Last updated: February 10, 2026
Here's an uncomfortable truth that the paid search industry doesn't want you to hear: most Google Ads reports are designed to make your manager look good, not to tell you whether you're actually making money.
Every month, thousands of small business owners sit through reporting calls where their agency walks them through impressive-looking numbers. Impressions are up. Clicks are growing. CTR is above the industry benchmark. The slides look polished. The account manager sounds confident. And yet, somehow, the bank account doesn't seem to reflect all this supposed success.
This isn't an accident. It's a reporting strategy. And once you understand which metrics actually determine whether Google Ads is profitable for your business, you'll never look at a performance report the same way again.
Google Ads has become significantly more complex heading into 2026. The introduction of AI Max for Search, expanded Performance Max campaigns, ads in AI Overviews, and Google's new Power Pack framework have added layers of automation and new placements that generate mountains of data. The median CPA across industries rose 12.35% in 2025 to $23.74. ROAS declined across 13 of 14 industries tracked by Triple Whale. CTR went up across the board, but conversion rates dropped 9.28%. In other words, people are clicking more but buying less, and it's costing more to acquire each customer.
In an environment like that, the difference between tracking the right metrics and the wrong ones isn't academic. It's the difference between a profitable ad account and a money pit.
Let's start with the most meaningless number in digital advertising. Impressions tell you how many times your ad was shown. That's it. Not how many people noticed it, not how many people cared, and certainly not how many people took action. An impression simply means your ad appeared on a screen somewhere.
Agencies love leading with impressions because the number is always large and always growing if you're spending money. "Your ads were shown 450,000 times this month" sounds impressive in a client meeting. But impressions cost you nothing directly in a pay-per-click model. They're a byproduct of bidding, not a measure of performance. A campaign could generate 10 million impressions and zero revenue, and the impressions number would still look fantastic on a report.
The only time impressions become remotely useful is when you're calculating impression share, which tells you what percentage of available impressions you're actually capturing. Even then, it's a competitive positioning metric, not a profitability metric. It tells you how visible you are relative to competitors, not whether that visibility is translating into money.
Clicks are one step better than impressions, but they're still dangerously misleading when presented in isolation. A click means someone was interested enough to tap on your ad. It does not mean they became a customer, submitted a lead form, or did anything else valuable for your business.
Here's why clicks are a favourite agency reporting metric: they're directly correlated with your ad spend. The more you spend, the more clicks you get. So when an agency reports that clicks are up 30% month over month, what they might really be saying is "we increased your budget and you got proportionally more traffic." That's not optimisation. That's arithmetic.
The hidden danger of celebrating clicks is that it obscures click quality. Not all clicks are equal. A click from someone searching "best CRM software for small business pricing" is vastly more valuable than a click from someone searching "what is CRM." One is ready to buy. The other is writing a school essay. But in a clicks-focused report, they're counted exactly the same.
With Google's shift toward broader match types and AI-driven keyword matching through AI Max, the click quality problem has actually gotten worse in 2025 and 2026. Your campaigns are being shown for a wider range of search queries than ever before, which means more of your clicks may be coming from people who aren't great fits for your business. If your manager isn't actively monitoring search term reports and building negative keyword lists, you could be paying for hundreds of irrelevant clicks every month without knowing it.
CTR is the percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked on it. In 2025, the average CTR across all industries on Google Search was around 6.66% according to WordStream's benchmarks, and CTR improved across all 14 industries tracked by Triple Whale.
On its own, CTR tells you whether your ad copy is compelling enough to generate clicks. That's useful information for ad copywriters. It is not useful information for business owners trying to determine if their advertising is profitable.
An agency can dramatically inflate CTR by writing clickbait-style ad copy that generates curiosity clicks from people with no purchase intent. They can also boost CTR by targeting branded keywords (people searching your company name were already going to visit your website) or by running ads on the Display Network with sensationalist creative that gets clicks but no conversions.
The most dangerous version of CTR manipulation is when agencies highlight a "great" CTR while ignoring what happens after the click. If your CTR is 8% but your conversion rate is 0.5%, you have an ad that's good at attracting clicks and terrible at attracting customers. That's not something to celebrate. That's something to fix.
CPC tells you how much you're paying for each click. The average across all industries in 2025 was $5.26 on the Search Network, though this varies enormously by industry. Legal services averaged over $8.50 per click. Ecommerce averaged under $1.
Agencies sometimes frame declining CPC as a win: "We've reduced your cost per click by 15% this quarter." That sounds great until you realise that cheaper clicks often come from less competitive, lower-intent keywords. You can slash your CPC tomorrow by bidding on broad informational queries instead of high-intent commercial ones. Your clicks will be cheaper and completely worthless.
