Every month, you get a report: charts, arrows pointing up, impressions in the tens of thousands. And you still don’t know whether your marketing pays off. In this article, you’ll learn which numbers are tied to money, which only provide context and which are in the report mainly to make it look good. At the end, you’ll find questions you can ask your agency when your next report comes in.
What a report is for
A report isn’t proof that the agency did some work. It should help you decide: keep going, add budget, change something or stop. If you read it and still don’t know what follows from it, the report hasn’t done its job – no matter how many pages it has.
The report is for you, not for marketers. If it’s full of acronyms and charts you don’t understand, that’s not your fault. Feel free to ask the agency to open with three sentences in plain language: what worked, what didn’t and what they suggest next.
Numbers tied to money
Conversions
A conversion is an action that has value for you: an order, a submitted inquiry, a phone call, a booking. What matters is knowing exactly what this word covers in your report. A visit to the contact page or a click on a button can also be set up as a conversion – and that’s not a customer yet.
Cost per conversion
How much one inquiry or one order cost. Compare this number with how much you earn from a customer. A reasonable cost per inquiry is completely different for a construction company than for a hair salon, so there’s no point comparing it with other industries – compare it with your margin.
Phone calls
In service businesses, some customers would rather call than fill out a form. If the report only counts submitted forms, your results may look worse than they are. Ask whether clicks on the phone number on your website and calls directly from your ads are tracked, and compare that with how many calls you actually took.
Revenue and ROAS
For an online store, track revenue from ads and ROAS – the ratio between ad revenue and what you paid for the ads. Keep in mind that ROAS is based on revenue, not profit. You can check whether your campaigns pay off at your margin with our ROAS calculator.
Total costs
Money spent on ads plus the agency’s fee. Only with this amount can you say how much a new customer really cost you.
Lead quality
The agency doesn’t have this number – you do. How many inquiries were relevant, and how many turned into jobs? When you share that with the agency, it can adjust the campaigns to bring in fewer useless inquiries.
Numbers that provide context
These numbers aren’t the goal, but they help explain why results are going up or down:
- Click-through rate (CTR) – how many of the people who saw the ad clicked on it. It tells you whether the ad caught their attention.
- Cost per click (CPC) – how much one visit from an ad costs. It goes up, for example, when more businesses compete for the same customers.
- Conversion rate – what share of visitors from ads converted. When it’s low, the problem may be your website, not the ad.
- Impression share – how often your ad was shown compared with how often it could have been. It shows whether you’re being held back by a low budget or by weak ad rank.
- Search terms – what people actually typed into Google when your ad appeared. A good report also shows the terms the agency excluded because they don’t sell.
Numbers that are mostly for show
They aren’t bad on their own. The problem starts when they make up the bulk of the report and the numbers from the previous sections are missing.
- Impressions and reach. High numbers are cheap to get and say nothing about whether anyone bought.
- Likes, followers and engagement. They may show interest, but they don’t pay the bills. More in our article Why likes don’t pay the bills.
- Website traffic without context. More visits are good news only when they come from people who can buy.
- Optimization score in Google Ads. It shows how closely the account follows Google’s recommendations. It’s not your business’s result, and not every recommendation is worth accepting.
- Growth without a baseline. “Twice as many inquiries” sounds great until you find out it went from two to four.
- Conversions that aren’t customers. If orders are lumped into one number with page views or finished article reads, the result looks better than it really is.
Why Google Ads and Google Analytics numbers don’t match
It’s common and not necessarily an error. Google Ads attributes a conversion to the day of the ad click, Google Analytics to the day the conversion actually happened. The tools also split credit between channels differently, and they may not fully capture people who decline cookies.
What matters is that the agency can explain the difference and that, over time, the numbers match what you see in your online store, at your register or in your inbox. You’ll find out how to set up tracking that makes sense in our article How to set up tracking in Google Analytics 4.
Table: what to look for in a report
| Metric | What it tells you | When it’s just for show |
|---|---|---|
| Conversions | How many inquiries or orders came in | When you don’t know what counts as a conversion |
| Cost per conversion | How much one inquiry or order cost | When you don’t compare it with your margin |
| Revenue and ROAS | How much revenue the ads brought in | When returns and margin are ignored |
| Impressions and reach | How many people saw the ad | When the report has no conversions |
| Likes and followers | Interest in your content | When they’re presented as the campaign’s main result |
| Optimization score | How closely the account follows Google’s recommendations | When it’s passed off as campaign success |
What a useful monthly report looks like
- A short written summary at the top: what happened, why and what to do about it.
- Costs, conversions, cost per conversion and, for an online store, revenue and ROAS.
- A comparison with the previous month and with the same period last year, so seasonality is visible.
- What the agency changed and what impact it had.
- What didn’t work – that belongs in the report too.
- A plan for next month.
You should also be able to check the numbers in the report yourself, directly in the ad account. At Tronos, campaigns run in the client’s ad accounts, which the client owns, so you can look at them anytime without waiting for a PDF. We cover how to agree on reporting when you sign in our article Marketing agency contracts.
Questions to ask at your next report
- What exactly counts as a conversion for us?
- How much did one inquiry or order cost us, and how is that trending?
- Which campaigns or keywords are spending money without results, and what are you doing about them?
- What did you change this month, and why?
- What would you do with a higher or lower budget?
- Can I see these numbers directly in the account?
A good agency will answer them without dodging, and if it doesn’t know something, it’ll say so and find out.
You can make the report more useful too. Compare the numbers with your revenue or jobs, tell the agency which inquiries were good and which were useless, and let it know about things it can’t see in the account: the season, a new product, items out of stock, a fully booked schedule. Without this information, the agency is only evaluating half the story.
Frequently asked questions
How often should a marketing agency send a report?
For ongoing campaign management, a monthly report makes sense, plus a short update in between when something changes significantly. With small budgets, weekly reports show random swings rather than real trends.
What is a good cost per conversion?
One at which you still make money on the customer. You calculate it from your margin and from how much a customer brings you over the whole relationship, not just on the first purchase. Comparisons with other industries or with “averages” from the internet won’t tell you much.
Why does Google Ads show more orders than my online store?
There may be several reasons: conversions attributed to a different day, canceled orders being counted, duplicate tracking or the “All conversions” column, which also includes less important actions. If the difference is large and persists, have your tracking checked.
What if there are no conversions in the report?
Then tracking is probably missing, and the campaigns are being optimized blind. The first step should be setting up tracking for inquiries, calls or orders. Only then does it make sense to evaluate and change the campaigns.
If you want campaigns where you can see how much an inquiry or order costs you, see how we handle Google Ads. Feel free to bring your current report to the first consultation, which is free.
