What Should a Google Ads Agency Report Every Month?
A monthly Google Ads report should help you make decisions.
If it only repeats impressions, clicks and CTR without explaining what those numbers mean commercially, it is a dashboard export rather than a management report.
Start with spend and outcome
At minimum, the report should show:
- total media spend
- tracked conversions
- cost per conversion
- conversion value or ROAS where reliable
- CPC
- conversion rate
Those metrics provide the basic relationship between investment and outcome.
Explain what changed
Google's negative-keyword guidance reinforces the principle: paid-search optimisation is about excluding irrelevant intent as well as finding demand. Judge changes on query relevance, conversion quality and commercial outcome—not clicks in isolation.
The report should identify meaningful changes made during the period and why they were made.
Examples include:
- new negative keywords
- search terms excluded
- campaign or ad-group restructuring
- budget changes
- ad copy changes
- landing-page recommendations
- tracking fixes
Without the rationale, the client cannot tell whether account activity was strategic or routine.
Include search-term quality
Google Ads can look healthy while paying for irrelevant demand.
A useful report should explain what kinds of queries are entering the account and whether poor-fit traffic is being controlled.
For more detail, see negative keywords and wasted spend.
Put CPC in context
CPC rising is not automatically bad if conversion rate or lead value rises faster. CPC falling is not automatically good if the account is buying weaker traffic.
The report should connect CPC to conversion performance rather than treating it as a standalone success metric.
See how to reduce CPC without losing conversions.
Show constraints and opportunities
The account may be losing visibility because of budget or rank. The report should explain whether that lost impression share is worth addressing and what evidence supports the recommendation.
Read impression share lost to budget vs rank for the decision framework.
End with actions, not observations
A good report should finish with a short list of decisions:
- what will be changed
- what will be tested
- what will be stopped
- whether budget should change
- what the client needs to know
Digital Womble's Google Ads Management uses senior-led account review and commercial performance evidence rather than reporting activity for its own sake.
If you want an independent view of the quality of your current account management, start with the £395 Google Ads Account Review.
Apply the idea without creating more noise
Start with the page's actual job and the reader's next decision. Check the evidence already available, identify the gaps preventing that decision, and improve those before adding another page or campaign. A useful change should make the journey clearer, not simply make the estate larger.
Measure the result against a baseline. For informational content that may mean qualified impressions, clicks and progression to a relevant commercial page; for commercial content it should extend to enquiries, sales or another meaningful conversion. This keeps optimisation tied to business value rather than publishing volume.
A practical review framework
Start with the business outcome rather than the platform metric. Define the conversion that matters, its approximate commercial value and the maximum sensible acquisition cost. Then work backwards through campaign, ad group, search term, ad and landing page. This stops a strong CTR or cheap CPC from disguising poor-quality demand.
Review search terms for intent, not just vocabulary. A query can contain the right keyword and still be informational, navigational or outside the service area. Separate terms that deserve a negative keyword from terms that expose a landing-page or offer problem. Where volume is low, avoid making confident decisions from a handful of clicks; use longer windows and conversion evidence.
Next, check message continuity. The searcher's wording, ad promise and landing-page proposition should describe the same job. If the ad promises a specific service but lands on a generic page, improving bids will not repair the conversion journey. Link paid-search learning back into on-page optimisation so organic and paid traffic are not solving the same intent problem separately.
Finally, document the change and review date. Record spend, qualified conversions, CPA and any downstream revenue signal before and after the intervention. That creates an evidence trail and makes the next optimisation decision easier.
Implementation and measurement
Treat the recommendation as a decision process rather than a publishing task. Define the page or campaign's intended audience, the problem it should solve and the next useful action before changing anything. Compare the current experience with that job, then prioritise the smallest changes that remove genuine friction or ambiguity.
Use evidence at the point it matters. Primary guidance can establish factual constraints; first-party data, examples and experience can explain what those constraints mean in practice. Internal links should expand a concept or move a qualified reader to the next relevant step, not exist simply to increase link counts. The anchor should make the destination understandable before the click.
After implementation, record a baseline and review the metric that matches the job. Discovery work should improve qualified visibility; educational content should create useful progression into deeper or commercial pages; conversion work should be judged on enquiries, sales or another meaningful outcome. Avoid claiming causation from a single short observation window.
This also creates a maintenance loop. When products, evidence, search behaviour or official guidance changes, refresh the affected passage and its linked destinations rather than producing another overlapping URL. That keeps the estate coherent and reduces the risk of thin, stale or competing pages.