CPC is a useful diagnostic metric when you're evaluating it alongside conversion data. A $15 CPC that converts at 10% gives you a $150 cost per acquisition. A $3 CPC that converts at 0.5% gives you a $600 cost per acquisition. The cheaper click is six times less effective, but an agency reporting only on CPC would make the $3 click look like a triumph.
This is where reporting starts getting honest. CPA tells you how much you spend to acquire one customer or one qualified lead. It's calculated by dividing your total ad spend (including management fees) by the number of conversions.
CPA cuts through the noise because it directly connects your spending to business outcomes. You don't care how many people saw your ad. You don't care how many clicked. You care how much it costs to get someone to take the action that makes you money.
Industry benchmarks for CPA vary wildly. Ecommerce businesses averaged around $23.74 in 2025 according to Triple Whale data. B2B lead generation often runs $50 to $200 per lead depending on the industry. Legal services can exceed $130 per lead. The number itself matters less than how it compares to the value each acquisition generates for your business.
Here's the critical question CPA helps you answer: if it costs you $75 to acquire a customer who spends $300 and has a 40% profit margin, you're making $45 in gross profit per acquisition after ad costs. That's sustainable. If it costs $75 to acquire a customer who spends $100 with a 30% margin, you're losing $45 on every sale. CPA makes this calculation possible. Impressions, clicks, and CTR don't.
A trustworthy manager will report CPA front and centre and will actively work to reduce it over time. A questionable one will bury CPA deep in the appendix and hope you don't notice.
ROAS measures revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. A 4:1 ROAS means every dollar you put into Google Ads returns four dollars in revenue. Across all industries, Google Ads ROAS averaged roughly 3.68:1 in 2025, though this declined about 10% year over year according to Triple Whale's analysis of over 18,000 brands.
ROAS is one of the most widely reported "real" metrics, but it has a critical flaw that many agencies exploit: it doesn't account for profit margins.
Consider two businesses both reporting a 4:1 ROAS. Business A has 60% gross margins, meaning out of every $4 in revenue, $2.40 is gross profit. After the $1 in ad spend, they're left with $1.40 in profit per dollar spent. Business B has 20% margins, so that $4 in revenue yields only $0.80 in gross profit. After the $1 ad spend, they're losing $0.20 on every dollar. Same ROAS. Wildly different outcomes.
This is why ROAS should always be evaluated against your specific margin structure. Your break-even ROAS is calculated as 1 divided by your profit margin. If your margin is 40%, your break-even ROAS is 2.5:1. Anything above that is profit. Anything below is a loss. If your agency reports a "strong" 3:1 ROAS but your margin is 25%, you're actually breaking even. That's not strong. That's surviving.
A more advanced version of this metric is POAS (Profit on Ad Spend), which factors in your actual cost of goods to measure profit generated per dollar of ad spend rather than revenue. If your agency or management platform tracks POAS, they're thinking about your business correctly.
CAC is broader than CPA because it accounts for all costs associated with acquiring a customer, not just ad spend. It includes management fees, creative production costs, landing page development, software subscriptions, and any other expenses tied to your advertising efforts.
This matters because many agencies report CPA based solely on ad spend while conveniently excluding their own management fees from the calculation. If you're spending $5,000 on ads and $2,000 on agency fees, your true cost base is $7,000. If that generates 50 customers, your CPA based on ad spend alone is $100, but your actual CAC is $140. That 40% difference can be the gap between profitability and loss.
When you evaluate any Google Ads management solution, whether it's a freelancer, an agency, or an AI platform, make sure you're calculating CAC holistically. Management fees are a real cost and they directly impact your bottom line.
This is the metric that separates business owners who understand their marketing from those who are flying blind. The LTV:CAC ratio compares the total revenue (or profit) a customer generates over their entire relationship with your business against the cost of acquiring them.
A healthy LTV:CAC ratio is generally considered to be 3:1 or higher. That means every customer you acquire generates at least three times what you spent to get them. Below 3:1, your acquisition economics are strained. Below 1:1, you're actively losing money on every customer you bring in.
LTV:CAC is particularly powerful because it justifies what might look like a high CPA in the short term. If acquiring a customer costs $200 but that customer spends $2,000 over two years, your LTV:CAC ratio is 10:1. That's phenomenal. But an agency reporting only on monthly CPA might flag the $200 acquisition cost as "too high" and optimise for cheaper, lower-quality leads that convert at $80 but only spend $150 lifetime. They've improved CPA by 60% and destroyed your business economics.
