What a good Google Ads month looks like

Most monthly ad reports open with impressions and clicks, because those numbers are big and they usually go up. Neither one pays your bills. A good Google Ads month is one where you can see what each new customer, call or booking cost, and that cost is holding steady or falling.

Here's how we read a month when we're running Google Ads for Utah businesses, and what we'd want you to ask your own agency.

Two real months, to make it concrete. NIMA, a medical aesthetics school in South Jordan, had 367 conversions from Google Ads in December 2023 at $21.99 each, and the dashboard's year-on-year figure shows cost per conversion 14% lower than a year before. Quality Billiards' Pinball campaign brought in 149 phone calls from $2,763.34 of ad spend between April and June 2022, which works out to about $18.55 a call. Both numbers answer the only question that matters: what did a lead cost?

1. Start with cost per conversion

Cost per conversion is your total spend divided by the actions you care about. It belongs at the top of the report. If it's missing, or buried on page six, ask why. Everything else in the report should help explain why that number went up or down.

2. Check what counts as a conversion

A conversion is only useful if it's something a customer did that you'd pay for: a call that lasted long enough to be real, a form, a booking, a sale. If the account counts page views or button clicks as conversions, the cost per conversion looks wonderful and means nothing. Ask for the list of conversion actions and what each one tracks.

3. Compare like with like

Month-on-month comparisons mislead for most businesses because seasons move everything. December isn't November, and a barbecue restaurant's summer isn't its winter. Compare each month with the same month last year, as NIMA's report does, and look at the trend over a few months before you call anything a win.

4. Read the search terms, not just the keywords

Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. The search terms report is where wasted money shows up: the free-download hunters, the job seekers, the people looking for a different business with a similar name. A good month includes new negative keywords that stop paying for those.

5. Count calls, not just forms

For a lot of local businesses the phone is the real conversion. Quality Billiards' Pinball numbers are calls, not form fills, because that's how people buy a pool table. If your customers call, call tracking has to be set up before the month starts, or the report will undercount the best leads you got.

6. Know what a lead is worth to you

"Good" depends on your numbers, not ours. Work out roughly what a new customer is worth and how many leads it takes to win one. If a customer is worth $1,000 and you close one lead in four, a $100 lead is a bargain and a $400 lead is break-even. Without that number, nobody can tell you whether $22 or $220 a lead is a good month. With it, every report gets easier to judge.

7. Check where the ads are showing

Location settings are easy to get wrong and expensive when they are. A campaign meant for the Salt Lake valley can quietly show to people who are only interested in the area, not in it. Check that targeting is set to people in or regularly in your area, and look at the location report to see where the clicks and conversions actually come from. Then bid more where your best customers are and less, or nothing, where they aren't.

8. Watch the pacing

A month that spends its whole budget by the 20th isn't a good month, even if the cost per lead looks fine. Your ads go dark for the last week and competitors take those customers. A good report shows spend against budget through the month, and explains any day that spent far more than usual.

9. Watch the page the ad sends people to

The ad gets the click. The landing page gets the customer. NIMA's December 2023 campaigns converted 12.78% of clicks, which only happens when the page matches the ad and makes the next step obvious. If clicks are steady but conversions drop, look at the page before you touch the bids: a broken form, a slow page on a phone or a missing phone number will sink a month faster than any bidding change.

10. Red flags in a monthly report

A report with no cost per conversion. Conversions that include page views. Only month-on-month comparisons. No search terms. No list of what was changed. A recommendation to raise the budget with no numbers behind it. Any one of those is worth a question. Three or more and the report is protecting the agency, not informing you.

11. What a good report ends with

Every good monthly report ends the same way: what we changed, what happened, and what we're changing next. Bids moved, ads rewritten, a landing page tested, search terms blocked. You should be able to read it in two minutes and know whether your money is working.

That's the standard we hold our own reports to. Spend, leads, cost per lead and the plan for next month, in plain language.