The IPQ Field Guide
Arseniy Volosevich
Most marketing advice written for architecture firms comes from people who have never had to explain a cost per lead to a principal on a Monday morning. This page is here so you can check whether that applies to the guides on this site.
What I do all week
IPQmedia runs client acquisition for US architecture firms on a performance model. The ads run inside the firm's own ad account, our setting team answers every inquiry within minutes and qualifies budget, scope and timeline, and the firm pays when a qualified consultation actually shows up.
The company has worked with more than 70 architecture firms across all 50 states, which you can read about on the main IPQmedia site. Because we get paid on consultations rather than on media spend, a campaign that produces impressions and nothing else is our problem before it is yours.
That model decides what I get to see. An agency that only buys media sees form fills. Our team is on the phone with the people who filled in those forms, all day, so the objections arrive in their own words. That is the layer these guides are built on.
Where the numbers on this site come from
Five pages here exist because we had data nobody else publishes for this profession. Each one ships with its sample size and its window attached, so you can decide how much weight it deserves.
- The benchmark report: 16 US architecture and design firm Meta ad accounts, $96,088 of spend, 1,752 leads and 410 booked consultations between September 2025 and July 2026, reported as per-firm quartiles so one big account cannot move the median.
- Statistics and costs: our blended $55 cost per lead and $0.95 cost per click across $95,539 of spend, sitting next to the third-party market figures we could verify.
- Social media for architects: 18 accounts, a median 825 impressions per lead at a median $58.45. Nobody else answers the question of what posting produces with a number.
- High-end residential: firms that name an affluence target pay a median $71.52 per lead against $31.02, and the mechanism is click-to-lead conversion rather than expensive reach.
- Demand by metro: our own search volume pull across 16 US metros, next to the adjacent trades your clients hire instead of you.
When a page leans on somebody else's number, it says whose, with a link and a date. The rules for that are written down in our editorial standards, including the corrections we have had to make to our own pages.
Why every guide here splits residential and commercial
This is the editorial rule I enforce hardest, because the profession sells to two different buyers and most content written for architects pretends they are one buyer.
If you do residential, your client is usually a homeowner going through this once in their life. They buy on feeling, they are nervous about the money, and plenty of them do not know an architect is even part of the process until after they have called a builder.
If you do commercial, your client is a developer, an operator or a business owner who wants returns, cost and a delivery date, usually with several other people in the room. Slower decision, bigger project, often the better client. Same channels, a completely different argument running inside them.
A page that writes "homeowners" when it means "clients" has quietly told half of you it is not for you. So we fork out loud on every page where the answer actually differs, and commercial gets equal weight instead of a closing paragraph.
What you will not find here
No cost per signed project. We have clean data on the advertising side and messy data on the closed-project side, so that figure stays unpublished until it is honest. A benchmark without its limits printed next to it is an ad.
No universal laws either. Everything here is what typically happens across the accounts we run, over the window stated on the page. Your market gets a vote, and sometimes it disagrees with us.
We also publish the numbers that make the channel look worse. Across the 15 accounts with enough creative history to judge, 56 percent of the ads we ran produced zero leads, and cost per lead drifted upward as accounts aged. Both are in the report, because you were going to meet them anyway.
Everything I have published here
Twenty-nine guides so far, all on the same subject: how architecture firms get clients. The full index with descriptions lives on the guide hub.
The core system
- Architecture marketing, the map everything else hangs off
- Lead generation for architects
- Meta ads for architects
- Marketing for residential architects
- Marketing for commercial architects
Channel by channel
- SEO, Google Ads and Google Business Profile
- Content marketing, email and website design
- LinkedIn, video and branding
- Houzz advertising, RFPs and direct mail
- Referral systems, partnerships and PR and press
Comparisons, rankings and firm types
- Meta ads vs Google Ads, creating demand against capturing it
- Pay per lead vs retainer, and who carries the risk
- The 2026 ranking of marketing agencies for architects, including where we place and why
- Marketing for landscape architects, where almost nobody searches the job title
How a page gets published
Each guide is drafted against a source list, checked line by line, and nothing goes live until I have read it. When we get something wrong, we fix the page and log the correction with a date rather than editing it quietly. The whole policy sits in editorial standards.
If you would rather we ran it
Everything on this site is written so you can do it yourself. If you would rather hand the advertising side to the people who collected these numbers, that is the actual business.
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