Early in my career, I was responsible for reporting metrics for a company’s homepage. A member of the usability team wanted to know how much traffic a particular widget was getting. When we pulled the numbers, the result was underwhelming: About 2.5% of visitors actually used it.
But that’s not the number that ended up in the report. Instead, the widget’s usage was reframed as “a couple thousand visits per month.” That was technically true. It also told a completely different story from 2.5%.
That moment taught me something I’ve carried throughout my paid search career: Data isn’t black and white, and the person presenting it has a responsibility to tell an accurate story, not just a flattering one.
Data doesn’t lie, but PPC practitioners sometimes do. In PPC, we have more opportunities to blur that line than most people realize. Here’s where it happens and how to make sure your reporting holds up so you stay honest and ethical.
Conversions aren’t just conversions
If there’s one number that gets flattened most often in paid search reporting, it’s conversions.
A “conversion” can mean something completely different depending on what’s actually being counted. A form fill isn’t a marketing qualified lead (MQL). An MQL isn’t a sale.
For example, a phone call, a chat initiation, and a user watching 50% of a video are all conversion actions I’ve seen tracked in the same account, sometimes rolled into the same headline number and reported as “conversions.”
When you tell a client or stakeholder, “We got an excellent number of conversions,” without specifying what that conversion actually was, that’s not reporting. That’s editorializing, and it’s not a solid foundation for PPC strategy decisions.
Before you present a conversion number, ask yourself:
- What action is actually being counted? A form fill, a call, a chat, a video view, or a purchase?
- How far is that action from an actual business outcome? A lead and a closed sale aren’t the same type of win.
- Would the person reading this report make a different decision if they knew what was behind the number?
If the answer to the third question is yes, you owe them that context, and you should include it when you deliver the report.
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Your CTR benchmark is probably a decade out of date
I still hear practitioners say a campaign is performing well because its click-through rate is “over 2%.” That benchmark comes from an era of PPC that doesn’t exist anymore.
Today’s bidding algorithms are far more sophisticated at finding users who resemble your existing converters. That alone pushes…
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