This is the metric that most small business owners have never heard of but that sophisticated advertisers consider the gold standard. Incrementality measures the true causal impact of your advertising by answering one question: would these conversions have happened anyway, even without your ads?
Google made incrementality testing significantly more accessible in late 2025 by reducing the minimum experiment budget from roughly $100,000 to just $5,000. The new Bayesian statistical methodology delivers up to 50% more conclusive results than previous approaches, and results are now available directly in the Google Ads UI.
Why does incrementality matter? Because a surprising amount of what Google Ads claims credit for are conversions that would have occurred organically. Brand search campaigns are the most obvious example. If someone searches your business name and clicks your ad, Google counts that as an ad-driven conversion. But that person was already looking for you. They would have clicked your organic listing if the ad didn't exist. Your ad didn't create the sale. It just intercepted it, and you paid for a click you didn't need.
Incrementality testing compares a group of people who see your ads against a control group who don't. The difference in conversion rates between the two groups represents your true incremental lift. Research from Google's own Conversion Lift studies found that for every dollar spent on Google Ads, the typical campaign generates $2.31 in truly incremental revenue. That's meaningful, but it's also considerably lower than the $3.68 average ROAS that gets reported, which means a significant portion of attributed conversions aren't truly driven by the ads.
Most agencies never run incrementality tests because the results might reveal that their "outstanding" performance is partly an illusion. An honest manager will embrace incrementality measurement. A dishonest one will actively avoid it.
This isn't about painting all agencies as dishonest. Many PPC professionals care deeply about their clients' success and report on the metrics that matter. But the agency business model creates structural incentives that often lead to misleading reporting, even when no one is intentionally trying to deceive.
Many agencies charge 10% to 20% of monthly ad spend as their management fee. When your agency makes more money by increasing your ad budget, their incentive is to show you metrics that justify spending more. Impressions, clicks, and traffic volume all grow with increased spend, so leading with these metrics naturally supports the case for a bigger budget, which means bigger agency fees.
An agency charging 15% of a $10,000 monthly spend earns $1,500. If they can convince you to increase to $20,000, they earn $3,000 for what might be the same amount of work. The incentive isn't to make your $10,000 work harder. It's to make the case that you should be spending $20,000.
Google Ads is genuinely complex in 2026. Between Performance Max, AI Max for Search, Demand Gen, Shopping, Display, YouTube, and ads in AI Overviews, there are more campaign types, placement options, and automation features than ever before. Most small business owners don't have the time or expertise to understand all of it.
Some agencies use this complexity as a shield. They flood reports with dozens of metrics across multiple campaign types, creating an overwhelming volume of data that obscures the simple question: am I making money? When a client can't easily determine whether their investment is profitable, they default to trusting the agency's interpretation. And the agency's interpretation is almost always "things are going well, but we could do even better with a bigger budget."
This is one of the most common ways agencies inflate their performance numbers, and most clients never catch it. Brand search campaigns target people who are already searching for your business name. These campaigns almost always show incredible metrics: high CTR, low CPC, high conversion rates, and outstanding ROAS.
The problem is that these people were already looking for you. If you turned off your brand campaigns, the vast majority of these customers would still find you through organic search results. By blending brand search results with non-brand campaign results, agencies can make overall account performance look dramatically better than it actually is.
A mid-tier agency might report a blended 6:1 ROAS across your entire account. But when you separate brand and non-brand performance, you might discover that brand campaigns are generating a 15:1 ROAS (which would have mostly happened without ads) while non-brand campaigns are actually sitting at a 2:1 ROAS (which might be below your break-even point). The blended number hides the fact that your prospecting campaigns aren't working.
Similar to brand search inflation, remarketing campaigns target people who have already visited your website. They're already in your funnel. Converting them through a remarketing ad is far easier than acquiring a cold prospect, so remarketing campaigns naturally show better metrics.
Agencies that blend remarketing performance with prospecting performance are flattering their overall numbers. The real test of advertising skill is acquiring new customers who didn't already know about you, not re-engaging people who were already considering a purchase.
You don't need to become a PPC expert to evaluate whether your Google Ads investment is working. You need to know how to ask four questions and where to find the answers.
Take your total ad spend for the month. Add your management fees (whether agency, freelancer, or software costs). Divide by the number of actual customers or qualified leads generated. That's your real CAC. Compare it to what each customer is worth to your business. If CAC is less than the profit you make from each customer, you're in good shape. If not, something needs to change.
