Benchmarks hide this problem

Comparing yourself to an average built from accounts with the same leak tells you nothing except that you are as broken as everyone else.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

How benchmarks are built

Aggregated click to install ratios across many advertisers, published by attribution platforms and industry reports. They are averages of whatever those accounts actually did, including every account losing taps in in-app browsers.

The circular problem

If a meaningful share of the market loses iOS social taps to blank pages, the benchmark includes that loss. Your funnel loses the same taps, lands on the benchmark, and looks healthy.

You cannot detect a systemic problem by comparing yourself to a system that has it.

What to compare against instead

• Your own install objectives against your own traffic objectives
• Your own iOS against your own Android
• Your own arrival rate against your billed clicks
• Your own numbers this month against last month

All four are internal comparisons where the leak shows up as a difference rather than being averaged away.

When benchmarks are still useful

For pricing and planning: what a reasonable cost per install looks like in your category, what retention is normal, what a paywall converts at. Those are less contaminated by this specific failure.

The practical rule

Use external benchmarks for setting expectations and internal comparisons for finding problems. Anything mechanical will show as an internal gap long before it shows as a deviation from an industry average.