CPA of $5.57, the lowest of any sector in the dataset. On a per-conversion basis, it’s in a different league from everything else in the study.

Travel had the largest CTR increase of any vertical at +49% year-over-year, with ROAS improving and CPCs staying low. The CVR dropped from 5.85% to 5.37% reflects a broader audience coming in through travel searches, as more people in early research mode click on ads but do not convert on that first visit.

Health and fitness had the hardest year among all verticals in this dataset. CPA rose 20.8%, the steepest increase across all seven categories, while CVR fell 11.8% at the same time. Increased competition and tighter Google policy around health-related ad claims pushed costs higher in a category where conversion rates were already declining. If you’re managing health and fitness accounts and benchmarking against the platform average of 430%, that comparison isn’t meaningful since your category baseline is 295.7% ROAS.

Get all the insights in the full report

The full breakdown is in our Q1 2026 Benchmark Report with five quarters of data by vertical, spend tier, and campaign type.

Download the full report