Monthly PPC Reporting: What Agencies Should Show You

The Problem with Vanity Metrics – And Why Your Dashboard Should Be Built for Decision-Makers

Let’s talk about PPC dashboards. They’re supposed to give you clarity, right? But too often, they’re built around vanity metrics or made to impress rather than inform. Real ad efficiency isn’t just about ROAS or click-through rates – it’s about how paid activity contributes to your bottom line. The smarter the dashboard, the more empowered your team is to make the right call.

Here’s how we break it down across the different roles in a business (this post is inspired by Feifan Wang and his LinkedIn post here):

🧠 Executive Level: Net Profit per Customer Cohort

If you’re in the C-suite, you don’t care how many clicks your campaign got. You care about profitability. Specifically, which customer segments are driving the most net profit. This means looking beyond acquisition cost and into margins, repeat purchases, and customer service costs. A sharp dashboard will help you spot which cohorts to double down on – and which to walk away from.

This is where ad efficiency gets real. Not just “is the campaign working?” but “is it sustainably growing profit?”

👨‍💼 Director Level: Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

Marketing directors and heads of growth should live in the space between short-term results and long-term strategy. CLTV is their north star. Are we acquiring the right kind of customers – the ones who stick around, spend more, and stay loyal?

If your dashboard doesn’t show how paid traffic is influencing CLTV by channel, campaign or even creative, you’re flying blind. A £150 CAC might look steep – until you realise the average customer is worth £2,000 over 12 months.

👩‍💻 Manager Level: Monthly Retention Rate

Marketing managers are in the trenches. They need to know what’s keeping customers engaged, how many are coming back, and where drop-off is happening. Retention rate tells you if your funnel is healthy. It’s also a great way to diagnose issues with messaging, onboarding, or post-click experience that may be sabotaging your ad spend.

You can pump budget into ads all day long – but if you’re leaking customers out the back end, what’s the point?

🤦‍♂️ Intern Level: “Our ROAS is 4.2x!” (But Somehow Cash Flow is Negative)

We’ve all seen it. The shiny ROAS figure proudly paraded around while the business is quietly wondering why cash flow is in freefall. A high ROAS can be misleading if it’s not tied to actual profitability or cash impact.

Is your ROAS calculated on gross revenue or net profit? Does it include product returns, discounts, fulfilment costs? A clean-looking ROAS that ignores business fundamentals is worse than useless – it’s dangerous.

What a Monthly PPC Report Should Actually Include

That role-based lens is the why. Here’s the what. A monthly PPC report should be more than a screenshot of the Google Ads dashboard with a friendly note attached. At a minimum, a good one gives you every line below, for the month just gone, with the previous month (and ideally the same month last year) sitting next to it so you can see the direction of travel:

• Spend – total media budget deployed across every platform, not just Google.
• Impressions and clicks – reach and engagement, useful for context, never the headline.
• CTR (click-through rate) – clicks ÷ impressions, as a percentage.
• CPC (cost per click) – spend ÷ clicks.
• Conversions and conversion rate – conversions ÷ clicks, with the conversion action clearly named (sale, lead, call).
• CPA (cost per acquisition) – spend ÷ conversions.
• ROAS – ad-driven revenue ÷ ad spend, stated on gross or net so you know which.
• Net profit and margin – revenue minus cost of goods, returns, discounts, fulfilment and the ad spend itself.
• MER (marketing efficiency ratio) – total revenue ÷ total marketing spend, blended across all channels.
• New vs returning revenue – how much growth is genuinely new custom versus repeat buyers.
• Budget pacing – planned spend versus actual, so nobody is surprised on the 28th.
• Month-on-month change – the delta on every number above, in plain percentages.
• Commentary and next-month actions – what happened, why, and the three things being changed next.

If a line item is missing, that’s not an oversight to shrug at. It’s usually the number that doesn’t flatter the account.

What Your Report Shows vs What It Should Show

Most reports lead with the metrics that look best. The ones that matter are often a column to the right. Here’s the translation:

Metric	What most agencies report	What actually matters	How to calculate it	Who it’s for (Exec/Director/Manager)
Return	ROAS on gross revenue	Net profit and margin after all costs	Revenue − COGS − returns − discounts − fulfilment − ad spend	Exec
Efficiency	Channel ROAS in isolation	MER across every channel combined	Total revenue ÷ total marketing spend	Exec / Director
Acquisition	Cost per lead or CPA	CAC vs customer value (CLTV)	CAC = total sales & marketing spend ÷ new customers	Director
Value	Conversions this month	Customer lifetime value by channel	AOV × purchases per year × avg. lifespan (yrs) × gross margin	Director
Loyalty	New conversions only	New vs returning revenue split	Returning-customer revenue ÷ total revenue	Manager
Retention	Not shown	Monthly retention rate	((customers at end − new customers) ÷ customers at start) × 100	Manager
Engagement	Impressions and clicks	CTR and conversion rate trend	CTR = clicks ÷ impressions; CVR = conversions ÷ clicks	Manager
Pacing	Spend to date	Spend vs plan, with forecast	Actual spend ÷ planned spend for the period	Manager / Director

Your Monthly PPC Report Checklist

Before you accept a report as done, run it against this. A strong monthly PPC report will tick every box:

1. Spend, impressions, clicks, CTR and CPC for the month, with last month alongside.
2. Conversions, conversion rate and CPA, with the conversion action named.
3. ROAS stated as gross or net – never left ambiguous.
4. Net profit and margin after COGS, returns, discounts and fulfilment.
5. MER blended across every channel, not just paid search.
6. New vs returning revenue, so growth is honest.
7. Budget pacing – planned versus actual, plus a forecast to month-end.
8. Month-on-month (and year-on-year) change on every headline number.
9. Written commentary explaining the why behind the movement.
10. Three next-month actions, owned and dated.

