What Your PPC Agency Should Be Reporting (And What's Bullshit)

You get a monthly report from your agency. 30 slides. Lots of charts. Impressions up 24%. CTR improved. CPC is stable.

Sounds great. But you have no idea if any of it is making you money.

That's not a report. That's a distraction.

The metrics that don't matter (by themselves)

Impressions: how many times your ad was shown. Means nothing alone. You could have a million impressions and zero customers.

Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of people who click your ad. A high CTR means your ad copy is good. It doesn't mean those clicks are worth anything.

Cost per click (CPC): what you pay for each click. A low CPC feels good but a €2 click that never converts costs more than a €10 click that becomes a €20K customer.

These metrics are useful for the person managing your campaigns. They're not useful for you to judge whether your investment is paying off.

The metrics that actually matter

Cost per qualified lead: not cost per lead, cost per qualified lead. The ones your sales team actually wants to talk to. If your agency doesn't know this number, they're not tracking deep enough.

Pipeline generated: how much potential revenue came from ads this month. This requires connecting your CRM to your ad platform, which is exactly what most agencies skip.

Cost per customer (CAC): the true cost to acquire a paying customer through ads. This is the number that tells you if Google Ads is profitable.

Return on ad spend (ROAS): for every euro you spend on ads, how many euros come back as revenue. Below 2×, you're probably losing money. Above 3×, you're in good shape.

Red flags in your agency's reporting

They never mention revenue or pipeline. Just clicks and impressions.

They blend brand and non-brand results. Brand searches (people typing your company name) always convert well, so mixing them with non-brand makes everything look better than it is.

They can't tell you which campaigns drive actual customers.

They report monthly but can't explain what changed and why.

What a good report looks like

One page. Five numbers: ad spend, qualified leads generated, cost per qualified lead, pipeline created, ROAS. A short section on what worked, what didn't, and what's changing next month.

That's it. If your agency needs 30 slides to explain what happened, they're either hiding something or they don't know what matters.

The bottom line

Your ads report should answer one question: are we making money? If it doesn't, the report is the first thing to fix. Before you touch a single campaign.