Strategy

PPC Reporting: The Only Metrics That Actually Matter

NUVIX · 23 December 2025 · 10 min read

TLDR: Most PPC reports are full of numbers that don’t help you make decisions. Impressions, reach, and CPM tell you how much you’ve shown ads but not whether those ads made money. The metrics that matter are cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, conversion rate, and customer lifetime value. Everything else is a diagnostic tool or a vanity metric.

The Problem With Most PPC Reports

Open a typical PPC report and you’ll see 15-20 metrics arranged in a table or dashboard. Impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, CPM, conversions, conversion rate, cost per conversion, ROAS, impression share, average position, bounce rate, pages per session, time on site — the list goes on.

More data is not the same as more insight. A report with 20 metrics tells you everything about the account and nothing about the business. The person reading it — usually a business owner or marketing director — doesn’t know which numbers matter, which are contextual, and which are irrelevant.

A good report answers three questions:

Is the campaign profitable? Are we making more money than we’re spending?
Is performance improving or declining? Are we moving in the right direction?
What should we do next? Based on the data, what changes will improve results?

If your report doesn’t answer these three questions clearly, it’s not a report — it’s a spreadsheet.

The Metrics That Matter

1. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

CPA tells you how much you’re paying for each customer, lead, or conversion. It’s the most important efficiency metric in PPC.

CPA = Total ad spend ÷ Number of conversions

If you spent £5,000 and generated 50 leads, your CPA is £100 per lead. If those leads become customers at a 20% close rate, your cost per customer is £500.

CPA only means something in context. A £100 CPA is excellent if your customer is worth £5,000 and terrible if they’re worth £150. Always evaluate CPA against customer value, not in isolation.

Track CPA at the campaign level and at the account level. A campaign with a high CPA might still be worth running if it’s generating customers in a high-value segment. An account with a low overall CPA might be hiding one campaign that’s haemorrhaging money.

2. Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS tells you how much revenue you’re generating for every pound spent on ads.

ROAS = Revenue from ads ÷ Ad spend

A ROAS of 5:1 means every £1 in ad spend generates £5 in revenue. Whether that’s profitable depends on your margins. A business with 80% margins is profitable at 2:1 ROAS. A business with 20% margins needs at least 5:1 to break even.

ROAS is most useful for e-commerce where revenue is directly trackable. For lead generation businesses, CPA is usually more practical because revenue happens offline and isn’t always easy to attribute back to specific campaigns.

Beware of ROAS calculated only from in-platform data. Both Google and Meta take credit for conversions that might have happened anyway. Cross-reference with your actual bank account. If the platform says ROAS is 8:1 but your business isn’t noticeably more profitable, the attribution is lying to you.

3. Conversion rate

Conversion rate tells you what percentage of clicks turn into conversions.

Conversion rate = Conversions ÷ Clicks × 100

This metric is critical because it tells you whether the problem is your traffic or your landing page. If you’re getting lots of clicks but few conversions, the issue isn’t your ads — it’s what happens after the click. Your landing page, your offer, or your form needs work.

Typical conversion rates by industry:

E-commerce: 2-4%
Lead generation: 3-8%
SaaS (free trial): 5-15%
Local services: 5-10%

If your conversion rate is significantly below these ranges, focus on landing page optimisation before increasing ad spend. Pouring more traffic into a page that doesn’t convert is like pouring water into a bucket with holes.

4. Blended CPA / Blended ROAS

Platform-specific CPA and ROAS are useful for optimisation, but they don’t tell the full story. Blended metrics combine all your marketing channels to give you a holistic view of acquisition costs.

Blended CPA = Total marketing spend ÷ Total new customers

Blended ROAS = Total revenue ÷ Total marketing spend

Why does this matter? Because channels interact. Someone might see your Meta ad, Google your brand name, and convert through organic search. Google Ads takes no credit. Meta takes view-through credit. Neither report tells the full truth.

Blended metrics cut through the attribution mess. If you spent £10,000 total across all channels and acquired 40 new customers, your blended CPA is £250 regardless of which platform claims the credit. That’s the number your bank account cares about.

Track blended metrics monthly. Compare against your target CPA or ROAS. If the blended numbers work, the channel mix is working — even if individual platform reports look confusing.

5. Customer lifetime value (LTV)

LTV isn’t a PPC metric per se, but it’s essential context for evaluating every other metric. If you don’t know what a customer is worth over their lifetime, you can’t know whether your CPA is acceptable.

LTV = Average order value × Purchase frequency × Customer lifespan

A subscription business with £50/month customers who stay for 18 months has an LTV of £900. That business can afford a CPA of £200-300 and still be very profitable. A one-time purchase business with a £50 AOV has a very different equation.

LTV should be the anchor for all your PPC targets. Set your target CPA as a fraction of LTV (typically one-third or less) and optimise toward that number.

