QRY’s April Benchmarks Show Paid Media CTR Up 42% as Awareness CPMs Hit Low

QRY’s April 2026 paid media benchmarks: engagement climbs across every funnel stage as the cost of awareness reaches its lowest point in over a year.

JERSEY CITY, NJ, UNITED STATES — Paid media engagement reached a six-month high in April 2026, according to the latest paid media benchmarks published by QRY, a full-funnel paid media agency. Across QRY’s managed client portfolio, click-through rate (CTR) climbed 42.1% month over month and 34.5% year over year, while awareness-stage CPMs fell 41.8% year over year. Conversion-stage return on ad spend (ROAS) climbed 56.5% year over year, evidence that the lower-funnel investments still working are working harder.

“More people are clicking. The cost of reaching them is materially lower than it was a year ago,” the report’s analysis notes. “For brands ready to invest, this is a window worth using.”

Where the Engagement Is Coming From

Facebook drove the majority of April’s lift. Facebook CTR rose 31.0% month over month and 46.4% year over year, with the platform’s share of total portfolio spend climbing 15.3% as advertisers leaned into the channel. Google CTR rose 18.6% month over month.

Across the funnel, the strongest movement was at the top: awareness-stage CTR climbed 44.2% MoM, paired with the 41.8% YoY drop in awareness CPM. Consideration-stage CTR rose 20.6% MoM, and conversion-stage CTR rose 12.1% MoM. The data points to a market where attention has become meaningfully cheaper to acquire, provided the creative is strong enough to earn it.

On the data, QRY founder and CEO Samir Balwani said:

“What’s interesting about this month is that the cost of attention has come down without engagement softening, usually those move together. For marketing leaders, that combination is worth pausing on. It changes the math on what an awareness investment actually costs and what it can return.”

Where the Leverage Is

Cheaper attention is an opportunity, but it raises the bar on what happens after the click. With engagement climbing across the funnel, the brands that capitalize most are the ones whose creative, offers, and on-site experience are ready to convert the new traffic. According to QRY’s full-funnel paid media methodology, two questions are worth running on a Q2 budget review:

Where can the cheaper awareness inventory create durable demand? Awareness CPMs at multi-year lows make brand campaigns measurably more efficient, a window worth using before competitors crowd the auction.

Is the creative and landing-page experience ready for higher-volume traffic? Engagement is up, which means more eyes on the brand at every stage. Tightening message-to-page consistency captures more of that engagement as growth.

“Most agencies treat their measurement infrastructure as a black box,” Balwani added. “We publish ours every month because the marketing leaders we work with deserve to know whether their numbers are in line with the market or whether something is actually broken.”

About the Report

QRY’s paid media benchmarks aggregate CPM, CTR, conversion rate, ROAS, and CPA across the agency’s managed client portfolio in ecommerce, retail, CPG, pharma, and financial services. Published monthly within seven days of each month close, the report breaks down performance by funnel stage and channel, and is aggregated by Athena, QRY’s proprietary AI-powered measurement platform.

The full April 2026 paid media benchmarks report, including six-month trend visualizations and detailed cuts by customer stage, is available on the QRY website.

About QRY

QRY is a full-funnel paid media agency built on a simple thesis: brand and performance are not separate strategies, they are one system with measurable connections. The agency’s proprietary Impact Methodology maps how upper-funnel investment drives lower-funnel outcomes, giving CMOs and CFOs the evidence they need to scale media confidently. QRY serves ecommerce, retail, CPG, pharma, and financial services brands.

Samir Balwani

QRY

press@weareqry.com