At the beginning of my career, I was responsible for reporting the company’s homepage metrics. A member of the usability team wanted to know how much traffic a certain widget was getting. When we crunched the numbers, the result was surprising: About 2.5% of visitors actually used it.
But that’s not the full figure in the report. Instead, widget usage was reclassified as “several thousand visits per month.” That was technically true. It also told a completely different story at 2.5%.
That moment taught me something I’ve carried with me 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 is up to date so you can stay honest and ethical.
Conversion is not just conversion
If there’s one number that falls flat most often in paid search reports, it’s conversions.
“Conversion” can mean something completely different depending on what is actually being counted. Filling out a form is not a marketing qualified lead (MQL). MQL does not sell.
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 title number and reported as a “conversion.”
If you tell a client or stakeholder, “We got a great number of conversions,” without specifying what those conversions actually were, that’s not reporting. That’s just planning, and it’s not a solid basis for PPC strategy decisions.
Before introducing a conversion number, ask yourself:
- What action really counts? Fill out a form, call, chat, watch a video, or make a purchase?
- How far is that action from the actual business outcome? Leads and closed auctions are not the same type of winning.
- Would someone reading this report make a different decision if they knew what caused 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Your CTR benchmark is almost a decade out of date
I still hear doctors say that a campaign is doing well because the click-through rate is “above 2%”. That benchmark is from the long gone PPC era.
Today’s bidding algorithms are more sophisticated in finding users who match your existing converts. That alone raises the click-through rate (CTR) higher across the board, regardless of anything you’ve done strategically.
A 2% CTR benchmark from 10 years ago tells you almost nothing about whether a modern, algorithmically targeted campaign is healthy and meeting its goals.
Reporting that “CTR is above benchmark” without acknowledging what’s driving that uptick, whether it’s better targeting, better art, or a better algorithm for finding a simpler audience, is another way data is presented as good news without getting that designation.
I don’t think there is an official universal benchmark left to point to. The algorithm has become very good at finding simple clicks of a single number to mean the same thing across accounts, industries, or campaigns within the same account.
Participants will always ask an important question: “Are these numbers good or bad?”
As subject matter experts, our job is not to provide them with a legacy benchmark to evaluate, especially one that doesn’t exist in any meaningful way.
Real expertise means redefining success and moving the conversation away from the meaningless metrics the algorithm teaches us. It means focusing our reports on the business results we are hired to drive.
It’s also important to explain how modern bid strategies affect the metrics you report.
Dig deeper: Why a lower CTR can be better for your PPC campaigns
Raw numbers and percentages tell different stories — use both
The story of the widget I opened with is really a story about raw numbers versus percentages, and that same tension is always seen in the paid search report.
When you break down conversions by type, for example, showing that phone calls make up 40% of conversions versus leads at 60% tells a much different story than “142 calls, 213 leads.” There is no wrong version. But presenting only one of them, especially the one that looks better, is a choice. It is not biased reporting.
It’s something we have to be aware of whenever we present data.
Editing is not difficult: Display data in more than one way.
By presenting figures and percentages together, you give anyone reading the report enough context to understand what actually happened, instead of what you want to take away from the report. Percentages add context to data.
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What you choose to focus on in the report is itself a form of deception
This type of inaction is something I think about a lot because I’ve seen it cost advertisers real money and create confusion.
For example, I once took over an account from a professional who used to tell a business that their low cost per click (CPC) was a sign of success.
If low CPC was actually the goal, it would be easy to hit that number by running everything through the Display Network or another top funnel campaign. But that type of campaign may not match what the brand needs.
In my example, because the business had been told for months that a low CPC meant good performance, it had bought the wrong metric entirely.
In fact, a higher CPC often drives better business results and can lead to a lower cost per acquisition because you’re paying more to reach high-intent, high-value users instead of targeting cheap, consistent clicks. For my client, that was true.
Focusing stakeholders’ attention on the metric that makes your work look the best instead of the one that reflects their true goals is one of the most silent ways data is being weaponized in this industry. We must be client first when it comes to reporting data.
An attribute can hide what your spending is doing
Even accurate reporting on conversions, CTR, and CPC can still obscure the big question: Would that conversion not have happened anyway?
Attribution models give credit for conversions across all touch points, but it’s important to remember that credit is not the cause. A branded search campaign can show a high volume of “conversions” that could happen with organic or direct traffic, regardless of whether the ad ever played. The report looks good, but the incremental business impact may be close to zero.
This does not mean that we will not run a brand campaign. It means the data needs more context and nuance.
Growth testing – whether that’s using a holdout group, running a geo test, or conducting a survey to suggest conversions – is the only real way to answer whether your media money is creating new business or claiming credit for results that could have happened anyway.
Reporting conversion volume without dealing with increases is one of the most common and most defensible ways paid search data tells an incomplete story.
Dig deeper: Why your B2B PPC metrics may be lying to you
3 cheating tricks that should be named specifically
Most of the above metric problems occur without the person intending to mislead. But there are certain patterns you have to call out because once you’ve seen them, you can’t see them in your report.
- Conversion stack: It counts multiple actions from a single user journey – say, a chat, then a phone call, then a form fill from the same person – as three separate wins instead of one.
- Cherry-picked date ranges: Comparing this month to an intentionally slow month last quarter, or out of the week your account had a problem with it or tracking. A date range chosen against a weak base can make almost any account look like it’s improving.
- Vanity metric replacement: Getting ahead of a metric that looks good — maybe impressions, clicks, or “reach” — when the metric that really matters — qualified leads, revenue, or CPA — tells a less flattering story.
I am not saying that all doctors who use these patterns are acting in bad faith. Most of the time, it’s a habit, not an illusion. But practices are precisely what need to be questioned if we are serious about reporting data honestly.
Paid search has no governing board. That’s why this is important
Unlike most licensed professionals, paid searchers do not answer to a regulatory body. We have field certifications, not an ethics board. That means that the standard of how we present data honestly to customers and stakeholders is very responsible.
I don’t think that’s talked about enough in our industry. It’s easy to frame a number in the best possible way, especially if your job security or client relationship depends on the story the number tells.
But accurately summarizing conversions, using current benchmarks, showing both raw numbers and percentages, and focusing on metrics that actually show business results is just not good practice. It is the ethical basis of PPC.
If we don’t hold ourselves to that standard, no one else will.
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