Ask your manager for total revenue attributed to Google Ads. Divide by total costs (ad spend plus fees). That gives you ROAS. Then check it against your break-even ROAS (1 divided by your profit margin). If your profit margin is 35%, you need at least a 2.86:1 ROAS to break even. Anything reported as "strong" that falls below your break-even point is actually a loss.
This is the question that separates clients who understand their advertising from those who don't. Ask your manager to show you non-brand, non-remarketing campaign performance separately. This reveals how well your ads perform at acquiring genuinely new customers who weren't already looking for you. If this number is weak while the blended number looks good, your ads aren't doing the heavy lifting your agency claims.
Ask to see the search term report. This shows the actual queries people typed before clicking your ads. If you see searches that have nothing to do with your business, that's wasted spend. If the search term report contains dozens or hundreds of irrelevant queries, it means negative keyword management is being neglected. This is one of the most common and expensive forms of waste in Google Ads accounts, and it's easily fixable with proper attention.
The fundamental difference between how groas approaches Google Ads management and how most traditional managers approach it comes down to alignment. Traditional management, whether through a freelancer or an agency, optimises for metrics that make the manager look good. groas optimises for metrics that make your business profitable.
Most agencies optimise campaigns using Google's Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA or Target ROAS. These are effective tools, but they optimise at the campaign level based on conversion data within Google's ecosystem. They don't know your profit margins. They don't know your customer lifetime value. And they don't differentiate between a $50 sale with 60% margins and a $50 sale with 10% margins.
groas takes a fundamentally different approach by building its optimisation models around actual business profitability. The platform doesn't just try to get you the most conversions or the highest ROAS within Google Ads. It works to maximise the profit generated by your ad spend after accounting for the real economics of your business.
One of the most revealing differences between mediocre and excellent Google Ads management is how negative keywords are handled. Most freelancers review search terms weekly or monthly. Many agencies do it bi-weekly at best. Some barely do it at all, especially on accounts with lower spend levels that don't generate enough management fees to justify detailed attention.
groas monitors search queries continuously and automatically excludes irrelevant terms before they can accumulate significant wasted spend. In a platform environment where AI Max and broad match are sending ads to a wider range of queries than ever before, this constant vigilance is worth a substantial amount of money. Across typical small business accounts, poor negative keyword management wastes 15% to 30% of monthly ad spend on clicks that never had any chance of converting.
Human managers allocate budgets based on periodic reviews. They might shift budget between campaigns weekly or monthly based on performance trends. Between those reviews, money continues flowing to underperforming campaigns while high-performing ones might be hitting their daily caps and missing potential conversions.
groas reallocates budget dynamically throughout the day, every day. If a campaign is performing exceptionally well during morning hours but poorly in the afternoon, budget shifts automatically. If one product category is converting at twice the rate of another, spend adjusts in real time. This level of continuous optimisation is physically impossible for human managers regardless of how skilled they are.
This is where groas holds a particular advantage that's worth understanding. Google Ads has become an AI-first platform. AI Max for Search uses machine learning to expand keyword matching. Performance Max uses AI to allocate budget across channels. Smart Bidding uses AI to set bids in real time. The platform is fundamentally built around AI systems communicating with each other.
groas is designed to work in deep harmony with these systems. Rather than fighting Google's automation or trying to override it with manual controls, groas feeds Google's AI better data, better signals, and better inputs that improve the entire system's performance. Its close integration with Google's technology means it's consistently among the first to leverage new features like expanded Performance Max controls, AI Overviews placements, and Demand Gen campaign enhancements as they roll out.
Traditional managers often find themselves in an adversarial relationship with Google's automation, trying to maintain manual control over a system that increasingly wants to be automated. groas leans into that automation intelligently, ensuring that Google's AI has the best possible foundation to work from. The result is campaigns that perform better within Google's own system, which directly translates to lower costs and higher returns for your business.
groas doesn't generate reports designed to justify its own existence. There's no incentive to inflate numbers or hide underperformance behind vanity metrics. The platform reports on the metrics that actually impact your bottom line: CPA, ROAS, conversion volume, budget utilisation, and wasted spend eliminated. When performance is strong, the data shows it clearly. When something needs attention, that's visible too.
This transparency is built into the model itself. Because groas isn't billing you a percentage of ad spend, there's no incentive to encourage you to increase your budget unnecessarily. The platform's only goal is to make your existing budget perform as well as possible, which is exactly aligned with what you want as a business owner.
Regardless of who manages your Google Ads, whether you do it yourself, hire a freelancer, work with an agency, or use an AI platform like groas, you should maintain visibility into the numbers that matter. Here's what belongs on your monthly check-in dashboard.
