Key stat: Travel advertisers paid $36.00 per thousand Meta ad impressions in Q2 2026, 10 times the $3.60 that financial services brands paid, according to a recent report from MindgruveMacarta.

Beyond the chart:

• Travel's premium follows the traveler. Some 38% of US adults get leisure travel ideas from social media or short-form video, more than turn to search engines (36%), according to Criteo.
• Meanwhile, every vertical is paying more. Meta CPMs rose 8.0% YoY, according to Metricool, and cost per click across Meta, Google, and TikTok jumped 22% last year with no lift in click-through rates, according to Emplifi.

Use this chart: Drop this into your paid social budget review before anyone applies a blended Meta CPM to your brand. Show finance why travel and healthcare need bigger budgets for the same reach, then pair it with the 8% CPM rise to explain why last year's plan won't buy this year's impressions.

Related EMARKETER reports:

• US Ad Spend by Industry 2026 (EMARKETER subscription required)
• US Social Network Ad Spending H2 2026 (EMARKETER subscription required)

Methodology: Data is from MindgruveMacarta's 2026 quarterly dataset and is based on an analysis of US advertising activity across Google, Bing, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Pinterest. Data aggregation was facilitated through the platforms' APIs. Data for this dataset was acquired June 30, 2026.