Google Ads dashboards are designed to make you feel clever. Rows of numbers, little green arrows, words like "impressions" that sound important. Most of it's noise. A handful of metrics actually move money, and the rest are there to make agencies look busy.
We run campaigns from a scruffy office in Newcastle for clients who'd rather spend their budget on results than on our rent. So here's the unvarnished version.
Impressions: the metric that flatters your ego
Impressions tell you how many times your ad was shown. They don't tell you if anyone cared. A million impressions and three clicks means you've wallpapered a bus station with vouchers for a shop nobody's walking past.
Use impressions for one thing only: sanity-checking reach. If it's zero, your bids are too low or your targeting's too tight. Past that, move on.
Click-through rate (CTR): the first honest signal
CTR is impressions divided by clicks, and it's the first metric that tells you whether your ad copy is pulling its weight. A CTR under 2% on Search usually means your headline's flat, your keywords are wrong, or both.
- Search benchmark: aim for 4-6% on branded, 2-4% on non-branded.
- Display benchmark: 0.5% is respectable. Anyone promising you 3% on Display is fibbing.
- Shopping benchmark: 0.8-1.5% depending on category.
Cost per click (CPC): useful, but not the point
Everyone obsesses over CPC. It's the wrong fight. A £5 click that converts at 20% beats a 40p click that converts at 0.5% every single time. Cheap clicks are only cheap if they do something.
If your CPCs feel punishing, the fix usually isn't bidding lower. It's improving Quality Score so Google rewards you with cheaper auctions.
Conversion rate: the one that pays the bills
Conversion rate is the percentage of clicks that become something valuable, a sale, a lead, a booked audit. This is where the real money lives. Everything upstream, keywords, copy, bids, exists to serve this number.
If your conversion rate's poor, the problem is rarely the ad. It's usually the landing page. Slow loading, dodgy form, confusing offer. Google can't fix a bad shop window.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) and ROAS
CPA is what you paid to get one conversion. ROAS is revenue divided by ad spend. Pick the one that matches your business. Lead gen lives on CPA. E-commerce lives on ROAS.
The only question that matters: are you making more than you're spending, accounting for margin and lifetime value? If you can't answer that, no amount of dashboard tweaking will save you.
Quality Score: the metric Google won't shut up about
Quality Score is Google's 1-10 verdict on how relevant your ad, keyword and landing page are. Higher scores mean lower CPCs and better positions. It's not a vanity metric, it's a discount coupon.
Impression share and lost share
Impression share tells you what percentage of eligible auctions you showed up in. Lost share (budget) means you ran out of money. Lost share (rank) means you were outbid or outranked.
For branded campaigns, anything under 90% impression share is leaving money on the table. Competitors are bidding on your name and you're letting them.
Search terms vs keywords
Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. They're almost never the same thing, and the search terms report is the single most underused tool in Google Ads.
- Negative keywords: add anything irrelevant. "Free", "jobs", competitor names you don't want.
- New keywords: if a search term's converting, promote it to its own exact-match keyword.
- Match type audit: broad match without smart bidding is arson.
What we actually look at first
When we audit a Google Ads account, we ignore the top-line vanity numbers and go straight to search terms, conversion tracking setup, and Quality Score distribution. Nine times out of ten, that's where the leak is.
Proper conversion tracking is non-negotiable. If you're still counting form views as conversions, you're flying blind. For a refresher on the bigger picture, see our piece on data analytics in digital marketing.
Reckon your Google Ads could do better?
We'll go through your account, find the leaks, and tell you straight. No jargon, no upsell, just a proper look under the bonnet.
Get a free ads auditClosing thought
Metrics aren't the enemy. Bad metrics used badly are. Pick the three numbers that connect to revenue, ignore the rest, and revisit them weekly. Campaigns don't need daily fiddling, they need honest reviews and the nerve to cut what isn't working. That's it. That's the secret.
