Google Display Benchmarks Tool Discontinued - Best Alternative Benchmarking Tools
What Happened to Google’s Display Benchmarks Tool?
Has the Google Display Benchmarking Tool been discontinued? Yes, though it has not been publicly announced yet, we’ve confirmed with Google Reps that this tool is no longer supported.
The Display Benchmarks Tool
The Display Benchmarking tool provided a very valuable service to analytical insight for display ads.
Whether you’re an experienced advertiser or running your first Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) campaign, benchmarking tools help you to determine where your campaign metrics stand compared to the rest of the industry at large. In their simplest form, these sorts of benchmark tools tell you whether or not you’ve done a good job with your display ad campaign.
This is why Google’s Display Benchmarks was an essential tool for gauging your campaign performance, exposing keen insights on how different ad formats and sizes perform compared to one another and determining whether or not you were beating industry averages. Since digital display advertising can be quite difficult to benchmark performance, being able to drill into analytical measures on a user-friendly platform made the Display Benchmarks Tool an excellent resource.
The Display Benchmarks Tool allowed you to segment your Google benchmarks by country, vertical, size, and format, showing metrics in twenty industries for display ads reporting on important KPIs like: average Click-Through Rate (CTR), average Cost per Click (CPC), average Conversion Rate (CVR), and average Cost per Action (CPA), but without Google’s tool, we’ll all be forced to find a new resource for benchmarking purposes.
Why Does Benchmark Performance Matter?
Display advertising can be very costly, but extremely rewarding, especially when it’s run properly. As the Google Display Network is the largest contextual advertising network on the internet, consisting of millions of websites, it was extremely useful to be able to find out which verticals had the highest costs, click rates, and conversion rates, but it was even more important to understand how each metric of your display ads campaign compared to the rest of your industry peers.
Data is practically pointless if it is just floating around in thin air without any reference points, which is the entire purpose of benchmarking information. With benchmarks, we’re able to provide some context surrounding the data to better understand what these numbers actually mean, and whether or not performance is truly good. Simply put, the Google Benchmark Tool was the easiest way to diagnose the performance of your display ads, shedding light as to whether or not your campaign was failing or hitting the benchmark for industry trends, and it was especially useful because it was both free, and located within a user-friendly interface.
The use of benchmarks in managing performance by size and format allows digital marketers to identify potential gaps in their ad display, and to make optimizations wherever they’ve found opportunities, like when certain types of ads perform better than others, and whether or not poor performance is due to mistakes or if the entire industry or country is experiencing similar performance declines or successes.
Best Alternative Display Benchmark Tools
Display ad benchmarks were a luxury that Google provided, but just because the Google Display Tool is discontinued doesn’t mean that industry benchmarks can no longer be utilized. Currently, there are still several available benchmarking tools that we can leverage to analyze display ad campaigns, including:
- WordStream’s industry benchmarking tool is fairly straightforward. You simply put in your CTR, CPC, CPA rates, select your industry, choose whether it is a Search or Display Network and the tool will show you how your metrics compare to the rest of the industry. This tool will even provide basic tips to improve each metric.
- Caution: Numbers on this site do seem on the inflated side, so we are assuming that this includes a heavy mobile delivery. It would be more beneficial to see what benchmarks are by platform (mobile, desktop, and cross-device).
- 4A’s industry benchmarking tool updates their data on a monthly basis and can be filtered by country, industry vertical, ad size, and ad format.
- Caution: Benchmark metrics are reserved for 4A’s members only.
- eMarketer https://www.emarketer.com/performance/
- eMarketer’s benchmarks tool helps you diagnose marketing effectiveness across channels, devices, formats, and industries.
- Caution: This tool is
member based as well.
Remember, it is always a good idea to keep track of your own industry benchmarks based on historical campaigns. Using your own campaign average performance metrics as guideposts should be an integral part of tracking your own success, and measuring future campaign performance against your previous efforts.
