U.S. stocks posted gains for the week as investors digested a slew of generally upbeat quarterly results amid economic data.

It was a big week of the earnings reports, with about a third of the S&P 500 companies reporting quarterly results during the week.

After Thursday's closing bell, four big tech giants -- Amazon.com Inc., Google parent company Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. -- all reported robust third-quarter results. Shares of those four companies all ended sharply higher Friday after the releases.

Earlier in the week, four Dow components--Caterpillar Inc., 3M Company, Boeing Company and United Technologies Corporation-also delivered better-than-expected quarterly reports.

Bucking the trend, some companies, including Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., posted lackluster quarterly earnings due to various reasons.

The latest data from Thomson Reuters showed that the S&P 500 companies' blended earnings in the third quarter of 2017 are expected to rise 6.7 percent year on year, while the revenues are forecast to increase 5.1 percent.

On the economic front, U.S. real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 3 percent in the third quarter of 2017, beating market consensus of 2.5 percent, according to the advance estimate released by the Commerce Department Friday.

The seasonally adjusted IHS Markit Flash U.S. Composite PMI Output Index increased from 54.8 in September to 55.7 in October.

U.S. new orders for manufactured durable goods in September increased 5.1 billion dollars or 2.2 percent to 238.7 billion dollars, well above market consensus of a 1.0-percent gain.

U.S. sales of new single-family houses in September 2017 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 667,000, beating market consensus.

Led by improvements in production-related indicators, the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) moved up to 0.17 in September from minus 0.37 in August.

Overseas, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced Thursday that the Eurozone base interest rate will remain at 0.00 percent.

According to the ECB, the marginal lending rate and deposit rate remain at 0.25 percent and minus 0.40 percent respectively.

As regards non-standard monetary policy measures, purchases under the asset purchase programme (APP) will continue at the current monthly pace of 60 billion euros (about 70.8 U.S. dollars) until the end of December 2017.

From January 2018, the net asset purchases are intended to continue at a monthly pace of 30 billion euros (about 35.4 dollars) until the end of September 2018, or beyond.

For the week, the blue-chip Dow rose 0.5 percent, and the broader S&P 500 added 0.2 percent, while the tech heavy Nasdaq jumped 1.1 percent.