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.
Uncover the keywords, ads, landing pages, and strategies driving your competitors’ paid search success—and find your next opportunity to outperform them.
Your CTR benchmark is probably a decade out of date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 click-through rate (CTR) up across the board, independent of anything you did strategically.
A 2% CTR benchmark from 10 years ago tells you almost nothing about whether a modern, algorithmically targeted campaign is actually healthy and meeting its goals.
Reporting that “CTR is above benchmark” without acknowledging what’s driving that lift, whether it’s better targeting, better creative, or simply a more capable algorithm finding easier audiences, is another way data gets presented as good news without earning that designation.
I don’t think there’s a legitimate universal benchmark left to point to. The algorithm has gotten too good at finding easy clicks for a single number to mean the same thing across accounts, industries, or even campaigns within the same account.
Stakeholders will always ask the fundamental question: “Are these numbers good or bad?”
As subject matter experts, our job isn’t to hand them a legacy benchmark to check off, especially one that doesn’t really exist in any meaningful form.
True expertise means redefining success and shifting the conversation away from vanity metrics that the algorithm inflates for us. It means anchoring our reports in the business outcomes we were hired to drive.
It’s also important to explain how modern bid strategies affect the metrics you’re reporting.
Dig deeper: Why a lower CTR can be better for your PPC campaigns
Raw numbers and percentages tell different stories — use both
The widget story I opened with is really a story about raw numbers versus percentages, and that same tension shows up constantly in paid search reporting.
When you’re breaking down conversions by type, for example, showing that phone calls make up 40% of conversions versus leads at 60% tells a very different story than saying “142 calls, 213 leads.” Neither version is wrong. But presenting only one of them, especially the one that happens to look better, is a choice. It isn’t neutral reporting.
It’s something we have to be conscious of whenever we present data.
The fix isn’t complicated: Show the data in more than one way.
By presenting raw counts and percentages together, you give whoever reads the report enough context to understand what actually happened, instead of what you want them to take away from the report. Percentages add context to the data.
What you choose to focus on in a report is itself a form of manipulation
This kind of manipulation by omission is something I think about most often because I’ve seen it cost advertisers real money and create confusion.
For example, I once took over an account from another practitioner who had been telling the business that its low cost per click (CPC) was a sign of success.
If a low CPC were actually the goal, it’d be easy to hit that number by running everything through the Display Network or another upper-funnel campaign. But that campaign type may not align with what the brand actually needs.
In my example, because the business had been told for months that a low CPC meant good performance, it had bought into the wrong metric entirely.
In reality, a higher CPC often drives better business outcomes and can even result in a lower cost per acquisition because you’re paying more to reach higher-intent, higher-value users instead of optimizing for cheap clicks that don’t convert. For my client, that turned out to be true.
Focusing a stakeholder’s attention on the metric that makes your work look best instead of the one that reflects their actual goals is one of the quietest ways data gets weaponized in this industry. We should be client-first when it comes to reporting data.
Attribution can hide whether your spend is doing anything at all
Even accurate reporting on conversions, CTR, and CPC can still mask a bigger question: Would those conversions have happened anyway?
Attribution models give credit for conversions across touchpoints, but it’s important to remember that credit isn’t causation. A branded search campaign can show a huge volume of “conversions” that would’ve happened through organic or direct traffic, regardless of whether the ad ever ran. The report looks great, but the incremental business impact may be close to zero.
This doesn’t mean we wouldn’t run a brand campaign. It means the data needs more context and nuance.
Incrementality testing — whether that’s using a holdout group, running a geo experiment, or conducting a conversion lift study — is the only real way to answer whether your media spend is creating new business or simply claiming credit for outcomes that would’ve happened anyway.
Reporting conversion volume without ever addressing incrementality is one of the most common and most defensible-sounding ways paid search data tells an incomplete story.
Dig deeper: Why your B2B PPC metrics may be lying to you
3 manipulation tactics worth naming directly
Most of the metric issues above happen without anyone intending to mislead. But a few specific patterns are worth calling out because once you see them, you can’t unsee them in your own reporting.
- Conversion stacking: Counting multiple actions from a single user journey — say, a chat, then a call, then a form fill from the same person — as three separate wins instead of one.
- Cherry-picked date ranges: Comparing this month to a deliberately slow month last quarter, or quietly excluding the week your account had an outage or tracking issue. A date range chosen against a weak baseline can make almost any account look like it’s improving.
- Vanity metric substitution: Leading with a metric that looks good — perhaps impressions, clicks, or “reach” – when the metric that actually matters — qualified leads, revenue, or CPA – tells a less flattering story.
I’m not saying every practitioner who uses these patterns is acting in bad faith. Most of the time, it’s habit, not deception. But habits are exactly what need to be questioned if we’re serious about reporting data honestly.
Paid search doesn’t have a governing board. That’s exactly why this matters
Unlike many licensed professions, paid search practitioners don’t answer to a regulatory body. We have platform certifications, not an ethics board. That means the standard for how honestly we present data to clients and stakeholders is largely self-imposed.
I don’t think that gets talked about enough in our industry. It’s easy to frame a number in the best possible light, especially when your job security or a client relationship depends on the story that number tells.
But contextualizing conversions accurately, using current benchmarks, showing both raw numbers and percentages, and focusing on the metrics that actually reflect business outcomes isn’t just good practice. It’s the ethical baseline for PPC.
If we don’t hold ourselves to that standard, no one else will.
