What a Google Ads report should show

The six that matter

Figure	Why
Spend	What actually left the account, against what was budgeted
Clicks	What the spend bought
Cost per click	Whether your auction is getting dearer
Conversions	Enquiries, calls, forms. The point of the exercise
Cost per conversion	Spend divided by conversions. The number that decides everything
Search terms	What people actually typed, not what you bid on

Cost per conversion is the figure to watch across months. Everything above it is an input, and everything below it depends on knowing what a customer is worth to you, which your agency does not know unless you have told them.

The three that are usually padding

Impressions. How many times an ad was shown. It goes up when targeting is loosened, which is not an achievement.

Click-through rate. Useful diagnostically, meaningless as a headline. A high rate on searches that never convert is an expensive success.

Impression share. How often you appeared out of how often you could have. It is a budget-increase argument dressed as a metric, and the honest use of it is to explain a constraint rather than to lead a report.

The line that reveals management

Negative keywords added this month. It is the direct evidence that someone read the search terms report and acted on it. An account with no negatives added in a month either has a perfectly tuned targeting setup, which is rare, or is not being pruned.

Ask for it explicitly if it is not there. It costs the agency nothing to include and is the cheapest proof of work in the whole discipline.

What to compare against

Your own previous months, and your own seasonality. Not an industry benchmark. Benchmarks are averages across businesses with different customer values, different geographies and different conversion rates, and the spread across Dublin trades shows how little a cross-trade average can mean when clicks range from thirty cents to thirteen dollars.

The uncomfortable report

A good agency will sometimes bring you a month where cost per conversion rose and the honest explanation is that competitors bid harder. That report is more informative than a good one, and an agency that never produces one is either extraordinarily lucky or is choosing what to show you.