Reporting & Analysis

Back in 2017, when Facebook was the new emerging ad platform for SMBs, we released our first Facebook Ad Benchmarks using our client data at the time. That was an exciting time, but thankfully things have changed in the past two years—since 2017,...

Whether you’re in lead gen or ecommerce, managing your business’s online advertising accounts means keeping track of a bunch of different metrics. You use search impression share to judge how well you’re performing in the Google Ads auction. You use engagement rate to see whether your messaging is resonating with your...

This post was co-written by Gordon Donnelly and Patrick Henry Carrera.

If you’re a reader of the WordStream blog, you may have heard of our Google Ads Benchmarks. Each year, we reach into our giant pool of client data looking for an answer to one persistent, ubiquitous question for...

You’re about to become a better Facebook advertiser.

Yesterday, Facebook announced that it’s sunsetting Relevance Score—the ad-level metric that basically tells you whether your ad is any good—and replacing it with three new metrics:

Yesterday morning, Google Ads announced that it will sunset average position—one of the original Search metrics—in September of this year.

What is average position? When you’re competing in the Google Ads auction, you’re...

One area that seems to elude many digital marketers is the relationship between conversion tracking and website analytics. Often, when businesses get started with online advertising, they have established each piece of the puzzle separately, with Google Analytics monitoring site traffic, and paid channels (like Facebook and Google Ads) tracking conversions individually within their respective...

Math was always my favorite subject in elementary and middle school. In high school, outside of the classroom, I started playing fantasy sports, spending waaaaay too much time evaluating stats and matchups while things like Billy Beane’s sabermetrics were developing and becoming more commonplace. Today, my colleagues know that I’m (...

We write a lot about metrics on the WordStream blog. From click-through rate (CTR) to conversion rate (CVR) to return on investment (ROI)—if it’s measurable, and it can help you better understand the performance of...

Let’s face it: If you’re running paid campaigns on social media, your boss is always going to be asking you about your social media metrics. “Are they improving?” “What are we tracking?” “What should we be tracking?” “Why?”

If all of these questions are making your head spin, you are not alone! With so many metrics out there, it can hard to decipher which ones are most critical...

Last month, when we released our Google Ads mobile benchmarks for 18 industries, one of our readers commented that it would be really helpful to know the average click-through rate, conversion rate and so on for each mobile ad type.

We thought, you know what? You’re absolutely right! (Our...

It’s a mobile-first world. This year, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide has come from mobile devices. Google rolled out its mobile-geared Speed Update to all users in...

Bosses and clients don’t always know what you do all day.

Sure, they kinda get it. They know you’re PPCing. They know you sprinkle magic SEO pixie dust on a page before it goes live.

But beyond that?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In that sense, reporting should be like selling.

Each month, you repeatedly justify the value you’re delivering in dollars and cents. You get...

It’s a shame that many advertisers overlook Bing. Although it started off small, Microsoft’s search engine has continued to grow in Google’s shadow and now, according to ComScore, Bing and its partners make up a combined 35.6% of the US desktop search market!

Bing Ads has a few unique advantages to Google AdWords that...

As Socrates almost said: an unmeasured campaign isn’t worth launching. If you don’t have concrete goals and KPIs for your campaign (relating to profitability), then it’s certainly going to be a dead loss.

Not all metrics are created equal. While clicks and sessions might bring a smile to your face, they don’t make you money. They’re vanity metrics. Instead, it’s crucial to capture the...

Being a marketer has many challenges, but one of the hardest is reporting and proving your success to higher-ups. You’re often met with questions like, “Well, how is Competitor X doing?” or “How do these numbers compare with industry standards?”

While it’s sadly illegal to hack into your competitors’ marketing reports, there are several tools and resources available that provide data...

Is Quality Score some sort of pseudoscientific Google voodoo? Debatable.

Is it important for AdWords users attempting to gauge their PPC success at a granular level? Mm-hhhm.

Did something important happen recently with Quality Score or something? You betcha.

That’s right: Google just...