You can judge a PPC agency by their monthly report in about ten seconds. Read the first paragraph.
If it opens with impressions, click-through rate or quality score, you are being shown inputs and told they are results. Impressions cost you nothing and mean nothing. Clicks cost you money and still tell you very little on their own.
A useful report answers a much simpler question: did the money work?
Here is what should be in one, what should not, and the section almost every agency leaves out.
What Should Be in the First Third
Lead With the Summary
The top third of the report is what busy clients actually read, and the detail below is for the ones who want it.
That means a plain English summary at the top. Not a chart. Two or three sentences saying what happened, whether it was better or worse than last month, and what is being done about it.
Spend Against Budget
Simple and frequently missing. What was the budget, what was actually spent, and if there is a gap, why.
Underspending is as much a signal as overspending. A campaign that cannot spend its budget is usually constrained by something worth knowing about.
In the UAE this matters more than in most markets, because click costs here are high enough that a small budget can exhaust itself before lunchtime. If your daily budget is being spent by 11am, you are invisible for the rest of the day and the report should say so.
Leads and Cost Per Lead
Cost per lead is the number that lets you make decisions. Once you know it, you can work out whether the channel is viable against your margin and close rate, which is the only question that actually matters.
Worked example. If your cost per lead is 120 dirhams, you close one in five, and a customer is worth 4,000 dirhams, each customer costs 600 dirhams to acquire. That is a decision you can make. Without cost per lead you are looking at a spend figure and a feeling.
What Clients Actually Care About
Direct answer: outcomes, not platform mechanics.
Inputs Versus Results
Clients do not care about impressions, click-through rate or quality score, because those are inputs. They influence results without being results.
There is nothing wrong with including them. There is something wrong with leading with them, because it usually means the outcome numbers are less flattering.
Match the Metrics to Your Business
The relevant metrics depend on what you sell. An online store cares about revenue and return on ad spend. A services business cares about qualified enquiries and what each one cost.
If your report shows ROAS and you do not sell online, someone has used a template rather than thought about your business.
The Numbers Worth Adding Yourself
Two things your agency cannot see but you can: how many of those leads were qualified, and how many became customers.
Send them back that information. An agency told which leads closed can optimise toward the campaigns producing real business rather than the ones producing the most enquiries. Very few clients do this, and it is the single highest-value thing you can contribute.
The Section Most Reports Omit
This is the one worth insisting on: what we did this month.
A short “what we did” section, plus clear next steps, belongs in every report and appears in remarkably few.
Without it you have numbers and no way to connect them to anyone’s effort. Results improved, but did somebody improve them or did a competitor pause their campaigns? Results dipped, but was that seasonality or neglect?
A list of actions taken answers that. It is also the section that quietly reveals a neglected account, because a month of genuine management produces a list, and a month of nothing produces excuses.
Ask for it explicitly if it is missing. The reaction tells you a great deal.
It should also cover what did not work. An agency that only reports wins is either extraordinarily lucky or editing, and tests that failed are useful information about your market.
Metrics Worth Arguing About
Cost Per Acquisition
CPA measures the average cost of acquiring a customer or lead through a campaign, and it is the number most worth tracking over time.
One caution. Cost per lead means nothing if the leads are poor. A campaign producing cheap unqualified enquiries looks excellent on a report and terrible in your inbox, so pair the number with a conversation about lead quality.
Conversions Are Only as Good as the Tracking
Before trusting any conversion number, ask how conversions are defined. Plenty of accounts count form page views, or count the same enquiry several times, or track a button click that does not mean anything happened.
Every optimisation decision rests on that definition being correct. Our post on negative keywords covers a related habit: verifying what the account is actually doing rather than trusting the summary.
Trend, Not Snapshot
A single month is noise. Monthly reports give the strategic overview while weekly reporting suits short-term tracking, and most SMEs are better served by monthly with trend lines than by weekly detail nobody has time to read.
How Often Should You Get One?
Direct answer: monthly for most businesses, weekly only if your spend genuinely justifies it.
At smaller budgets a week contains too little data to mean anything. Reacting to it produces the worst kind of account management, where campaigns get changed constantly and never accumulate enough history to optimise against.
Frequency matters less than whether the report explains what changed. A monthly report with real commentary beats a weekly one with none.
What should not wait for the report is anything urgent. If conversion tracking breaks or spend doubles unexpectedly, you should hear that day, not in three weeks. Agree upfront what counts as urgent enough to warrant a call.
What Should Happen After the Report
The report is not the point. The conversation it starts is.
A good agency sends it a few days before a call, so you have read it and can arrive with questions. A weak one sends it on the last day of the month and never mentions it again.
If you have received twelve reports and never had a conversation about any of them, nobody is managing the relationship. That is worth raising before it becomes a reason to leave.
Report Red Flags
Screenshot dumps. Platform screenshots pasted into a document with no interpretation. You could log in and see that yourself.
Metrics that only ever improve. Every account has bad months. A report where everything is always up is either cherry-picking date ranges or selecting whichever metric happened to rise.
No next steps. Clear next steps belong in every report. Without them there is no plan, only a record.
You cannot understand it. Complexity is sometimes used to obscure. If you need the agency to explain their own report every month, that is a choice they made.
Changed date ranges. If the comparison period shifts between reports, comparisons become meaningless. Fix the format and keep it fixed.
The Bottom Line
A good PPC report answers four questions before you have scrolled: what we spent, what it produced, what each result cost, and what we did about it.
Everything else is supporting detail. If the first page is full of impressions and click-through rates, ask why the outcome numbers are further down.
Ask to see a sample report before you sign anything. Whatever you are shown is what you will receive every month, and it is far easier to raise standards before money changes hands than after. Our guide on choosing a Google Ads agency in Dubai covers the other questions worth asking upfront.
If you would like a second opinion on the reports you are currently getting, our Google Ads team is happy to look at them and tell you honestly whether what you are being shown is reasonable. Send us last month’s report and we will tell you what it is missing.
WhatsApp Hameed for a quick question, or call +971 56 544 6241 for a free consultation. Either reaches Hameed directly.
A report should tell you whether the money worked. Most tell you the campaigns ran.
