A pay-per-click (PPC) report from your agency should answer four questions. What was spent? What counts as a conversion? Which searches did the money go to? What changed in the account? Read it in that order, and check each answer against the ad account, which you can open with read-only access. The examples here use Google Ads.
What was spent, and who was billed?
The report should show two amounts on separate lines: what went to the ad platform, and what went to the agency as its fee. The post on how PPC agencies charge covers the fee.
Then ask whose payment details the platform bills. Google Ads links each account to a payments account, and that link decides who is billed for the account’s costs. If the payments account is the agency’s, the spend reaches you on the agency’s invoice. Ask for the cost figure from the account as well.
Compare the spend with the budget you agreed, and ask what the budget failed to reach. An impression is one showing of an ad. Google Ads estimates the share of impressions your search ads missed because the budget was too low, and reports it as a figure of its own. A high figure means there were searches your money didn’t cover. Ask whether the agency would move budget between campaigns before it asks you for more.
What counts as a conversion in this report?
A conversion is whatever action the account is set up to count after someone clicks an ad, or sees one on Google’s display network. Google’s own categories for these actions include a purchase, a submitted lead form, a phone call and a page view. So “150 conversions” can mean 150 sales or 150 visits to a pricing page.
Ask for the list of conversion actions, with two facts about each: its category, and whether it is primary or secondary. Google Ads can bid towards primary actions, and it counts them in the Conversions column. Secondary actions stay out of Conversions and still appear in the All conversions column, shown as “All conv.”. Google’s conversion goals guide sets out the difference. A report built on All conv. shows a larger number as soon as one secondary action records anything.
Cost per conversion is spend divided by conversions, so it moves with the definition. So does return on ad spend (ROAS), the revenue recorded for each dollar of ad spend.
When the report and your sales records disagree
Say the report shows 150 conversions on $6,000 of spend, which is $40 each. Your sales system recorded 90 enquiries from paid search. You ask for the list of actions and find three: 70 form submissions, 30 phone calls and 50 views of the pricing page. Take out the page views and the count is 100, at $60 each. The gap that remains is ten enquiries, few enough to trace one by one.
Check the dates next. Google Ads has a second set of conversion columns, labelled “by conv. time”, which date each conversion to the day it happened. Ask which set the report uses before you compare a month with your own records. The most recent days can also be incomplete, because Google says conversion data isn’t available instantly.
Which searches did the money go to?
The search terms list shows what people typed before an ad appeared. A search term is the person’s words. A keyword is what the advertiser chose to bid on, so the two can differ widely. Google Ads marks each search term as added as a keyword, excluded, or neither. Excluded means it matches a negative keyword, a word or phrase the advertiser has ruled out.
Ask each month for the terms that took the most spend, and for the negative keywords added. Check that the list covers every campaign. Google’s reporting holds the search terms of Performance Max, its automated campaign type, in a separate view from those of standard search campaigns.
Brand and non-brand searches
Ask for results split into searches that contain your company’s name and searches that don’t. People who type your name were already looking for you, and some would have arrived without an ad. Mixed together, the two hide how the searches for new customers performed.
What changed in the account, and who changed it?
The report should say what was changed, what was tested and what happens next month. You can check all three, because Google Ads keeps a change history. Google’s change event documentation lists what an entry holds: the date and time, the user who made the change, the route it came through, and the old and new values.
The route is worth reading. A change can come from a person working in the Google Ads website, from an automated rule or a script, or from one of Google’s own recommendations being applied. If every entry in a month is an applied recommendation, ask the agency who reviewed each one.
A test leaves a record too. A Google Ads experiment splits traffic between a control and a version with the change applied, then compares the two. A claim that a new bidding approach was tested can therefore come with the split, the dates and the result.
Try writing down three decisions the agency made last month. If the report doesn’t give you three, ask for the month’s change history.
What to ask when a line looks wrong
Each row pairs a line you might see with the question to ask about it.
| The report shows | Ask |
|---|---|
| Clicks, impressions and click-through rate only | How many conversions, of which actions, and at what cost each? |
| Conversions far above your own sales records | Which column is this, and which actions does it count? |
| Results with no brand and non-brand split | What are the results for searches without our name? |
| Spend on budget, with no search terms | Which searches took the most spend, and which did you exclude? |
| The same campaigns as last month | What did you change and test, and what did each test show? |
Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions. It explains why a result moved. So do cost per click and Quality Score, Google’s rating of a keyword from its ads, its expected click-through rate and its landing page. None of the three is the result.
What agencies say about their own reports
Few agency websites say what the monthly report contains. In October 2026 we read the PPC or paid media pages of 25 agencies we have profiled, among them PPC agencies in the United Kingdom, 37 pages in all. Of the 25, 17 mention a report or a dashboard, and 5 say how often: 3 monthly, 1 weekly, and 1 a weekly snapshot with a monthly report.
Only 8 name the figures they report, such as leads, ROAS or cost per acquisition, which is cost per conversion under another name. On the other points, 4 describe a dashboard the client can open, 2 say the client owns the ad account, and 1 says its report lists the changes made and the next steps.
A dashboard changes the format and leaves the checks in place. It still has to say which conversion column it uses and how brand searches are separated. When you next compare PPC Marketing agencies, ask each for a sample report before the proposal.
Check the account yourself
Ask the agency today for Read only access to the Google Ads account, under your own work email. Google defines that level as able to view campaigns and account changes without making edits. That covers the campaign figures and the change history.
Then ask who holds Admin. Google describes an Admin as owning the account and controlling who else is added, so one Admin should be a person at your company. Agency staff can also reach your account through a manager account linked to yours, without being invited to the account itself. Google’s access model describes both routes.
The report is the agency’s account of the work, and the ad account is the record. What the contract should say about owning that account is in the guide to agency contracts, ownership and handover.