A Guide To Understanding Google Ads Reporting & Metrics

If you are an online business, you should know that Google’s ad display network connects with over 90% of users globally. Google Ads, therefore, allows you to advertise with the broadest possible outreach available online today.

Before you begin, you should familiarize yourself with the essential reports Google Ads uses and the metrics that highlight the performance of a successful ad campaign.

Further along in this blog, you will discover the specific reports in Google Ads, the key metrics you need to track, and how you can use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to analyze the collected data for practical, actionable insights.

What is a Google Ads Report?

Reports in Google Ads are a collection of metrics that highlight how your marketing and advertising campaigns have performed. You get granular insights into metrics such as:

• The number of users who clicked on your ads
• The demographics that responded best to your ads
• Conversion rates on your ads
• Ad impressions
• Average CPC

Use these insights to pinpoint the marketing or advertising efforts that create the desired impact and those that require revisiting. For example, if the conversion rate of your advertisements is not at par with industry standards, it is time to optimize your marketing strategies.

Google Ads reporting empowers you to make data-driven decisions to create more impactful ads. For example, using the insights from Google Ads reports, you can optimize your keyword bidding methods and set mindful budgets.

Bonus: Compare Bing Ads and Google Ads to understand which suits your ad campaign better.

How To Access Google Ads Report?

If you already using Google Ads, here is how you can access your reports:

• Sign in to your Google Ads account, then click on “Campaigns.”
• Click on the “Insights and Reports” option.

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• Next, click on “Report Editor” to see the list of Google Ads reports.
• Here, you can select and open any predefined report from the “Predefined reports (dimensions)” to view reports.

If you are using GA4, follow the steps below to access your reports:

• Open your GA4 dashboard and click on the “Acquisition” section in the left sidebar, and open the dropdown button.

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• Click on the “Overview” option.
• From the cards displayed, find the one that says “Sessions by Session Google Ads.” At the bottom of this card, you will notice the “View Google Ads campaigns” button—click on it.
• You can now see the standard, preconfigured Google Ads report in your GA4 interface.

Key Google Ads Metrics: What Do They Mean?

Let’s now understand the key metrics in Google Ads reporting with respect to three parameters: what they are, what they signify, and what they tell you about your ad campaigns.

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

• Definition: Click-through Rate is the number of times people click on your ad divided by the number of times your ad was displayed. On average, the CTR for Google Shopping Ads is about 0.86%.
• How to Analyze: A high click-through rate signifies that your ad copy is compelling and that your ads are appearing in front of your target audience. To improve the CTR further, you can compare keywords and CTR for various ad groups and identify areas of improvement.
• What it Reveals: A good CTR shows that your ads are effective and reveals the pain points of the target audience.
• Example: An ad that receives 5 clicks for every 100 impressions has a CTR of 5%.

2. Quality Score

• Definition: It is a diagnostic measure of how your ads and landing pages compare to your competitors for a specific keyword. It is calculated based on three factors – expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience on a scale of 1 to 10.
• How to Analyze: The quality score helps you pinpoint areas for improvement, such as enhancing ad relevance or user experience on landing pages. Use this score to filter out low-quality ads and readjust resource allocation.
• What it Reveals: Higher quality scores help your ads appear in better positions in searches without outbidding your competitors, improving your ad visibility and reducing cost-per-click. However, this metric does not include keyword match types, ad placement, and account structure, so you may need other metrics to measure this impact.
• Example: A quality score of 10 means your ad is highly relevant to a user’s search query.

You can check the quality score in Google Ads by navigating to the “Campaigns” icon and clicking on the “Audience, keywords, and content” dropdown. Click on “Search keywords” and find the columns icon in the upper right-hand corner. Find “Modify columns for keywords” and open “Quality Score.” Enable “Quality Score” and add it to the statistics table to check it.

3. Conversion Rate

• Definition: Conversion Rate is the percentage of interactions with your ads that result in conversions. The average conversion rate across all industries for Google Ads is 2.85%.
• How to Analyze: Compare the conversion rates of various ads in a campaign or ad group to highlight the ones bringing the most customers. Use the GA4 dashboard to track specific conversion goals.
• What it Reveals: A good conversion rate means that viewers who see your ads and landing pages complete the desired actions you have set to achieve the campaign goals.
• Example: Your conversion rate is 2% if 2 out of every 100 visitors to your website take the desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or completing a purchase.

