Your agency sent you a report with 30 metrics and a lot of green arrows. Here’s which three numbers actually matter and what to ask about everything else.
I’ve built hundreds of client reports. Most of what’s in them is context or noise. A small portion is actually decision-relevant.
Here’s how to cut through it.
What Three Numbers Actually Matter in a Google Ads Report?
1. Customer acquisition cost. All-in cost to get a paying customer — ad spend plus management fees, divided by customers acquired from ads in the same period. Compare this to one-third of your customer lifetime value. Under that threshold: good. Over that threshold: problem.
2. Lead-to-customer rate. Of all the leads that came from ads, what percentage became paying customers? This is the number that connects marketing performance to business results. If your agency can’t tell you this number, ask why.
3. Cost trend. Is cost per lead going up, down, or flat over 90 days? A new campaign that’s getting more efficient over time is healthy even if current CPL is above target. A mature campaign with rising CPL is a red flag.
Everything else in the report — click-through rate, quality score, impression share — is context for those three numbers.
What Is Click-Through Rate and Does It Matter?
CTR is the percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked on it. It’s a useful diagnostic metric, not a business outcome metric.
High CTR means your ads are compelling to the audience seeing them. Low CTR usually means your ads aren’t relevant to the queries they’re appearing for, or your offer isn’t compelling.
CTR matters for diagnosing specific problems. It doesn’t tell you whether the business is making money from ads.
What Is Quality Score and Should You Optimize for It?
Quality Score is Google’s rating of your ad relevance on a 1-10 scale. Higher quality scores can lead to lower costs and better ad positions.
It matters, but it’s a means to an end. Don’t optimize for quality score directly — optimize for ad relevance and landing page experience (what quality score measures), and quality score will follow.
What Should You Ask Your Agency That They’re Not Already Telling You?
Three questions I’d ask:
What happened to the leads we got this month? Not ‘how many leads did we get’ — what happened to them downstream. Did they close? Were they qualified? Your agency may not have this data (which is itself a structural problem), but they should be trying to get it.
What did we learn this month that we’re acting on next month? A good agency is running tests — ad copy, landing pages, audiences — and applying learnings. If every report looks the same month over month with no hypothesis about what to test, that’s a concern.
What would you do differently if this were your money? I ask myself this about every account I manage. The answer sometimes differs from what the client wants to do. That tension is worth surfacing.
The One-Sentence Summary of How to Evaluate Ad Performance
Add up everything you’ve spent on advertising (including fees) over the last 90-120 days. Add up the revenue you can attribute to ads in the same period. If the ratio makes sense for your business economics, the ads are working. If it doesn’t, figure out which specific number is off and fix that.