Overall score: one number that tells you if things are moving the right way

Why an index and not a grade

An absolute score requires someone to have decided what is good, and what is good depends on industry, budget and size. A small site with two hundred visitors a week would fail every day without that saying anything about the work put in.

That is why you are measured against yourself. At the start a baseline of your own numbers is frozen, and the score describes how far you have moved from it. A 50 means you are standing still, not that you are failing.

What weighs most

The weights apply to the tools that actually have data. If you have no ad accounts connected, that weight is redistributed over the others instead of dragging the score down.

If you have fewer than two scored tools, no total score is shown at all. A number built on a single measurement looks like an overall judgement without being one.

Three things that keep the number honest

• The score is written once a day and never recalculated. If we change a rule it applies going forward. The history you looked at last week looks the same today.
• A sub-score has to rest on sufficient data. If the available sub-metrics cover less than 60 percent of what the sub-score is meant to measure, it is not reported. Without that guard an ad score could land on 100 on click-through rate alone while cost per conversion was missing.
• Comparisons are made on comparable ground. The direction arrow counts only tools that were scored on both days, and the curve marks the points where the composition changed, so you never compare bars that do not belong together.

What you should not read into the number

The monthly bars are averages of overlapping thirty-day windows, so an even bar can hide large swings within the month. And because the baseline is your own, scores cannot be compared between two different websites. The number answers whether you have moved, not whether you are better than someone else.