/ Blog
Home Blog Contact Buddy Ads Builder Audit Engine

What should you report on for Google Ads?

Based on an r/PPC community discussion
John Williams — Founder of AHMEEGO
John Williams
· 10 min read
Google Ads Strategy

After managing over $350M in Google Ads spend across industries ranging from SaaS to ecommerce to financial services, I've sat through hundreds of client reporting calls — the good, the bad, and the ones where someone asks "but why is my CTR going up if conversions are going down?" Getting your reporting framework right isn't just about looking professional. It's about telling the right story, catching problems early, and making decisions that actually move revenue. If you're managing a SaaS client in the finance or payments space (as one practitioner recently asked about in r/PPC), the stakes are even higher — your client's leadership team likely speaks fluent metrics, and a surface-level report will get you fired faster than a bad quarter.

Why Most Google Ads Reports Miss the Point

A common question in the r/PPC community is some variation of: "What metrics should I include in my monthly report?" And the answers people give are usually technically correct — impressions, clicks, CTR, CPA, ROAS — but they miss the underlying problem. Reporting isn't a checklist. It's a narrative. The metrics you select need to answer one fundamental question: Is this account moving the business forward?

The biggest reporting failure I see from practitioners at every level is reporting on what's easy to pull from the interface, not what's actually meaningful to the client. Clicks and impressions are easy. Influenced pipeline and cost-per-qualified-lead are harder — but they're what your client's VP of Marketing is going to bring into their board meeting.

Key Insight: There's a difference between vanity metrics (impressions, CTR) and decision-driving metrics (CPL by funnel stage, MQL volume, pipeline influenced). Your report should have both — but your narrative should center on the latter.

The Core Metrics Framework: Four Layers of Reporting

I organize every Google Ads report into four layers. Each layer serves a different audience and a different purpose. For a SaaS or fintech client, this structure helps you speak to both the tactical practitioner level and the executive level without creating two separate documents.

Layer 1: Business Outcome Metrics (The "So What" Layer)

These are the metrics that matter to someone who doesn't care about keyword bids. For a SaaS client in payments, this typically means:

For a fintech SaaS client, a healthy CPQL benchmark typically lands between $150–$450 depending on ACV. If you're seeing CPQLs above $600 and ACV is under $10K annually, your unit economics are likely upside down and that needs to be the headline of your report.

Layer 2: Campaign Performance Metrics (The "How Are We Doing" Layer)

These metrics live at the campaign and ad group level. They're what you use to optimize, but they're also useful for explaining the story behind Layer 1.

Best Practice: For SaaS clients with longer sales cycles, always segment conversions by type. A "contact us" form and a "request a demo" form are not the same signal. Weight them differently in your reporting and in your Smart Bidding targets. I typically value a demo request 3–5x a generic contact form submission for bidding purposes.

Layer 3: Efficiency Metrics (The "Are We Being Smart With Budget" Layer)

This is where you demonstrate media competence. These metrics prove you're not wasting money.

Metric What It Tells You Healthy Benchmark (SaaS/Fintech)
Click-Through Rate (CTR) Ad relevance to query intent 3–8% for branded; 1–4% for non-brand
Quality Score Landing page + ad relevance signal 6–10 for core keywords
Impression Share (Search) Market coverage 70%+ for branded; 30–60% for competitive non-brand
Invalid Click Rate Traffic quality / click fraud exposure <5% (flag anything above this)
Cost Per Click (CPC) Auction competitiveness $8–$35 for payments/fintech non-brand
Budget Utilization Are you spending what was approved? 95–105% of monthly budget target

Layer 4: Diagnostic Metrics (The "What Do We Fix Next" Layer)

Most agencies skip this layer entirely. That's a mistake. Diagnostic metrics are what separates a report from a spreadsheet dump. Include at least 2–3 of these monthly:

Common Mistake: Reporting on Quality Score as a primary KPI. QS is a diagnostic tool, not a goal. I've seen practitioners optimize aggressively for QS 10s while their actual CPL tripled. Quality Score is a means, not an end — include it for context, not as a headline metric.

SaaS & Fintech-Specific Reporting Considerations

As practitioners often discuss in PPC communities, SaaS reporting has unique challenges that generic ecommerce frameworks don't address. Here's what to add when your client is in a B2B SaaS or financial services vertical:

Attribution Modeling in Long Sales Cycles

Payments and fintech SaaS deals can take 60–180 days to close. Your monthly report will almost always be looking at incomplete data if you rely solely on last-click or even data-driven attribution in Google Ads. My recommendation is a two-track approach:

  1. Report Google Ads attributed conversions as your leading indicator (fast feedback loop)
  2. Report CRM-sourced closed revenue attributed to paid search as your lagging indicator (true business impact)
  3. Flag the lag explicitly — "This month's revenue reflects leads acquired 90–120 days ago"

This prevents the common scenario where a bad month in Google Ads tanks the report even though revenue is actually strong — or worse, where great lead volume masks downstream quality collapse.

Branded vs. Non-Branded Segmentation

Always report these separately. This isn't optional. Blended metrics hide the truth. I've inherited accounts where a client's "improving" CPQL was entirely driven by branded search growth (due to a PR spike or product launch) while non-branded performance was actively deteriorating. If you blend them, you'll miss it — and so will your client.

For a SaaS fintech company, branded CPAs are often 5–15x cheaper than non-branded. If branded starts dominating your volume mix, your blended CPA looks great but your actual acquisition efficiency on net-new prospects may be cratering.

