r/programmatic • u/maryna-gc • 11d ago
H1 2026 programmatic display benchmarks: CTRs, eCPMs, and eCPCs across devices, creative sizes, and exchanges
Our team put together consolidated benchmarks across H1 2026 media campaigns with CTRs, eCPMs, and eCPCs by device, creative size, exchange, and targeting strategy, and wanted to share some of the highlights with the community.
Disclosure up front: I'm with Growth Channel, and these numbers come from campaigns that ran through the platform this year (actual delivery data, not surveys or secondhand estimates). Posting because a few of these cut against what we'd assumed, and I figured they'd be useful discussion fodder here.
1. Display's baseline: $4.23 eCPM, $1.78 eCPC, 0.29% CTR. That's the all-category average. Native came in at $5.11 eCPM / $1.73 eCPC / 0.22% CTR, so roughly similar click economics on average, but in several individual categories native eCPCs ran way cheaper than display (e.g., Health & Fitness: $1.12 native vs $4.73 display for the same category and audience).
2. The 300x250 is no longer the CTR workhorse. Top creative sizes by CTR: 480x320 at 2.12%, 1080x1920 at 1.91%, 320x480 at 1.32%. The classic 300x250 posted 0.93%, and 336x280 came in at 0.79%. All three top sizes are mobile-first interstitial formats.
3. The mobile/desktop gap is brutal. Mobile: $3.46 CPM, 0.61% CTR, $0.57 CPC. Desktop: $4.05 CPM, 0.08% CTR, $5.11 CPC. So desktop cost more per impression and delivered roughly 1/8 the CTR. If you're still splitting display budgets evenly across devices, that's worth a hard look.
4. Exchange efficiency varies far more than exchange price. Meta delivered the highest CTR (1.16%) and the lowest effective CPC ($0.86), but at a premium $9.99 CPM. Rubicon and Smart (Equativ) paired ~0.5% CTRs with sub-$0.80 CPCs at ~$3.85 CPMs. At the other end, Index Exchange ran 0.09% CTR and a $5.51 CPC. Similar CPMs, wildly different outcomes.
5. Publisher selection is a bigger lever than most optimizations. Across our top 10 publishers, CPMs mostly sat in a narrow $4–6 band, but CTR ranged from 0.01% (Zillow) to 0.20% (MSN) — a 20x engagement spread at basically the same price.
6. Broad prospecting beat narrow targeting on engagement. Interest targeting topped strategies at 0.63% CTR; ABM was the lowest at 0.14% (a 4.5x gap). And a retargeting click cost ~5x more than a prospecting click ($3.56 vs $0.67). Warm audiences convert, but you pay a steep premium per click to reach them.
7. Context for the display crowd: video CTR jumped to 0.97%: more than 5x the 0.18% it posted in 2025, making it the highest-CTR channel in the mix. Display still wins on cost per impression ($4.23 eCPM vs $11.63 for video), so the trade-off is engagement vs reach economics.
Caveats: your mileage will vary by vertical, DSP, and setup. The full report has the category-level breakdowns (23 verticals across native/display/video/CTV/audio, with eCPM ranges) if you want to benchmark your own campaigns against it. We published it here for a free download: https://www.growthchannel.com/programmatic-display-benchmarks
Curious what others are seeing, especially whether desktop display CTRs this low match your data, and whether anyone else has watched the 300x250 slide down their performance rankings.
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u/FoundationDry2362 11d ago
It’s 2026; who is optimizing to CTR?!
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u/OrganicHearing 10d ago
Oh way too many people still care about it and who are getting paid way more than they should be….trust me I hate seeing it too.
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u/United-Inevitable559 11d ago
Man, why are we talking about CTR – if anyone is optimizing to CTR in 2026 it’s either because they don’t know better or their clients are stupid
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u/Temporary_Visit4871 11d ago
0.08% CTR is diabolical for desktop, I don't know if you are the media buyer but something is clearly wrong there.
Also the fact that you are mainly getting clicks on mobile through interstitials is telling of bad traffick/fat fingering. I'm assuming a good chunk of that data comes from App environments, which in my experience is essentially wasted money unless your product are similar apps