In a move that promises to redefine how fashion and lifestyle brands measure success, The Thoughtful Agency has launched a proprietary performance benchmarking platform, called Thoughtful Index (TI) designed to give brands clarity in an increasingly complex and competitive e-commerce landscape.
Developed over several months and powered by aggregated live campaign data from over 35+ fashion and lifestyle clients across Meta, Google, Shopify, and GA4, the tool delivers category-specific performance benchmarks with unmatched granularity. It surfaces trends and opportunity areas across markets, channels, and verticals—helping brands fine-tune spend, creative, and customer journey strategies for smarter growth.
From surfacing trends across markets and channels to identifying opportunity areas in creative, spend, and customer journeys, TI equips brands with the insights they need to drive smarter, more strategic growth.
“One of the most common questions we hear from clients is, ‘What’s a good ROAS or CPA?’ The truth is, there’s no universal answer,” said , Prav, co-founder, CEO at The Thoughtful Agency.
“That’s why we created this benchmarking tool, Thoughtful Index, to move beyond generic industry benchmarks and instead deliver meaningful, contextual insights tailored to each brand’s specific market and channel mix.”
Thoughtful Index also supports strategic planning and around high-impact periods like Black Friday, or global market impacts such as the recent USA tariffs, while enabling clients to benchmark themselves against an anonymized, blended data set.
Thoughtful Index Key May industry insights include:
- Google saw a 91% year-on-year increase in CPA in the US market.
- Despite a 19% increase YoY for CTRs on Google in the US, Conversion Rates are down 51% with US users.
- Australia has been sheltered by the impacts of the US. Google CPA reduced by less than 1%, Conversion Rate increased by 2.7%
Meta
- Meta saw a year-on-year increase in CPMs in the US by 121%, whereas AU decreased by 14% YOY.
- Meta also saw a 10% year-on-year increase in AOV in the AU market.
Further strengthening its impact, TI helps brands adapt to recent platform changes—such as reduced signal quality due to data privacy updates—by leveraging server-side tracking solutions like Meta’s Conversions API. This ensures more accurate retargeting, better optimisation, and ultimately, improved return on ad spend.
“With rising ad costs and a tightening economy, it’s never been more important to make every dollar count,” added Tiani, performance lead at The Thoughtful Agency. “Thoughtful Index helps brands do just that by delivering actionable insights and empowering smarter budget allocation.”
This new capability cements The Thoughtful Agency’s position as a data-led partner for brands seeking sustainable, strategic growth in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.