Red Flags in Your Agency’s Reporting

If you suspect the numbers are being dressed up, these are the tells:

• ROAS quoted on gross revenue with no mention of margin, returns or fulfilment.
• No month-on-month comparison – a single snapshot with nothing to measure it against.
• No commentary – charts with no narrative, so you can’t tell a good month from a lucky one.
• No next steps – reporting that describes the past but never commits to a change.
• Cherry-picked date ranges – a nine-day window that happens to include a sale, rather than a clean calendar month.
• Only channel-level ROAS, never a blended MER, hiding how much “new” revenue was cannibalised from organic or repeat buyers.
• Vanity metrics up top – impressions and clicks leading, profit buried on page four (if it appears at all).

For the deeper case on why one number in particular flatters to deceive, see why ROAS is misleading and what you should be tracking instead.

How Often and in What Format

“Monthly” is the cadence most businesses settle on, and for good reason: a calendar month smooths out the daily noise while still being frequent enough to act on. But the best setups pair three things:

• A live dashboard (Looker Studio, or similar) you can open any day for the raw numbers.
• A monthly report – a concise PDF or deck that curates those numbers into the story that matters.
• A monthly call where a human walks you through the why and agrees the next month’s actions.

The dashboard answers “what happened?” at a glance. The report and the call answer “so what?” and “now what?” — the two questions a spreadsheet can’t. If your agency only sends a raw data export with no narrative, you’re being handed the ingredients and asked to cook the meal yourself.

The Metrics That Matter — and How to Calculate Them

The four numbers our tiered framework leans on are worth defining precisely, because “profit” and “value” get thrown around loosely:

• Net profit per cohort – the profit a group of customers acquired in the same period generates over time: their revenue minus cost of goods, returns, discounts, fulfilment, ad spend and service costs. It tells you which acquisition months actually paid off.
• Customer lifetime value (CLTV) – average order value × average purchases per year × average customer lifespan in years × gross margin %. It’s what a customer is worth in total, not on first purchase.
• Monthly retention rate – ((customers at the end of the month − new customers acquired that month) ÷ customers at the start) × 100. A leaky funnel here quietly undoes good acquisition.
• True ROAS (or POAS, profit on ad spend) – rather than revenue ÷ ad spend, it’s the gross profit from ad-driven sales ÷ ad spend. A 4.2x gross ROAS can be a losing 0.9x once margin is applied.

If you want to go deeper on how these join up, our guides on the metrics and KPIs that really matter in ecommerce and unit economics in paid ads are the natural next reads.

Build Dashboards That Match the Decision

The best reporting dashboards don’t just show performance – they show performance in context. They speak the language of the person reading them. That’s what makes data actionable.

At HOC-Digital, we build tiered dashboards tailored to who’s looking. Execs get a profitability lens. Directors get strategic insights. Managers get operational levers. And yes, interns still get their ROAS – but now they understand what it actually means.

Because in PPC, the right data in the wrong hands is just noise. But the right data in the right hands? That’s power.

FAQ

What should a monthly PPC report include?

At a minimum: spend, impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, conversions, conversion rate, CPA and ROAS, plus the numbers most reports skip — net profit and margin, MER, new versus returning revenue, and budget pacing. Every figure should sit next to the previous month so you can see the trend, and the whole thing should close with written commentary and a short list of next-month actions.

How is ROAS different from MER?

ROAS is channel-level: revenue from a set of ads divided by the spend on those ads. MER (marketing efficiency ratio) is blended: total revenue divided by total marketing spend across every channel. ROAS can look strong while MER quietly slips, because a channel may simply be claiming credit for sales that would have happened anyway. Reading them together is what stops you being fooled.

How often should I get a PPC report?

Monthly is the sensible default — long enough to smooth out daily noise, short enough to act on. The strongest setups pair a live dashboard you can check any day with a monthly report and a call, so you get both the raw numbers and the human interpretation of what they mean.

What are the red flags of a bad agency report?

ROAS quoted on gross revenue with no mention of margin, no month-on-month comparison, no written commentary, no next steps, and cherry-picked date ranges that dodge a clean calendar month. If profit is buried below impressions and clicks — or missing entirely — treat that as a signal, not an accident.

How do you calculate customer lifetime value (CLTV)?

Multiply average order value by average purchases per year, by average customer lifespan in years, by your gross margin percentage. That gives you what a customer is worth over the whole relationship, which is the number a director should weigh against your cost to acquire them (CAC).