Diagnostic Metrics

These metrics don’t tell you whether your campaigns are profitable, but they help you diagnose problems and identify opportunities.

Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR tells you what percentage of people who see your ad click on it. It’s a measure of ad relevance and appeal. A low CTR usually means your ad copy isn’t resonating or your targeting is off.

CTR benchmarks vary wildly by platform and campaign type. Google Search CTR of 3-5% is typical. Google Display CTR of 0.5-1% is normal. Meta CTR of 1-2% is average. Don’t compare across platforms — compare against your own historical performance and industry benchmarks.

CTR matters for Google Ads Quality Score, which affects your CPC. But a high CTR with a low conversion rate means you’re attracting clicks from the wrong people. CTR is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Cost per click (CPC)

CPC tells you what you’re paying for each click. It’s useful for budgeting and for spotting trends — rising CPCs might indicate increased competition or declining Quality Score.

But CPC alone is meaningless. A £15 click that converts into a £5,000 client is better than a £0.50 click that bounces. Always evaluate CPC in context of what those clicks produce.

Impression share

Impression share tells you what percentage of available impressions you’re capturing. If your impression share is 60%, you’re missing 40% of potential impressions — either because of budget constraints or because your ad rank isn’t high enough.

This is useful for understanding growth potential. If your campaigns are profitable and your impression share is low, increasing budget could capture more of the available demand. If impression share is already 90%+, you’ve captured most of the demand and need to expand keywords or channels to grow further.

Quality Score

Google’s 1-10 rating of keyword relevance. Low Quality Scores mean you’re paying more per click than necessary. It’s a diagnostic that points to specific improvements needed in ad relevance, CTR, or landing page experience.

Quality Score is important for cost efficiency but it’s a means to lower CPCs, which is a means to lower CPA. It belongs in the diagnostic section of your report, not the executive summary.

Vanity Metrics

These metrics look impressive in reports but don’t help you make decisions. They’re not useless — they provide context — but they should never be the headline of a report.

Impressions

Impressions tell you how many times your ad was shown. That’s it. An ad shown 100,000 times that generates zero conversions achieved nothing except spending your budget.

Impressions are sometimes used as a proxy for brand awareness, but even that’s dubious. An impression on Google Display where your ad was below the fold on a page nobody scrolled to is not awareness. It’s a number in a spreadsheet.

Impressions belong in the appendix of a report, not the front page.

Reach

Reach tells you how many unique people saw your ad. It’s marginally more useful than impressions because it accounts for frequency, but it still doesn’t tell you whether those people did anything as a result.

Reach matters for brand awareness campaigns where the goal is getting in front of as many relevant people as possible. For performance campaigns optimising for conversions, it’s irrelevant noise.

Engagement

Likes, comments, shares, saves. These make your social media manager happy but they don’t pay the bills. An ad with 500 likes and zero conversions is a content piece, not an advertisement.

Engagement can be a leading indicator — ads with high engagement sometimes convert well because the social proof encourages others to click. But engagement alone doesn’t justify spend. Track it, note it, but don’t optimise for it.

Building a Report That Works

The one-page summary

Every PPC report should start with a one-page summary that anyone in the business can understand. No jargon, no 20-column tables, no raw data dumps.

The one-page summary should include:

Total spend: How much was invested this period.
Total conversions: How many leads, sales, or whatever your primary conversion is.
CPA: Cost per conversion. Is it above or below target?
ROAS (if applicable): Revenue generated versus spend.
Trend: Is performance improving, stable, or declining versus last period?
Key actions: Two to three bullet points on what’s being done to improve performance.

That’s the entire first page. Everything else goes in subsequent pages for people who want to dig deeper.

The one-page summary answers the three questions: Is it profitable? Is it improving? What are we doing about it? If you can answer those in six lines, you’ve built a good report.

Comparing time periods

Raw numbers in isolation are almost meaningless. ‘We generated 50 leads this month’ — is that good? Bad? No one knows without context.

Always compare against:

Previous period: Month over month or week over week. Shows recent trajectory.
Same period last year: Accounts for seasonality. A dip in January might be normal if it happens every January.
Target: What were we aiming for? Are we above or below target? By how much?

Use percentage changes, not just absolute numbers. ‘CPA decreased 15% month over month from £120 to £102’ is more useful than just saying ‘CPA was £102’.

Be honest about context. If CPA dropped because you paused a high-CPA campaign, say so. If conversions spiked because of a seasonal promotion, note that the spike isn’t sustainable. Reports that only tell good news lose credibility. Reports that contextualise both wins and losses earn trust.

The goal of a PPC report is not to make the campaigns look good. It’s to give the business the information it needs to make smart decisions about where to invest its advertising budget. If you build your reports around the metrics that actually matter — CPA, ROAS, conversion rate, and LTV — and relegate everything else to supporting context, you’ll produce reports that drive action rather than gathering dust in someone’s inbox.