/INDUSTRY REPORTS
INDUSTRY REPORTS
DATA WE CAN STAND BEHIND
The marketing industry produces a great deal of benchmark data and very little of it survives a question about method. This page explains what our reports contain, how we build them, and — more usefully — how to read anybody’s benchmark without being led somewhere by it.
/HOW WE BUILD
A REPORT
Method first, headline last. If the method section would be embarrassing to write, the report does not get written.
The question, before the data
A report exists to inform one decision — whether to enter a market, whether a cost per acquisition is defensible, whether a platform choice is holding a business back. Data assembled without a decision in mind produces a chart nobody acts on.
The sample, described in full
Where the data came from, how many accounts or sites, over what period, in which markets, and what was excluded and why. Aggregates from our own client work are labeled as such: they represent businesses that chose to work with an agency, which is not the same as the market.
The limits, stated in the report
What the sample cannot support. A figure drawn from one vertical in one country does not generalize, and a report that does not say so is asking to be misquoted.
The interpretation, separated from the numbers
Our reading of what the data means is marked as our reading. You should be able to disagree with the conclusion while still using the numbers.
/THE AREAS
WE REPORT ON
Where we have enough of our own data, or a public source solid enough to build on, to say something useful.
Search demand by vertical
How demand shifts across a year in a given market, and how much of that shift is seasonality rather than performance. The single most common cause of a panicked meeting about a traffic drop.
Industries we coverPaid media cost and competition
How auction pressure moves in a vertical, and what that implies for budget planning — as ranges and trends, never as a single number to be quoted out of context.
AdvertisingPlatform and CMS performance
What real sites on a given stack actually achieve on load performance and stability, as opposed to what the vendor’s demo achieves.
DevelopmentMeasurement and consent
How much of the picture is lost to consent and browser restrictions, and what that means for the numbers your board is looking at.
GA4 setup/HOW TO READ
ANY BENCHMARK
Five questions. Applied to most published marketing statistics, they take about a minute and change the conclusion surprisingly often.
- Who is in the sample, and who is missing? Benchmarks built from a vendor’s own customers describe that vendor’s customers, not your market.
- Is it a mean or a median? Marketing data is heavily skewed by a small number of very large accounts. An average conversion rate across an industry is almost always the wrong statistic.
- Over what period, and does it include a peak? Any figure spanning a seasonal peak needs the peak declared, or it is not comparable with your quarter.
- How is the metric defined? “Conversion” means something different in every account it is measured in. Without the definition the number is not portable.
- What decision would this change? If the honest answer is none, it is trivia. Most published benchmarks are trivia, and there is no harm in that as long as nobody budgets against them.
NEED NUMBERS
FOR YOUR MARKET?
Published benchmarks are, at best, a way of framing a question. If you need figures you can actually plan against, they have to come from your own data and your own competitive set. Tell us the market and the decision you are trying to make, and we will tell you what could realistically be measured.
- Find my industry — start from your vertical
- SEO Audit — measurement of your own position, not an average
- Contact — speak to an analyst directly
- All Insights — the full index of guides, tools and updates
Start your journey
Tell us the market and the decision. We will tell you what can be measured.