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Ramp Advertising Index

Monthly measurement of the number of businesses increasing or decreasing advertising spend.
Ara Kharazian
Economist, Ramp

Methodology

Ramp Advertising Index measures trends in digital advertising spend by American businesses. Ad spend is one of the leading indicators of business optimism, sales, and investment. When businesses feel good, ad spend goes up. When they start facing headwinds, ads get cut first.

Our sample includes more than 30,000 American businesses and billions of dollars in corporate spend using data from Ramp’s corporate card and bill pay platform.

Our methodology uses business-level matching on year-over-year values, similar to the Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker. To estimate the index we:

  • Identify advertising spend using proprietary company models that analyze receipts, bills, and line-item data.
  • Calculate monthly advertising spend at the business-level.
  • Match each business’s advertising spend to it’s spend in the same month a year earlier.

To account for minor variation in year-over-year spend patterns, businesses that increase spend by 10 percent or more are tagged as increasing ad spend. The index reports the share of businesses that increased advertising spend year-over-year.

Ara Kharazian•Economist, Ramp
Ara Kharazian is an economist at Ramp. His writing and analysis of AI, business spend, and the economy has been covered in the New York Times, NBC News, ABC News, NPR's Planet Money, Bloomberg, the Guardian, Vox, Axios, and more. Ara previously led economic research at Square and developed Square Payroll Index, which became one of the key public datasets used to track restaurant worker wages, tips, and overtime in the United States. He was previously an economic consultant at Cornerstone Research.

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