Most agency reports look impressive but tell you almost nothing. The good ones do the opposite: fewer numbers, more honesty, and a clear answer to the only question that actually matters — did this month’s spend move the business or not?
A good Google Ads agency report should answer four questions in plain language: what we spent, what it produced (leads, revenue, ROAS or CPA against your target), what we changed in the account and why, and what we plan to test next month. The metrics that belong front and center are conversions, CPL, CPA, and ROAS, paired with a written explanation. Impressions, clicks, and CTR are useful diagnostics, not headline numbers.
Every paid-media engagement starts with optimism. A few months in, the optimism either compounds into trust or quietly erodes, and the place that erosion almost always begins is the monthly report.
The pattern is consistent. The first few reports are dense and impressive. By month four, the deck has the same charts, but you can’t actually tell whether the account is improving. By month six, you’re asking the agency questions they should be answering for you. By month nine, you’re shopping for a replacement.
Reporting is a leading indicator of how an agency thinks. An agency that hides behind vanity metrics tends to manage with those metrics in mind. An agency that leads with lead volume, CPL, CPA, or ROAS is likely putting those metrics front and center when they make decisions about your campaign. We covered the upstream version of this in our guide on questions to ask before hiring a Google Ads agency.
Google’s own best-practice documentation on reporting tells advertisers to define clear success metrics, focus on insights that change those success metrics, and filter out everything that doesn’t serve the goal (Google Ads Help: Finding actionable insights through Google Ads reporting). The same principle should govern an agency’s monthly report.
These are the numbers that should be in the first page or two of any monthly report:
Total conversions for the month, broken out by conversion action (lead form, phone call, purchase, etc.), with conversion value where it applies. Lead-gen businesses care about volume of qualified leads (conversions). Ecommerce businesses care about revenue (conversion value).
Cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS) are the two numbers that connect spend to outcome. Industry benchmark data from sources like AgencyAnalytics and OwlClaw consistently shows CPA rising and ROAS compressing across most categories over the last two years, so the right framing isn’t “is CPA going up?” but “is CPA tracking against the target we set, and what is the trend over the last 90 days?”
If the agency has access to your CRM or downstream qualification data, the report should distinguish between raw leads and qualified leads. If they don’t have that visibility yet, the report should say so and propose how to get it. Optimizing for raw lead count when bad-fit leads dominate is one of the most common reasons accounts “perform well” while the campaign goes nowhere — a failure mode we covered in 7 Signs Your Google Ads Account Is Wasting Budget.
A short list — three to five of each — with one sentence on why each one is where it is. The point isn’t completeness; the point is to make the agency demonstrate that they actually look at the account.
Google’s search-terms report shows the actual queries that triggered your ads, and is the foundation of negative-keyword work (Google Ads Help: About the search terms report). Performance Max also exposes a search-terms report now, as Google rolled out earlier in 2025 (Search Engine Land coverage of the PMax search-terms launch). A good monthly report shows how many negatives the agency added this month, what categories of waste they cut off, and a short list of the queries they’re now investing more behind.
Tracking breaks. Tag containers get republished, sites get redesigned, GA4 events drift. A good report includes a one-line statement that conversion tracking was verified this period, and flags anything that needs attention. If conversion tracking is wrong, every other number in the report is also wrong.
These metrics aren’t useless. They’re useful inside the account, in the agency’s internal optimization work. They just don’t belong as headline KPIs in a client-facing report:
AgencyAnalytics, Swydo, and most of the established PPC reporting platforms make the same point: agency reports get worse as they add more metrics, not better. Optimization metrics belong in the agency’s working dashboards, not in the headline of your monthly report.
Cadence is one of the most under-discussed parts of reporting. The right rhythm depends on spend level and how dynamic the account is, but the consensus across PPC industry sources is that monthly is the floor — not the ceiling — for any account spending material money.
A monthly report and a monthly or quarterly call are usually enough. Trying to optimize a small account weekly tends to overwhelm it with low-data decisions.
A monthly report with a monthly or bimonthly call.
A monthly or bimonthly report with a monthly or bimonthly call, with the addition of either weekly performance updates or a live analytics dashboard. Reports that show up two weeks late, or only when you ask, are a leading indicator that the underlying account work is also slipping. We touch on this in our guide to how to choose a Google Ads agency in Orlando, and it applies whether you’re hiring locally or not.
A real Google Ads report should answer four questions in plain English, in under a page:
An honest report includes the bad news. “CPA increased 18% this month. Auction competition spiked across the lender-services category, which we’ve seen across two other clients in the same vertical. We’ve tightened audience signals and paused two ad groups with the worst CPA, and we expect CPA to settle within 10% of target over the next four weeks.” That paragraph is worth more than twenty charts.
Hedging language (“trending in a positive direction,” “continuing to optimize”) without specific numbers or commitments is the polite version of admitting there’s nothing real to say.
A good monthly report covers more than performance metrics. It also documents what work was done. Specifically:
If your monthly Google Ads report does any of the following, push back:
One or two of these on their own may be a fixable communication gap. Three or more together usually means the underlying work is also weak.
Monthly is the standard for most accounts. Accounts spending above roughly $25,000/month should also receive a short weekly summary or access to a live dashboard. Whatever the cadence, reports should arrive on a fixed date, not whenever the agency gets to them.
There isn’t one. The right pairing for lead-gen is Conversions and Cost Per Conversion. The right pairing for ecommerce is ROAS plus CPA.
Yes. You should have admin or read-only access to the underlying Google Ads account at all times, and the agency should be willing to share raw exports on request. Refusing to is a structural red flag, not just a reporting one.
It’s a neutral sign. Polished dashboards are easy to build with off-the-shelf tools like AgencyAnalytics, Swydo, or Looker Studio.
Always. A good report ends with what the agency intends to test, change, or investigate over the next 30 days, and how they’ll judge whether it worked. Without that, the report is a status update rather than a plan.
If you already work with a Google Ads agency and you’re not sure whether the monthly report is telling you the truth, reach out to Power Couch Media. We’ll look at the last two or three reports you’ve received, your account, and your tracking setup, and tell you what we’d push back on, what we’d ask for, and where the real gaps are — whether or not you end up working with us. You can also see how we approach the work on our Google Ads management page.
.svg)
.svg)