Total ad spend (what Google charged you). Total management cost (fees, software, creative production). Total conversions (broken down by brand vs non-brand where possible). Cost per acquisition (calculated on total costs, not just ad spend). Revenue attributed to ads (preferably with non-brand and non-remarketing breakout). ROAS (evaluated against your specific break-even ROAS). Wasted spend (budget spent on search terms that didn't align with your business). Month-over-month trend (are things improving, declining, or flat?).
If your current manager can't or won't provide this information, that tells you something important. If they respond to requests for this data with deflection, complexity, or an avalanche of other metrics, that tells you even more.
The businesses that win at Google Ads in 2026 aren't the ones spending the most. They're the ones who understand exactly what they're getting for every dollar spent. The metrics you track determine the decisions you make, and the decisions you make determine whether Google Ads becomes your most profitable marketing channel or your most expensive mistake.
Vanity metrics are data points that look impressive on paper but don't directly connect to business profitability. The most common vanity metrics in Google Ads are impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR) in isolation, and cost per click (CPC) without conversion context. These numbers always increase when you spend more money, which makes them easy for agencies to report as "improvements" even when actual business results are flat or declining.
The metrics that actually determine profitability are cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS) evaluated against your profit margins, customer acquisition cost (CAC) including all management fees, and the lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio (LTV:CAC). Incrementality is also increasingly important as Google has reduced the minimum testing budget from $100,000 to just $5,000 in late 2025.
Ask for non-brand, non-remarketing performance data separated from blended account totals. Request search term reports to check for wasted spend on irrelevant queries. Calculate your true CAC by adding management fees to ad spend before dividing by conversions. Compare your ROAS against your break-even ROAS (1 divided by your profit margin). If your agency resists providing any of these breakdowns, that's a significant red flag.
The average ROAS across all industries was 3.68:1 in 2025, though this varies enormously. Search campaigns averaged 5.17:1 while Performance Max averaged 2.57:1 and Display averaged 0.12:1. However, "good" ROAS depends entirely on your profit margins. A business with 50% margins breaks even at 2:1 ROAS. A business with 25% margins needs 4:1 just to break even. Always evaluate ROAS against your specific margin structure.
Several structural reasons. Agencies on percentage-of-spend pricing models earn more when budgets increase, so metrics that justify higher spend get featured. Impressions and clicks always grow with increased budget, making them easy "wins" to report. Additionally, profit-focused metrics like true CAC and LTV:CAC require deeper integration with a client's business data, which many agencies either can't or won't invest the effort to obtain.
Incrementality testing measures the true causal impact of your ads by comparing a group of people who see them against a control group who don't. The difference in conversion rates reveals how many sales your advertising genuinely created versus how many would have happened anyway. Google reduced the minimum budget for these tests from $100,000 to $5,000 in November 2025 and now uses Bayesian statistical methods that deliver 50% more conclusive results.
groas optimises for actual business profitability rather than in-platform vanity metrics. It calculates true cost per acquisition including all costs, continuously eliminates wasted spend through real-time negative keyword management, and dynamically reallocates budget to the highest-performing campaigns throughout the day. Because groas doesn't charge a percentage of ad spend, there's zero incentive to inflate budgets or obscure underperformance. Its deep integration with Google's AI ecosystem also means it leverages platform features like AI Max and Performance Max more effectively than managers who treat Google's automation as an adversary rather than an ally.
CPA (cost per acquisition) typically refers to ad spend divided by conversions. CAC (customer acquisition cost) is broader, including all costs associated with acquiring a customer: ad spend, management fees, creative production, software costs, and any other related expenses. Many agencies report CPA based solely on ad spend while excluding their own fees, which understates the true cost of each acquisition by 20% to 50% depending on fee structure.
Not necessarily, but you should understand what they're actually doing for you. Brand campaigns can serve a defensive purpose by preventing competitors from appearing above your organic listing. However, blending brand campaign performance with non-brand campaigns inflates your overall metrics and obscures the true effectiveness of your prospecting efforts. The best approach is to run brand campaigns with a modest budget, report their performance separately, and evaluate your advertising effectiveness based on non-brand results.
For business owners who aren't managing campaigns themselves, a meaningful monthly review focused on the right metrics (CPA, ROAS, CAC, and wasted spend) is sufficient. Weekly reviews are helpful during the first 90 days of a new campaign or after significant strategy changes. Avoid daily performance anxiety as Google's algorithms need time to optimise, and daily fluctuations are normal. What matters is the month-over-month trend, not day-to-day noise.
