The Google Ads dashboard shows around 80 columns. The post we wrote on this back in 2019 highlighted four of them. The 2026 update is that those four still matter, but seven really decide whether the account pays back. And which seven depends on what kind of account you're running.
If you've ever opened Monday's report and felt unsure which numbers to look at first, this post is the version of the answer we'd give a client at the start of an engagement.
KPI vs metric, and why the difference saves you Monday mornings
Every column on the Google Ads dashboard is a metric. A KPI is the small subset you've decided actually maps to your goal. Most accounts watch 20 metrics and call them all KPIs. That's how dashboards become anxiety machines.
The discipline is editorial. Pick the few that move the business. Ignore the rest. Hold yourself to that list even when something else looks interesting that week.
A measurement you've decided actually maps to your business goal. Every metric is a measurement. A KPI is a measurement you've made a commitment to.
Pick your account type before you pick your KPIs
Same dashboard, three different KPI hierarchies. The standard listicle on this topic gives you the same 14-metric round-up regardless of whether you're a B2B services firm or a Shopify store. That's the wrong frame.
Three account types we'd separate before doing anything else.
- Lead generation.Services, B2B, professional services, anything where the conversion is a form fill or a phone call and the dollar value is figured out later. Cost per conversion is the headline.
- Ecommerce.Shopify, BigCommerce, anything where conversions carry a revenue value Google can see. Return on ad spend is the headline.
- Awareness.Rare for the £1k to £30k accounts we usually see. Most SMBs who say they want 'brand awareness' Google Ads are paying for clicks they're not converting. Treat the awareness column with a healthy default of 'you probably don't need this'.
| Lead generation | Ecommerce | Awareness | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Click-Through Rate (CTR) | Health metric | Health metric | Primary |
| Cost Per Click (CPC) | Health metric | Health metric | Primary |
| Conversion Rate | Primary | Primary | Ignore |
| Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) | Primary | Secondary | Ignore |
| Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) | Secondary if scored | Primary | Ignore |
| Quality Score | Secondary | Secondary | Secondary |
| Search Impression Share | Primary | Secondary | Primary |
The four KPIs every account watches
These four are the foundation. The order matters: CTR is leading, CPA is lagging. The numbers cited below are from LocaliQ's 2025 US paid-search benchmarks. UK and AU CPCs typically run 70 to 90% of US figures across most verticals; percentages like CTR and conversion rate translate more cleanly across markets.
1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is the percentage of people who see your ad and click it. Clicks divided by impressions.
The 2025 LocaliQ benchmark for paid search CTR across all industries is 6.66%. The 2018 WordStream industry average was 3.17%. Match-type changes and richer ad assets have roughly doubled the average since.
Industry range matters more than the average. Arts and Entertainment hits 13.10%. Attorneys and Legal sit at 5.97%. Dental at 5.44%. Comparing your B2B SaaS CTR to a restaurant tells you nothing useful.
CTR is a health metric, not a goal. Amy Bishop at Cultivative Marketing put this well.
"CPC and CTR are health metrics. They're important to keep a pulse on and to use as levers to achieve your goals. However, they aren't KPIs. Focusing too much on CPCs or CTR as a KPI can be detrimental.
SourceLocaliQ search advertising benchmarks, 2026Amy BishopOwner, Cultivative Marketing
When CTR drops, the usual suspects are ad copy that no longer matches the search query, a weak USP versus competitors in the same auction, or a targeting expansion that pulled in less qualified searches. Diagnose in that order.
2. Cost Per Click (CPC)
CPC is what you pay each time someone clicks your ad. The auction sets it from your bid, your Quality Score, your competitors' bids, and the ad's expected impact.
The 2025 industry average is $5.26. The 2018 figure was $2.69. Inflation, density of competition, and broad-match-by-default have all pushed CPCs up since.
The range is huge. Arts and Entertainment sits at $1.60 a click. Restaurants and Food at $2.05. Attorneys at $8.58. Home Improvement at $7.85. Construction trades and legal pay multiples of the average.
Don't optimise for CPC alone. The classic trap is lowering bids until CPCs look pretty and conversions evaporate at the same time. CPC only means something in the context of CPA below.
When CPC moves up, Quality Score has usually dropped, you've shifted into more competitive match types, or a new competitor has entered your auction. Cross-check Search Impression Share at the same time.
3. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of clicks that result in the action you care about. A lead form. A phone call. A checkout.
The 2025 industry average is 7.52%. The 2018 figure was 3.75%. Some of the lift is real. Some of it is composition. Better landing pages and smart bidding optimising toward the conversion both pulled the average up.
The bigger lever sits below the metric. What counts as a conversion? An undifferentiated "page view" event will pad the number and ruin smart bidding. A clean "qualified lead" event, filtered against your CRM, is the foundation every other KPI in the account rests on.
Conversion tracking is the silent #1
4. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
CPA is total spend divided by total conversions. The headline number for whether the account is paying back.
LocaliQ's 2025 average Cost Per Lead is $70.11 (the modern equivalent of CPA in their reporting). The 2018 figure was $48.96. Auto Repair sits at $28.50 a lead. Restaurants at $30.27. Attorneys at $131.63. Furniture at $121.51.
CPA only means something against your target CPA. And your target CPA is whatever you can sustain given your lead-to-customer conversion rate and customer lifetime value. The "compare to industry average" framing misses the point. Your benchmark is your unit economics.
"You can manage higher CPLs if the bottom line is growing.
SourceLocaliQ search advertising benchmarks, 2026Brett McHaleFounder, Empiric Marketing
Three more KPIs that earn their place in the weekly review
These three sit alongside the four above. Plenty of operators have tracked them for years. The point isn't that they're newer, it's that each deserves its own diagnostic frame and they're often the first to disappear from a thin agency report.
5. Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
ROAS is revenue per pound (or dollar) of ad spend. A ROAS of 4 means £4 of revenue for every £1 spent.
For an ecommerce account, this is THE KPI. CPA tells you what a customer cost. ROAS tells you whether the spend actually made the business money.
Smart bidding leans on this number. Target ROAS bidding is the default strategy for shopping campaigns with enough conversion data. The prerequisite is conversion-value tracking. If you're not passing the revenue from each conversion back to Google Ads, ROAS is a guess.
Rule of thumb. An account with under 30 conversions a month doesn't have enough signal for Target ROAS. Use Maximise Conversion Value with a budget cap until the volume builds, then move to a target.
When ROAS moves, the usual causes are a change in the conversion-value feed, a product-mix shift, or a major bid-strategy change still inside its learning phase. Wait two weeks before reacting to the third.
6. Quality Score
Quality Score is Google's 1-to-10 rating of your keyword, ad, and landing page combination. It comes from expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience, all visible as sub-components in the dashboard.
Quality Score is a leading indicator of CPC. Keywords with a score of 7 or higher usually sit at or below the auction baseline. Below 5, you're paying a penalty. The biggest single lift we get on inherited accounts comes from rebuilding ad copy to match the keyword theme. A jump from Quality Score 5 to 7 routinely takes 20 to 30% off CPC at the same bid.
A note on Performance Max. Quality Score doesn't apply inside PMax campaigns because PMax is signal-based, not keyword-based. Don't lose sleep over it there.
7. Search Impression Share (and the two "Lost IS" cousins)
Search Impression Share is the percentage of times your ad could have shown versus the times it actually did show.
Three numbers travel together. Search Impression Share. Search Lost IS (Budget). Search Lost IS (Rank). Lost IS (Budget) tells you how often you missed because you ran out of money. Lost IS (Rank) tells you how often you missed because Ad Rank was too low.
Both are signals, not problems. Chasing 100% impression share is rarely worth the marginal cost. But losing 40% to budget on a campaign that converts profitably is a clear case to ask for more spend. And losing impressions to rank is a campaign your competitor is beating in the auction. Quality Score, bidding, or ad copy is where you go to fix it.
The metrics to stop looking at
A short counter-list. Brief, opinionated, useful.
- Impressions on their own.Meaningless without context. For an SMB lead-gen account, this is noise.
- Average position.Google deprecated this in September 2019. Top Impression Rate and Absolute Top Impression Rate replaced it.
- Clicks as a top-line KPI.Outcome of CTR times impressions. Useful as a sanity check, not as strategy.
- Cost on its own.Spend matters only as a ratio to revenue or conversions.
- Display campaign metrics inside a search review.View-through conversions and Display CTR are different animals. Mixing them up wrecks weekly reviews.
