The four numbers that matter
A Google Ads report can show hundreds of columns. Four of them determine whether the account is working.
Conversions — how many purchases the ads generated.
Conversion value — the total rupee value of those purchases.
Cost — what you spent.
ROAS (return on ad spend) — conversion value divided by cost. Reported as a multiple: 3.5x means every ₹1 spent returned ₹3.50 in tracked revenue.
If ROAS is above your break-even multiple, the account is making money. If it is below, it is not. Everything else in the report exists to explain why.
Work out your break-even multiple first
Without this number, ROAS is meaningless.
Break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ gross margin
- 50% margin → you need 2.0x
- 40% margin → you need 2.5x
- 33% margin → you need 3.0x
- 25% margin → you need 4.0x
Then adjust for returns. If a quarter of your orders come back as RTO, the platform’s reported revenue overstates reality by roughly a third. A reported 4.0x is closer to a real 3.0x. See gross vs net revenue for why this matters more in India than almost anywhere else.
The metrics that look important and mostly are not
Impressions. How many times your ad appeared. Reaching more people is not an outcome. A campaign can generate millions of impressions and no revenue.
Clicks and CTR. How many people clicked, and what share of those who saw it. Useful diagnostically — a very low CTR suggests the ad or the targeting is off — but it is not a result. Clicks cost money; they do not make it.
Impression share. What proportion of available auctions you appeared in. Useful when you are deliberately trying to dominate a category. Meaningless otherwise, and frequently used to make a flat month look busy.
Quality Score. A diagnostic for your agency, not a business metric.
If a monthly report leads with impressions and CTR and buries conversions, that is worth noticing.
What a useful report actually shows
- Conversions and conversion value, this month against last
- Cost, and cost per acquisition
- ROAS, ideally on net revenue as well as gross
- Performance by campaign, so you can see what is carrying the account
- Top and bottom products, so you know what to stock and what to drop
- What changed — the actual actions taken, in plain language
- What is planned next, and why
That last pair matters most. A report that shows numbers without decisions is a spreadsheet, not a report.
Five questions worth asking
- What is our ROAS on net revenue, after returns?
- Which campaign is carrying the account, and which is dragging it?
- What did you change last month, and what did it do?
- Which products should we stock more of, based on this data?
- If we increased budget 20%, where would it go and what would happen?
Any competent agency can answer all five in a couple of minutes. Struggling with them is a signal.
A note on honesty
Every ad platform reports its own performance, and every platform is generous with attribution. Google will claim conversions Meta also claims. The sum of platform-reported revenue routinely exceeds actual revenue.
The corrective is simple: sanity-check against your bank. If Google says ₹6 lakh and Meta says ₹4 lakh but your account received ₹7 lakh, the platforms are overlapping. Trust the bank, use the platforms for direction.
How we report
Monthly, plain language, revenue and spend and ROAS and return rate, plus what we changed and what we are changing next. No impression-share filler. If a month was flat we say it was flat and explain what we think is causing it — including when the answer is that the constraint is the product or the price rather than the advertising.
Sources
Metric definitions follow Google Ads’ own documentation. Break-even ROAS arithmetic is arithmetic. Reporting practice and the attribution caveat reflect the accounts we run.