Aaron Young says Google Ads dashboards miss what matters: build your own spreadsheet tracking inquiries, conversions, revenue, and marketing efficiency ratio across months. Connect ad spend to your actual profit and loss statement, not platform metrics.
When it comes to optimizing Google Ads accounts, I think that I spend far more time looking at Google spreadsheets than I actually do looking at the Google Ads dashboard. Let me show you what I mean. Now, it definitely looks different for each type of business, but for every member in one of our programs, we spend the time to set up something like this. So it's basically, this one's tracking their inquiries and their conversions. This one is going through and tracking their actual Google Ads spend with their actual revenue, then the average order, then the MER. This one is actually going through and tracking their lead volume versus qualified leads. So it's different for every member inside of Define Digital Academy because ultimately it comes down to what's important for that individual business. But the core concept is that I want you to understand is that if you're serious about truly scaling Google Ads, you do— and, and if you're only concerned about what you're reading inside of the Google Ads dashboard, you're never going to see success. What you need to be getting is you need to be getting some real data feedback from the business owner about— or if you're running Google Ads yourself, you need to have a separate sheet where you're tracking this, and then you know what leads are coming in, what sales are coming in, what's your total revenue coming in, what spend are you spending on other platforms outside of Google Ads. And when you start compiling that data month on month, and when you've got 6 months, you get a good picture. But when you start building out 12, 18 months, 24 months of that data, it is so powerful, the type of information you can get, especially now in the age of where you can use a tool like Claude where you can export all of your real business data, export your Google Ads account and any other platforms that you've got, and then really start running this analysis of tell me about what were we doing, what did our Google Ads account look like, what products were we spending on, what were our settings, what keywords were we focused on, where we're getting the best results for our business. Because ultimately we're not saying that the Google Ads dashboard is not important, but it comes secondary to what is happening in the business. So what is the take-home message? And it's this, is that if you are running a Google Ads account and you're not looking at the monthly real data that business, you're simply wasting your time. Google Ads dashboard data is good, but it comes secondary to what is really happening inside of the business's profit and loss statement and inside of the business's bank account.
