The IPQ Field Guide

Editorial standards

Marketing statistics travel in circles. A blog quotes a blog that quotes a slide deck, and four years later the number is famous and nobody can find the study. We have caught that happening on our own pages, which is why this one exists.

The six rules a number has to survive

These were not written in advance. Each one comes from an audit of our own live pages, and the examples are ours.

1. Go to the publisher, never to an aggregator

A marketing blog repeating a figure is not a source. When we cannot find the study behind a number, the number does not ship, however quotable it is. That rule cost us the best line in the social media guide: "Instagram organic reach is now 2 to 3 percent of followers" sits on a dozen respectable sites and not one of them attributes it to research you can read.

2. No denominator, no publication

A percentage with no stated sample size and no base is decoration. The same social media research pass killed a set of engagement rows for professional services that sat roughly ten times away from every properly sourced figure for the same metric, with no method published anywhere.

3. Put the year on anything older than about two years

Old data is often the best available data, and readers deserve to know which they are getting. A marketing spend benchmark we called "the standard" traces back to a 2015 edition. It still appears on the page, now with its vintage attached.

4. Say what the study actually measured

The most cited lead-response research in the industry is from 2007 and it measured how quickly firms dialed a telephone. Using it to argue for an automated email is a stretch unless the page says so out loud, so ours does.

5. Link the source, then re-check the link

Adding a citation is an audit, because it forces you to open the page. The first sweep to link every claim on this site turned up a figure attributed to a survey that has never published it, and a statistic sitting close enough to somebody else's citation to read as though it were covered by it.

Links also rot. One of the first source links we added was dead the day we checked it, so a link sweep now runs weekly across the whole site. The most recent pass checked 47 outbound source links and found none broken.

6. Read the page, not the status code

An automated check said a public bidding platform was live and returned a normal response. The body of that response was a bot verification screen. The table row we had written from it came out of the RFP guide before it published.

How our own data is built

The pages that carry first-party numbers, most of all the 2026 benchmark report, come from Meta ad accounts IPQmedia manages for US architecture and design firms. The method is printed on the page itself, and it follows three rules.

• Per-firm figures treat each account as one observation and report quartiles, so a single high-volume account cannot drag the median toward its own results.
• Pooled figures are labeled as pooled wherever they appear. Total spend divided by total results is a different claim from a typical firm's experience, and mixing the two is how benchmarks flatter whoever published them.
• The sample, the window and the limits are stated next to the result. Sixteen accounts is a small sample, only a handful have run long enough to say anything about month six, and we say that in the report rather than in a footnote nobody reads.

We also leave things out. Show rates and closed-project data are not consistent enough across accounts to publish, so nothing on this site claims a cost per signed project, even though it would be the most flattering number we have.

Who writes and who approves

Every guide carries a byline for Arseniy Volosevich, founder of IPQmedia, and he reads and approves each page before it goes live. The guides are drafted from campaign data, the questions our setting team hears from clients, and published research, in that order of preference.

Our commercial interest is not hidden: IPQmedia sells done-for-you client acquisition to architecture firms, primarily through paid advertising, and the guides are how firms find us. The counterweight is that we publish the unflattering numbers from the same accounts, including how many ads produce nothing at all.

Corrections

Published in date order, most recent first. Each entry names the page, what was wrong, and what it says now.

16 October 2026, Google Ads for architects

The residential section said a firm bidding on "architect near me" does so "alongside every firm in town". Our noon count on 13, 14 and 15 October 2026 found an ad on 13 of 144 results pages across 12 metros, from eight advertisers of which two were architecture firms. The sentence now says every firm that ranks or bids competes for the search, and the page has a new section with the full count, the advertiser list and its limits.

12 October 2026, Marketing for high-end residential architects

The page said firms aiming at wealthy clients pay about 2.3 times more per lead, a median $71.52 against $31.02. That came from a cut of 16 accounts to 28 July 2026 which included a construction contractor whose brief named a $900,000-plus income. Re-run on the 13 architecture accounts doing residential work over twelve months to 10 September 2026, the four firms that wrote an income figure or net worth into their brief paid a median $57.32 against $34.22, with their own range running from $17.57 to $88.56, and a wider definition of affluence targeting removes the gap entirely. The page now says the premium is unreliable, shows both definitions, and replaces the $245 cost per booked consultation with $207 and $246. The figure for accounts that also target developers ($59.22 per lead, 36% booked) is gone, since a re-cut gave a spread too wide to report as a median.

11 October 2026, Architecture client demand by metro

The two tables built on our own ad accounts used the July cut: 18 accounts to 30 July 2026. That cut counted a construction contractor in Austin as an architecture firm, which put Austin in the metro table at $91.48 per lead and in the service radius table at $94.40, and it backed a line comparing 276 Austin inquiries with 310 monthly Austin searches. Both tables now use the 21 architecture accounts in our benchmark report, to 11 September 2026, with no contractor. An account now counts for a metro when its written service area is centered there, which removes Austin and Dallas, adds Los Angeles, and moves New York's median from $60.16 to $53.30. The Austin comparison is gone.

10 October 2026, Social media for architects

The page quoted the August cut of our ad account data: 18 firm accounts to 7 August 2026, a median 825 impressions per lead, $58.45 per lead and $55.13 per 1,000 impressions. It now uses the 21-account, twelve-month window in our benchmark report: about 680 impressions per lead, $50 per lead and $64 per 1,000 impressions. The old click-through rate (2.88%) and click to lead rate (4.16%) counted every click on the ad, including reactions and profile taps; the page now counts only clicks that open the ad's destination, 1.71% and 9.1%.

