If you’re paying an agency to run your PPC campaigns, you deserve to know exactly what you’re getting for your money. You shouldn’t get a vague summary email or a graph without context; you need clear reporting that tells you whether your budget is working or not.
Surprisingly, that’s not the norm. A lot of businesses we speak to have been running Google Ads for months, sometimes years, with very little visibility into what’s actually happening. They know they’re spending money, but they’re not sure if it’s doing anything.
Transparency in reporting is a problem we take seriously at DBS Digital. It’s why monthly performance dashboards are a core part of how we manage PPC campaigns for our clients. Transparency is something every client should be able to expect from their agency, and it shapes how we build every campaign and every report.
Here’s what good PPC reporting should include, and how we approach it:
Why Most PPC Reporting Falls Short
The typical agency report tends to focus on the metrics that look impressive: clicks, impressions, or click-through rates, rather than metrics that actually matter to a business owner.
Getting clicks is fine, but clicks alone don’t tell you whether your budget is actually generating business. What you really need to know is: how many of those clicks turned into enquiries, phone calls, or sales? What did each of those cost you? And are costs trending downwards?
When reporting is built around vanity metrics, it’s usually for one of two reasons:
- The agency hasn’t set up proper conversion tracking, so they genuinely don’t know what the return on advertising is
- The results aren’t great, and surface-level data is easier to present than the real picture
Neither of those is acceptable when someone is trusting you with their marketing budget. Especially for local businesses, where every pound spent needs to count.
What Our Monthly Dashboards Actually Show
Our performance dashboards are built around one question: is this campaign making our client money?
Everything in the report connects back to that. We don’t just pull data from Google Ads and paste it into a PDF. We build dashboards that give clients a clear view of what’s working, what’s been adjusted, and what we’re doing next.
The metrics that matter
Here’s what every client dashboard covers each month:
- Cost per conversion — how much it costs to generate a lead or sale, tracked month-on-month
- Conversion rate — what percentage of clicks are turning into meaningful actions
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) — for e-commerce clients, the revenue generated per pound spent
- Quality Score trends — a signal of how relevant and well-structured the campaigns are
- Search impression share — how often your ads are showing versus how often they could be
- Budget utilisation — whether spend is being used efficiently or wasted on irrelevant searches
Alongside the numbers, we include a plain-English summary of what changed during the month, why we made those changes, and what we’re testing next. We keep the language plain throughout, avoiding jargon and never using acronyms as a way to obscure what’s actually happening.
Conversion tracking done properly
None of this is possible without solid conversion tracking in place. Before we run a single ad, we make sure the right goals are being tracked. That means phone calls, form submissions, live chat interactions, and for e-commerce clients, actual purchase data.
You’d be surprised how many accounts we inherit where conversions either aren’t tracked at all, or are set up in a way that inflates the numbers. We’d rather start with an accurate baseline than report impressive figures that don’t reflect reality.
Reporting That’s Built for Local Campaigns
Local PPC has its own quirks, and reporting needs to reflect that.
For a national brand, a cost per click of £3.50 might be perfectly reasonable. For a local plumber in Lincoln trying to win jobs within a 20-mile radius, that same figure might be eating through budget faster than the phone is ringing.
We tailor our dashboards to the context of each campaign. For local clients, that means paying close attention to:
- Geographic performance — which towns, postcodes, or areas are driving the most conversions
- Device breakdown — local searches skew heavily mobile, so we track how ads perform across devices
- Time of day and day of week — when are people actually converting, and are we bidding accordingly?
- Local competitor activity — if impression share drops, we investigate why
This level of detail is what separates a well-managed local campaign from one that’s just running on autopilot. And it’s the kind of insight that feeds directly into our monthly recommendations.
Good reporting doesn’t just tell you what happened — it gives you a clear view of what to do next and why it matters.
When we share a dashboard with a client, it’s not a sign-off document. It’s the starting point for a conversation about the next 30 days.
Transparency as a Standard, Not a Selling Point
We’re a Google Partner and Bing Ads Accredited agency, which means we’re held to certain standards when it comes to campaign management. Accreditations aside, we believe that transparency is simply what good client relationships look like.
You should always be able to see:
- Where your budget is going
- What results it’s producing
- What your agency is actively doing to improve performance
If you can’t answer those three questions right now, that’s worth addressing. Whether you’re working with us or someone else, you deserve reporting that gives you genuine confidence in your investment.
If you’d like to see what that looks like in practice, get in touch with our team. We’re happy to talk through your current campaigns, your tracking setup, and what better reporting could mean for your business.