Key Insight: For B2B SaaS, add a "Lead Quality Score" metric to your reporting if your client has lead scoring set up in their CRM. Pull the average quality score of leads sourced from paid search and compare it to organic, referral, and direct. This single addition will make your report more valuable than 90% of what agencies deliver.

PMAX & Campaign Type Transparency

If you're running Performance Max alongside Search campaigns (which is increasingly common in SaaS), your report needs to explicitly break down spend and conversion volume by campaign type. PMAX cannibalization of branded search is real — I've seen it pull 20–35% of branded conversion credit in accounts where it wasn't properly segmented. Report it transparently, even if the story isn't pretty.

Reporting Frequency & Format Best Practices

Monthly is the standard cadence for formal reporting, but it shouldn't be the only touchpoint. Here's what I recommend for an engaged SaaS client:

Cadence Format Key Contents
Weekly Slack/email summary (5–7 bullets) Spend pacing, conversion volume, any anomalies or tests launched
Monthly Full report (PDF or slide deck + live dashboard) All four layers above; MoM & YoY comparison; optimization log
Quarterly Strategy review (video call) Trend analysis, budget planning, competitive landscape, test roadmap

For the monthly report format, I strongly recommend a live Looker Studio dashboard plus a written narrative summary. The dashboard gives clients self-serve access (which builds trust); the written narrative tells them what to actually think about the numbers. Never send a dashboard without a narrative — that's just a spreadsheet with better formatting.

Best Practice: Always include an "Optimization Log" section in your monthly report. List every change you made during the month — bid adjustments, new negative keywords, ad copy tests launched, audience additions, budget shifts — with a one-line rationale for each. This is the single most underrated trust-builder in client reporting. It shows you're actively managing the account, not just collecting a retainer.

What to Exclude (Or Deprioritize) from Reports

Just as important as what you include is what you leave out or minimize. Cluttered reports dilute attention from what matters. Metrics I deliberately deprioritize or exclude entirely from client-facing reports:

Common Mistake: Reporting month-over-month comparisons without accounting for seasonality. A 15% drop in conversions in December for a B2B SaaS client isn't a crisis — it's December. Always include a year-over-year comparison alongside MoM, and call out known seasonal factors explicitly. Failing to do this leads to panic-driven decision-making and unnecessary budget cuts during slow periods that will hurt Q1 recovery.

Connecting Paid Search to Revenue: The Reporting Holy Grail

As practitioners increasingly discuss across PPC communities, the most sophisticated clients want to understand paid search's contribution to actual revenue — not just leads. This requires infrastructure investment upfront, but it pays off massively in reporting credibility.

For a fintech SaaS client, the setup I recommend is:

  1. Import Google Ads conversions from Salesforce or HubSpot via the native connector — track MQL creation as a micro-conversion, demo completion and closed/won as primary conversions
  2. Use UTM parameters consistently across all campaigns so CRM source attribution is clean
  3. Set up offline conversion imports to push closed revenue back into Google Ads — this enables Smart Bidding to optimize toward actual revenue, not just lead volume
  4. Report pipeline ROAS = Total Pipeline Influenced by Paid Search ÷ Total Paid Search Spend. A healthy benchmark for fintech SaaS is 4:1 to 8:1 on pipeline ROAS (not closed revenue ROAS, which will lag significantly)

When you can walk into a monthly report and say "We spent $42,000 in paid search and influenced $310,000 in qualified pipeline this month," the conversation changes entirely. You're no longer defending CPCs — you're discussing investment strategy.

What to Do Next: Your Reporting Action Plan

If you're building or overhauling a Google Ads reporting framework for a SaaS or fintech client, here are five concrete steps to take immediately:

  1. Audit your current conversion tracking. Verify that every conversion action is firing correctly, segmented by type (demo, trial, contact), and weighted appropriately for Smart Bidding. Fix this before anything else — bad data invalidates everything downstream.
  2. Separate branded and non-branded campaigns if they're currently blended. Create separate campaigns or at minimum separate reporting views. This single change will reveal performance dynamics that are currently hidden.
  3. Build your four-layer reporting framework. Map your current metrics against Business Outcomes, Campaign Performance, Efficiency, and Diagnostics. Identify gaps — for most accounts, the Business Outcome layer is either missing or relies on metrics the client's leadership doesn't actually use.
  4. Add an Optimization Log to your next report. Document every change you made in the past 30 days with a brief rationale. Send it. Watch the client's trust level increase immediately.
  5. Start the CRM integration conversation. If your SaaS client isn't passing opportunity and closed/won data back into Google Ads via offline conversion imports, put it on the Q1 roadmap. It's the single highest-leverage technical investment for improving both reporting quality and campaign performance simultaneously.

Reporting is ultimately a trust exercise. Every month, your client is deciding whether you understand their business, whether you're actively managing their investment, and whether the money they're spending is worth it. A reporting framework built around real business outcomes — not just platform metrics — is the clearest signal you can send that the answer to all three questions is yes.

AI Disclosure: This article was generated with AI assistance based on a community discussion on Reddit r/PPC. Expert analysis and practitioner perspective by John Williams, Founder, AHMEEGO · Google Ads Practitioner with $350M+ in managed Google Ads spend. AI was used to draft and structure the content; all strategic recommendations reflect real campaign experience.