The weekly checklist, by account type
The deliverable. Open the dashboard on Monday morning, scan these in order. If everything's in range, close the tab and do something useful with the next hour.
Lead generation accounts:
Is the count holding? A 20% drop versus the trailing 4-week average is the first thing that should catch your eye.
Sustained CPA above target for 2 to 3 weeks is when you act. One bad week isn't a signal.
A sudden drop usually means a tracking break or a landing page change. Check both before changing bids.
Is the campaign throttled? If yes, and CPA is healthy, that's your business case for more budget.
Ecommerce accounts:
Trend versus target. Smart bidding usually finds its feet inside 2 weeks. Don't react inside that window.
Both. A campaign can hit target ROAS by losing volume on cheap conversions while higher-value sales drop.
Check it weekly. A broken feed is the silent #1 cause of 'Target ROAS stopped working'.
Less load-bearing than in search, but a sudden drop usually means inventory or feed issues, not auction pressure.
A rule on volume and patience. Random variance dominates short windows. Under 30 conversions a month? Look at 4-week rolling windows, not single weeks. 30 to 100 conversions a month? Look at 2-week. Over 100? Weekly is fine. Reacting to noise is the second-biggest cause of underperformance, right after bad conversion tracking.
How agencies (including us) actually use these KPIs
What separates a good monthly report from a bad one is what's in the header, not the appendix.
A good Google Ads report opens with the three KPIs that map to the client's business goal. Lead-gen client: conversions, CPA, conversion volume trend. Ecommerce: revenue, ROAS, conversion volume. Everything else is supporting context.
Bad reports highlight whichever metric improved this month. Good reports lead with the same KPIs every month so the trend is legible across quarters.
If a report you're getting looks different every month, that's usually a story. Either the campaign's priorities are legitimately shifting, or the agency is steering toward the brightest number on the dashboard. The second is much more common.
What are the KPIs for Google Ads?
The most important Google Ads KPIs depend on your account type. Lead generation accounts focus on Cost Per Acquisition, Conversion Rate, Search Impression Share, and Quality Score. Ecommerce accounts focus on Return on Ad Spend, Conversion Rate, and Conversion Value. Click-Through Rate and Cost Per Click are health metrics for every account, but neither is a true KPI on its own.
What's a good Click-Through Rate for Google Ads in 2026?
LocaliQ's 2025 paid-search benchmark across all industries is 6.66%. The range is wide. Arts and Entertainment sits above 13%, Attorneys around 6%, Dental around 5.4%. Use your industry's average as the reference point, not the global figure. CTR is a health metric: low CTR points to ad copy or targeting issues, but high CTR alone doesn't guarantee a profitable campaign.
What ROAS should I aim for?
Your target ROAS is a function of margin, not an industry benchmark. The simplest rule: ROAS = 1 / margin gives you breakeven. A business with 30% margin needs a ROAS of at least 3.3 to break even on ad spend.
Most ecommerce accounts aim 30 to 50% above breakeven, but the right number sits inside your unit economics, not in an industry table.
How is Performance Max measured differently from a Search campaign?
Performance Max reports at the asset-group level rather than the keyword level. Quality Score doesn't apply. Search Terms Insights gives you query-level visibility, but you can't bid against individual keywords inside PMax. The KPIs that translate cleanly are CPA, ROAS, conversion volume, and conversion value. CTR and CPC are less useful because they're aggregated across multiple ad surfaces.
Is $20 a day enough for a Google Ads campaign?
Sometimes yes for a local services business in a low-CPC vertical like restaurants, beauty, or auto repair. Usually no for competitive categories. The maths is simple. If your CPC is $7 (a typical mid-bracket figure), $20 buys under three clicks a day.
Smart bidding needs around 30 conversions a month to optimise toward Target CPA or Target ROAS. Under that volume, you're flying blind.
Three takeaways
Pick your account type before you pick your KPIs. The lead-gen list, the ecommerce list, and the awareness list overlap but they're not the same. Treating them as one list is how you end up watching 14 metrics and optimising for none of them.
The four-KPI scaffold of CTR, CPC, Conversion Rate, and CPA is still the foundation. ROAS, Quality Score, and Impression Share are the layer that separates a managed account from a merely measured one.
The weekly checklist exists to lower your heart rate on Monday morning, not raise it. Watch the right seven. Ignore the other 73.
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