Facebook Ads Cost Per App Install Benchmarks for Marketplaces

Introduction — the headline story

Marketplaces experienced a year of extreme swings in cost-per-app-install (CPI) relative to the overall market. On average the Marketplaces CPI ran well above the global benchmark, but the series finished the year near rock-bottom after a dramatic late-stage collapse. This analysis is based on $3B worth of advertising data from our dataset, which provides strong directional benchmarks. This analysis explores ad performance trends for Marketplaces in All countries available compared to the global benchmark.

The story in the data

The Marketplaces CPI began in July 2025 at about 54.49 and ended in June 2026 at roughly 1.86 — a net decline of roughly 96.6%. Across the 12 months the median Marketplaces CPI averaged about 57.6, with a high of 146.37 in April 2026 and a low of 1.79 in May 2026. By contrast the global (baseline) median averaged about 15.6 over the same window.

Monthly movements were large and frequent. The series saw notable spikes into October 2025 (~84.8) and February 2026 (~101.7) before peaking in April 2026 at ~146.4. That peak was followed by an abrupt plunge into May (1.79) — the biggest single-month swing in the year. Ten of 12 months the Marketplaces CPI sat above the global benchmark; May and June were the exceptions, falling to roughly 12–13 percentage points below the baseline.

Volatility was striking: average absolute month-to-month change for Marketplaces was about 45.5 CPI points, versus roughly 5.1 points for the global baseline — nearly nine times more variable. Those swings amplified the distance from the benchmark, with Marketplace peaks running up to 7–8x the baseline (April vs. baseline ~19.46) while the troughs were roughly 80–90% below baseline (May/June vs. baseline ~14–15).

Seasonal and monthly dynamics

The series shows episodic momentum rather than a smooth seasonal pattern. Late Q3 into Q4 2025 saw a rise (July→Oct), then a softening in November and another run-up into early 2026. The early-year window included a sharp move higher in February and the strongest peak in April, followed immediately by a collapse in May and stability at a very low level in June. Compared with typical CPM analysis or CPC trends that show steadier Q4 competition and Q1 troughs, Marketplaces’ CPI in this sample behaved more punctuated — periods of intense cost pressure followed by abrupt decompression.

Country vs. Global

Measured against the global baseline, Marketplaces CPI was largely above average across most months: the Marketplaces median was about 3.7x the baseline average overall. At its narrowest gap the Marketplaces CPI still exceeded the baseline by several multiples; at its widest (April) it was roughly 7.5x higher. Conversely, the May–June collapse flipped the narrative: Marketplaces went from being well above the market to being markedly below average, illustrating the unusual dispersion in country-specific ad costs when aggregating across All countries available.

Understanding cost-per-app-install benchmarks for Marketplaces in All countries available provides a data-rich view of how industry ad performance can diverge from Facebook Ads benchmarks, CPC trends, CPM analysis, and CTR performance expectations across country-specific ad costs.