4. Cost Per Click (CPC)

• Definition: CPC is the amount that you pay when someone clicks on your ads. The average CPC on search ads is about $2.69 across industries.
• How to Analyze:  CPC trends over time show if the competition for a keyword is going up or down (higher CPC means higher competition or that competitor ads are more relevant than yours).
• What it Reveals:  This metric helps you understand how cost-effective your campaigns’ are. Aim to keep the CPC low so you can use your budget for other aspects of your campaign.

5. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

• Definition: ROAS shows the revenue your company earned from a campaign against every dollar spent for the campaign.
• How to Analyze: ROAS is crucial for campaign profitability, and you should aim for a higher ROAS. You can use GA4 to track the conversions that translate into ROAS.
• What it Reveals: Ad campaigns are ultimately supposed to help you increase your sales revenue. By tracking ROAS, you can screen the campaigns that are not profitable to your business.

Key Google Ads Reports: Understanding and Analyzing

Before diving into Google Ads reports, let’s understand the difference between reports and Google Ads metrics.

Metrics are individual data points that highlight the performance of your ad campaigns at any given time. On the other hand, reports track these metrics over a period to highlight how effective a campaign has been.

Google Ads provides you with numerous types of reports that cover different aspects of your campaigns:

1. Campaign Performance Report

• What it Covers: This report shows you the key events of your campaigns, like clicks, conversions, CPC, and impressions.
• How to Analyze: Use this report to analyze your conversions, such as purchases, signups, app downloads, etc. These insights are critical to identifying your top-performing campaigns and ad groups and comparing their performance across demographics and timelines.
• Key Actionable Insights: This report helps you adjust your campaigns based on the high or low levels of your key metrics (like CPC).

2. Search Terms Report

• What it Covers: This report shows the list of frequently used search terms that triggered your ads to be displayed in front of the audience.
• How To Analyze: Use this report to identify the top keywords, implement negative keywords, allocate a budget, and refine your Google ads copy. Look for high- and low-performing search terms to understand which ads are more visible than others.
• Key Actionable Insights: Search term reports help you discover user intent, which you can use to optimize your campaigns or create new ad groups for better targeting. They also help you improve your ad quality score through keyword optimization and save money by preventing wasteful spending.

Read Also: 500+ Top Ecommerce Keywords

Pro Tip: Search terms and keywords are two different things. Search terms refer to the phrases that a user enters into the search engines to look for information. On the other hand, keywords are the phrases that advertisers use to target their ideal audience in search campaigns.

3. Keyword Performance Report

• What it Covers: This report highlights the performance of your chosen keywords in terms of click-through rates, conversions, quality score, and other metrics.
• How to Analyze: Use this report to identify underperforming keywords that have high CPC and low-quality scores and refocus your resources on the keywords that deliver better results.
• Key Actionable Insights: This report helps you remove low-performing keywords to minimize wasteful spending. You can also view high-performing keywords to optimize your ad campaigns for better ROI and ROAS.

4. Auction Insights Report

• What it Covers: This report compares your campaign performance in the same auctions to your competitors’ campaigns.
• How to Analyze: Use this report to gauge how competitive your ads are, using metrics such as overlap rate (how many impressions your and competing ads receive at the same time). Overlap rate highlights how many more or fewer impressions your ad got against a competitor’s ad.
• Key Actionable Insights: By examining competitor behavior in those metrics, you can adjust your bidding strategies (like increasing bids). These insights tell you where your competition is ranking better.

5. Ad Performance Report

• What it Covers: This report highlights the performance of each ad in your ad campaigns, using key metrics such as CTR, quality score, and more.
• How to Analyze: Use this report to analyze or re-evaluate your bidding strategies and budgeting. Use the metrics from A/B testing to adopt the best ad creatives. Identify the patterns in your high-performing ads and replicate those strategies.
• Key Actionable Insights: This report is critical to identifying the ads that your audience interacts with the most. It helps you reallocate your budget and eliminate underperforming ads.

Did you know that you can also check the performance of your Google Ads account? Here’s a detailed guide on Google Ads Audit.

