Basics
Read your core metrics without panicking
Most bad ad decisions are made on a Tuesday morning, looking at yesterday's numbers. Here is how to read the dashboard so it stops reading you.
You open Ads Manager, cost per purchase has jumped from €24 to €41 overnight, and your stomach drops. Before you touch anything: one day is almost never enough data to mean something. Ad platforms deliver unevenly, conversions report late, and a single €200 order can swing a small account's numbers in either direction.
The skill isn't knowing what every metric means. It's knowing which ones to look at first, over what time window, and which ones are just noise.
Start with the one number the client pays you for
Every account has one result that actually matters to the business: purchases for a shop, qualified leads for a B2B company, bookings for a clinic. Write it down, along with what one of those results is allowed to cost. Everything else on the dashboard exists to explain movement in that number — not to compete with it.
If a client sells a €90 product with a 60% margin, they make roughly €54 per sale before ad costs. A cost per purchase of €30 is healthy. €50 is breakeven at best. Knowing that ceiling in advance turns a scary number into a simple yes or no.
Read in this order
- Spend — did the account spend what you planned? Underspend often explains 'bad' results better than any creative issue.
- Main result and cost per result — over the last 7 days, compared with the 7 days before.
- Click-through rate (CTR) — is the ad still getting attention? A falling CTR on the same ad is usually fatigue.
- Conversion rate on the site — are the people who click still buying? If CTR is fine but this drops, look at the landing page, stock or price, not the ads.
- Frequency and CPM — only once something above looks off. They explain why, rarely what.
Following the same order every time does more than any formula. It stops you from fixing the ad when the real problem is a broken checkout.
Pick a time window that matches your volume
A useful rule of thumb: don't judge anything until it has around 30–50 results behind it. An account doing 10 purchases a day can be read weekly. An account doing 10 a week needs a month before trends become real. Small B2B lead accounts often need even longer — and that's fine, as long as the client knows it up front.
ROAS is a ratio, not a goal
Return on ad spend is the most quoted metric and the most misread one. A ROAS of 4 sounds great, but on a product with 25% margin it barely covers costs. And platform-reported ROAS includes people who would have bought anyway — returning customers, branded searches, newsletter readers who also saw an ad. Compare platform numbers with the client's actual revenue in Shopify or their bookkeeping at least once a month. If the gap keeps widening, trust the shop.
What to tell the client
Clients don't need CPMs. They need three sentences: what we spent, what it brought in compared with the target, and what we'll do next. If you can't write those three sentences, you haven't finished reading the numbers yet.