What a freight lead costs — and the four benchmarks that don't exist to check it against

An agency proposing freight marketing will usually arrive with benchmarks. It is worth knowing that almost none of them exist. No publisher breaks out cold email for transportation. The 13.2 million-request LinkedIn dataset has no logistics row. No webinar report segments by industry at all. The 23-category search benchmark does not include transportation. What does exist is a cost per lead of $588 blended, a customer acquisition cost of $510 blended, and a 3:1 lifetime-value ratio, all from one publisher's client data. That is the whole record.

The published freight marketing record is three numbers from one publisher. Everything else on a competitor's benchmark slide was made up somewhere.

1. 01

   The absence is the finding, and it is worth stating to the client on day one

   Naming the four missing benchmarks does more for a freight operator than quoting a fifth invented one. It sets the expectation that the first quarter produces the baseline rather than the comparison, and it makes every subsequent number the operator's own.

2. 02

   Organic costs a third less than paid in this vertical, which is unusual and worth acting on

   $505 organic against $670 paid. In most verticals the gap is narrower or runs the other way. It is a strong argument for content and search in freight, provided the lag is stated in the same sentence rather than left for the second quarterly review.

3. 03

   The published customer acquisition cost is lower than the published cost per lead, which cannot be read as a funnel

   $510 to acquire a customer against $588 to acquire a lead is arithmetically impossible inside one funnel. The two figures come from different tables, different update cycles and different client populations. They are each useful as an order of magnitude and must never be divided into each other to produce a conversion rate.

4. 04

   Use the all-B2B buying cycle and label it every time

   10.1 months across all industries, with 61% of the journey complete before a seller is contacted. There is no freight-specific figure. A model that presents the all-B2B number without the label is presenting a made-up vertical benchmark with a real citation attached, which is worse than presenting nothing.

5. 05

   First-party instrumentation replaces the missing benchmarks inside one quarter

   Reply rate, response time, quote-to-award rate and cycle length are all measurable from the operator's own records within a quarter. The absence of a published comparison is only a problem for as long as the operator has no internal series of its own.

Confirmed absence across the major 23-industry benchmark sets — closest categories are "Industrial & Commercial" and "Business Services."

The model front-loads instrumentation and content, in that order. Source tagging, a response clock and closed-list win and loss reasons go in first, because without them the second quarter has nothing to compare itself to. Content and search follow, weighted by the published organic advantage, built around lane, mode and the specific operational problems a shipper searches on. Paid runs as a floor on the highest-intent terms only. Every published figure in the reporting pack is labelled with its source and its population, and the pack states plainly which of the operator's numbers have no external comparison available.

1. 1

   Weeks 1–4

   Instrument

   Source tags on records, response clock, closed-list win and loss reasons

   Owner: OmniFlow + operator

2. 2

   Weeks 4–8

   Baseline

   First internal series: enquiries by source, response time, quote-to-award rate

   Owner: OmniFlow

3. 3

   Months 2–6

   Content and search

   Lane, mode and operational-problem content weighted by the published organic advantage

   Owner: OmniFlow

4. 4

   Month 3 onward

   Paid floor

   Highest-intent terms only, measured on quotes issued rather than on form fills

   Owner: OmniFlow

5. 5

   Month 6

   Review

   Internal series against itself; published figures shown labelled and separately

   Owner: OmniFlow + operator

At the published rates a freight lead costs $588 blended and a customer costs $510 blended, and the model reports both with a note that they come from different tables and cannot be divided into each other. The figures that will actually run this engagement are the operator's own quote-to-award rate and first-response time, neither of which has a published benchmark and both of which exist inside a quarter of instrumentation.

Modelled. Inputs: First Page Sage, Average Cost Per Lead by Industry (updated December 2025); First Page Sage, Average CAC by Industry (updated January 2026); 6sense, B2B Buyer Experience Report 2025 (~4,000 respondents). Modelled outputs are not a forecast or a guarantee of results. Cited: LocaliQ / WordStream *2026 Benchmarks* (industry-list proof).

Every figure below is published research, not a client result. They are the inputs to the arithmetic above, listed so it can be checked rather than taken on trust. The bracketed number points to the full citation at the end of this page.

These are the surfaces this engagement is run and measured from, shown with representative figures built around the benchmarks cited on this page. Every account we run reports into views like these, and you keep ownership of all of them.

Each figure on this page, the system it is read from, and the definition and window it is measured over.

Not applicable — this is a modelled engagement. Its weakest input is that every freight-specific figure in it comes from a single publisher's client data with no disclosed sample size for the vertical, drawn from two tables updated a month apart on populations that are not stated to be the same. There is no second source to cross-check against, because no second source exists. The model uses them as an order of magnitude and nothing more.

A modelled capability, not a client account. Figures illustrate what the model produces and are labelled as modelled wherever they appear. See all our work

Full citations for everything cited on this page, with the sample and period each study covers, so you can go and read the original.