Other Types Of Google Ads Reports

• Historical reports: This report shows you historical ad data (of up to 2 years) for clicks, revenue, CTR, and total impressions for any data you select.
• Future sell-through: The sell-through rate (STR) shows (in percentage) how much of your inventory was sold compared to the stock you received over a certain period.
• Reach: This report indicates the number of unique visitors exposed to various advertisers, orders, line items, or ad units in your Google Ad Manager network during a specified period.
• Privacy & messaging: This report highlights how your viewers are interacting with regulatory and compliance messages displayed on your digital channels.
• Ad speed: These reports display a picture of your ad network’s ad serving speed. You can check whether your ads are quick or slow to load.
• Analytics: This report shows you post-click metrics of how users interact with your ads, landing pages, and website. Use this to view conversion patterns and user behavior.
• Partner finance: This report helps you track your revenue splits and assignments with your network’s hosts and partners.
• YouTube Consolidated: This report shows you YouTube partner sales data for ad requests served through your Ad Manager network.
• Beta reports: Reports such as video creative quality, real-time video, revenue verification, and technical ad delivery are currently in the Beta phase.
• Video creative quality: This report provides information on the number of times that viewers see each content video.

Using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to Track Google Ads Performance

Google Analytics is a tool that helps website and app owners gauge the effectiveness of their content and analyze user interactions. Use GA4 with your Google Ads setup to extract more detailed insights on keyword performance, user behavior, etc., on your ads.

If you’re a Shopify user, here’s a guide: 3 Methods For Installing Google Analytics 4 On Shopify

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You can link GA4 to Google Ads by going to the “Data Manager” option in your Google Ads account and adding GA4 under the “Data Source” option.

GA4 augments your Google Ads analysis with deeper insights into user behavior, especially for post-click metrics.

If you want to reach high-intent groups with your ads, linking GA4 to Google Ads can help you create more holistic audiences by keeping track of them across platforms (such as websites, subdomains, apps, etc.).

What can you track with Google Analytics (GA4)?

GA4 keeps track of the following metrics for your ads:

1. GA4 Conversions and Events for Google Ads

Get deeper insights into converting actions, such as scroll depth, form fills, visitor interactions, and more. These details help you understand what users search for on your website after clicking on your ad.

2. GA4 User Behavior Reports

Get a better idea of what users look for after clicking on your ads, such as time on page, site searches, app uninstalls, file downloads, bounce rates, etc. This helps you understand the relevance of your landing pages to the ads and how you can improve retention.

3. GA4 Audience Segments and Retargeting

GA4 analytics provide a holistic picture of your audience before and after clicking on your ads. It helps you build custom audience segments and new ad groups on this user behavior to create more effective retargeting campaigns.

Advanced Google Ads Reporting Features

Google Ads Reporting provides you with two advanced features that focus on your ads data:

1. Custom Reports

Custom reports in Google Ads filter your campaign data according to the criteria you specify to focus on the insights that matter most to you.

Follow the steps below to create a custom Google Ads report:

• Sign in to Google Ads. Click on “Campaigns” and then “Insights and Reports.”
• Click on “Report Editor.”
• Click on the “+ Custom” icon, and select the visualization or chart type (line, table, column, bar, etc.).
• Choose the Dimensions of your report from the right-side panel and drag-drop them into your chart.
• Choose the metrics (such as clicks) from the panel in your chart.
• Your custom chart will now reflect the parameters you have selected. When you are satisfied, click on “Save.”

Custom reports help you eliminate the noise from your campaign monitoring and focus on your ads’ KPIs. They also help you optimize your efforts and resources accordingly.

2. Looker Studio Integration

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Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, offers powerful reporting capabilities to discover trends, insights, and patterns in your ads and customer data. Create interactive and shareable reporting dashboards to capture Google Ads performance.

Follow the steps below to connect Looker Studio to Google Ads:

• Sign in to Looker Studio. On the home page, click on the “+ Create” icon and then select “Data Source.”
• Click on the “Google Ads” connector. Authorize Looker Studio to access your account.
• Next, click on “ALL ACCOUNTS.” Search for the account ID you want to connect.
• Select “Overall Account Fields.” In the upper right corner, find and click “CONNECT.”

Looker Studio is a critical integration to get dynamic data that updates when Google Ads data changes. You can create fully customized reports that are easily shareable with your team.

How to Read Google Ads Reports

Google Ads reports provide you with a vast collection of insights. It is crucial to understand how to read these reports to maximize the benefits of this data. Here’s a guide on how to interpret key components:

1. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Reports show you a collection of various metrics that highlight different aspects of your campaigns and ad groups. Therefore, focus on the objectives of your campaign and identify the key metrics.

For example, conversion rate, CPC, and ROAS are the KPIs that matter for a lead-generation campaign. Apply filters to your report to screen for these KPIs.

