2026 · Annual report18 min
Five findings drawn from 250+ brands' field data.
// 01 · Executive summary
This report draws on the anonymized performance data of 250+ brands managed between Q2 2024 and Q1 2026. €52M total ad budget, 4 countries, 12 industries, across paid and organic channels.
Five findings stand out: (1) ROAS plateaus around 4×, (2) TikTok Shop is producing real revenue in Türkiye, (3) cookieless is a forcing function, not a panic, (4) AI Overviews has sharply redistributed CTR, (5) MENA ad spend is growing 38% YoY.
The findings are designed to drive practical decisions, not academic summaries. Each one carries a 'how to act on this' note plus a visualization of the underlying data.
// 02 · Key findings
More than half of accounts in the portfolio cluster in the 3–5× ROAS range. Accounts that broke past 6× spent an average of 18 months getting there.
Practical takeaway: 4× ROAS is a starting point, not a target. Pushing past it isn't a budget question — attribution architecture, segmentation, and creative testing have to improve in parallel.
First-90-day data from our pilot brands shows TikTok Shop hitting a 4.8% conversion rate, beating most paid acquisition channels. Email is still untouchable, but TikTok Shop is two-to-three-times the conversion of paid ads.
Practical takeaway: in 2026, Turkish e-commerce brands shouldn't treat TikTok Shop as optional. Live shopping converts 5–8× the organic feed.
Server-side tagging adoption varies sharply by industry. E-commerce leads at 62%; B2B and consumer sit under 30%.
Practical takeaway: GA4's default attribution model is shifting to first-party identity from Q3 2026. Postponing server-side tagging is no longer 'nice to have' — it's measurement loss.
Across 8,000 keywords tracked since AI Overviews launched, CTR on rich-result Position 1 grew 47%, while long-tail CTR dropped 38%. Plain organic Position 1 is no longer enough.
Practical takeaway: without schema.org JSON-LD and E-E-A-T signals, Position 1 is losing value. The 2026 strategy isn't 'rank #1' — it's 'rank #1 + rich result + AI-answer source.'
Local-brand ad-spend growth in Saudi Arabia and the UAE is up 38% YoY, while Germany and the UK sit at 4–8%. Saudi's lift comes from Vision 2030 grant programs; in the UAE, dual-marketplace strategy across noon and Amazon has gone standard.
Practical takeaway: a Türkiye-headquartered performance team expanding into MENA still finds the door open. 2026–2028 is a structural growth window.
// 03 · Methodology
Data source: anonymized reporting from 256 accounts managed by SEO Evaluate between 2024-04 and 2026-03. Account split: e-commerce (38%), SaaS (24%), marketplace (16%), B2B (14%), consumer (8%).
Measurement: daily GA4 → BigQuery exports aggregated from per-client dashboards. Multi-touch attribution defaults to GA4's Data-Driven model; the impact of alternative models is discussed in the limitations section.
Statistical significance: findings are reported at 95% confidence minimum. Single-account outliers (>3σ) were excluded.
// 04 · Sources
// 05 · Download the PDF
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// 06 · FAQ
Client names, domains, and account IDs were removed before aggregation. No finding identifies a single client; every metric represents an average over at least 12 accounts.
No — it reflects the SEO Evaluate portfolio. A Türkiye-headquartered performance team's view of the field. We don't claim industry-wide generalization.
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Q2 2027. The data window will run from 2025-04 to 2027-03.