9 October 2026, Houzz for architects

The lead cost section still quoted the August cut of our ad account data: 18 firm accounts, a $57.88 median cost per lead with the middle half between $33.80 and $71.40, a $12.34 to $93.25 range, and 27.8% of leads booking a consultation at $198.51 each. It now quotes the 21-account, twelve-month window in our benchmark report: a $50 median, $28 to $71 for the middle half, $12.58 to $112.94 across accounts, and 32% booked at $148 each. The benchmark report itself said an "architect near me" click runs around $9; the October figure is about $10.

8 October 2026, Google Ads for architects

The page carried a July 2026 keyword table: "architect near me" at about $9.40 a click, "commercial architect" at about $21, and "architects near me" as a separate 12,100-search term. Re-pulled on 8 October 2026, those read $10.02 and $15.12, and Google now reports "architects near me" together with "architect near me", so that row is gone. The per-inquiry estimate moved from about $115 to about $120. The same $21 figure on Meta ads vs Google Ads for architects now reads about $15.

4 October 2026, branding for architects

The page said advertisers pay around fourteen dollars a click on "architecture firm branding" and that the people paying are mostly agencies selling branding. Google's estimate is now about $10, and no ads showed on that search when we checked on 4 October 2026, so we could not verify who bids; that claim is gone. The branding price ranges were credited to unnamed "2025 price guides"; they now cite three named 2026 guides with links, and the 50-millisecond first-impression study carries its year (2006) and a link.

3 October 2026, Google Business Profile for architects

The page said 42 percent of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation, down from 79 percent in 2020, with no source linked. BrightLocal's current 2026 edition, 1,002 US consumers, puts the figure at 49 percent, and the page now cites that edition with its sample size. The page also said "architects near me" added about 12,100 searches a month on top of "architect near me"; Google now reports the two as one search, so that line is gone, and "architecture firms near me" was updated from 12,100 to 9,900.

2 October 2026, architecture marketing statistics and costs

The page still reported our July sample: 16 accounts, a blended $55 cost per lead, $236 per booked consultation and a $0.95 cost per click. The click figure was pooled on Meta's all-clicks basis, the same defect corrected on the landscape page the day before, and the page set it against search as if the two clicks were alike. It also repeated the July claim that accounts get more expensive as they age, which the September benchmark retired. The page now carries the 21-account September figures: $50 per lead and $148 per booked consultation for the median firm, and a $3.60 median link click compared with search. The aging claim is gone. The author page summary and the same figures quoted on Meta ads vs Google Ads for architects were corrected to match.

1 October 2026, marketing for landscape architects

The page compared a $0.95 cost per click from our own ad accounts with $9.28 for a click bought on Google search. The $0.95 was a pooled figure on Meta's all-clicks basis, which counts reactions and profile taps alongside clicks that reach the offer, so it made social look about ten times cheaper than search. The comparison that holds is the median cost per link click across 21 accounts, $3.60, against $8.41 on search today. The page now uses that, and says what the click counts.

11 September 2026, architecture marketing benchmark report

The July edition reported that cost per lead climbs as an account ages, from about $41 in month one to about $71 in month four, and said the pattern held after correcting for seasonality. On a sample a third larger and a full twelve month window it mostly does not. Indexed against what the whole sample paid in the same calendar month, the first six months of an account's life are flat. The same edition reported that accounts spending under $40 a day had the lowest cost per lead; in the September cut they have the highest. Both claims were retired rather than restated, and the report now carries the corrected analysis in a named section.

15 August 2026, website design for architects

The page credited Stanford with finding that "75 percent" of people judge a company's credibility on web design. No Stanford publication contains that figure. The real study asked 2,684 people what made a site credible in 2002, and visual design came up in 46.1 percent of their comments, ahead of every other factor. The page now carries that figure, the sample and the year. The wrong version was live from 2 July 2026.

14 August 2026, Google Business Profile for architects

The page said "BrightLocal's 2025 survey found 88 percent of consumers use Google to find reviews of local businesses." No edition of that survey has published 88. The published series runs 87 percent in 2023, 81 in 2024, 83 in 2025 and 71 percent in 2026, which is what the page says now.

14 August 2026, SEO for architects

A line reading "around 96 percent of all clicks happen in the top ten" followed directly after a citation of Backlinko's four-million-search study, so it read as that study's finding. It is not in it. Replaced with a figure the study does publish: 0.63 percent of searchers click anything on the second page.

14 August 2026, video marketing for architects

A mobile usage figure was credited to the news outlet that reported it rather than Sensor Tower, the firm that produced it. Now credited correctly.

5 August 2026, RFPs for architects

A comparison row describing a bidding platform's coverage and pricing was written from a page that answered an automated request normally while serving a human verification screen. The row was removed before publication rather than shipped unverified.

Tell us when we are wrong

If a number here does not match what you can find at the source, or your own accounts say something different, we want to hear it. The fastest route is a message to IPQmedia on LinkedIn. Corrections that stand up get made on the page and logged above with your finding credited if you want it.

The guides themselves start at the field guide index, or with the architecture marketing overview if you want the whole system in one place.

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