How to read: Analyze the trends you see to identify opportunities for improvement or scaling successful campaigns.

2. Analyze Segments

Segmenting the filtered metrics by device, time of day, audience, keyword match, and other parameters can simplify your reports. This allows you to focus on the granular metric data for deeper understanding.

How to read: Identify customer segments (such as mobile searches) that perform better than other segments, and use this data to adjust your targeting efforts. For example, if the CTR from the mobile segment is low, adjust ad bids or enhance the landing page loading speed for mobile phones to get better results.

3. Focus on Conversion Metrics

The conversion rate ultimately determines a campaign’s success. Measure metrics such as conversion rate, CPC, and conversion value to determine each campaign’s degree of success.

How to read: Tabulate these metrics for each campaign you run to identify the one that performs best and is the most cost-effective.

4. Review Search Terms and Keyword Match Types

A search term report shows you the actual search phrases used by customers that triggered your ads. A keyword match type report shows you how closely your keywords match the search terms used by your audience. Combine this data to identify how to target your ads better.

How to read: Work with negative keywords to eliminate bad targeting and optimize your bids for high-performing keywords. 

5. Benchmark with Auction Insights

Leverage the Auction Insights report to compare your campaign performance with competitors. Look for metrics like outranking share that measure the number of times your ad outranked your competitor’s or if your ad appeared when theirs did not.

How to read: This report is important because it reveals how your ads are performing against the competition. Use this report to improve your ad performance by adjusting bids and improving the landing pages and ad quality.

Conclusion

The average ROI of Google Ads shows that businesses make around $2 for every $1 they spend. It is important to keep track of how your ads are performing to benefit from that potential.

Campaign success depends on a lot of metrics, all of which you can access in Google Ads reporting. To get deeper insights into the performance of your Google Ads campaigns, augment its capabilities with GA4.

Customizing your reports and visualizations through Google Ads reports allows you to explore your data in greater detail and better focus, helping you continuously optimize your ad campaign.

FAQs

1. How to get a Google ads report?

To get a Google ad report, click “Campaigns” and then open “Insights and Reports.” Click on “Report Editor.” Under “Predefined reports (dimensions),” select the type of report you want and click on it.

2. How to check Google Ads results?

Navigate to the Campaigns tab, and then click on the “Campaigns” icon. Click the columns icon (three vertical bars) above the statistics table.

Select “Modify columns” from the dropdown menu.

In the “Modify columns” window, click on “Results” to expand the options.

Check the box next to “Results” to include this column in your view.

Click “Apply” to save your changes.

The “Results” column displays the number of conversions achieved for each of the standard goals in your account, based on your primary conversion actions.

3. What is the best Google ads report?

The best report depends on the specific metrics you are tracking. The Ad Performance report gives you a snapshot of your ads’ performance.

4. How to analyze the Google Ads report?

Analyze Google Ads reports by focusing on metrics like impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, and CPC, to identify trends, optimize your ad campaigns, and improve ad performance.

5. What is the most important metric to track in Google Ads reports?

ROAS is the most important metric that reflects how much profit you have made from your ads. ROAS differ significantly from ROI, which is the overall profitability of an investment your business makes.

6. How do I interpret the Click-Through Rate (CTR) in my Google Ads report?

A higher CTR means more people clicked on your ad, indicating that the ad content was compelling and relevant. A low CTR means you may need to improve your copy and targeting.

7. What is the best way to analyze conversion performance using Google Ads reports?

Use Google Ads reports to view key metrics like conversion rate, CPC, and ROAS to identify your top-performing campaigns. Then, view the Search Terms report to understand your user intents and tweak your ad keywords. Move on to report filters and segmentation capabilities to view important campaign data.

8. How can I use the Search Terms report to optimize my ad targeting?

Search terms show you the keywords that triggered your advertisements. You can focus on high-performing terms and include them in your ad copy for better visibility of your ads.

9. What does the Quality Score in my Google Ads report tell me about my campaign’s performance?

The quality score shows how well your ad performs compared to the ads of other competitors on a scale of 1 to 10 on a keyword level. A high score shows that your ads are more relevant than the competition’s.

Check Out These Related Articles:

• Google Ads Auction Insights
• Performance Max Audience Signals
• Invalid Clicks in Google Ads
• Performance Max Campaigns
• How to Run Google Ads
• What is Smart Bidding in Google Ads?