The ONLY Google Ads Metrics That Matter (My Exact Setup)

I can't tell you how many times I've logged into a Google Ads account and it's an absolute mess of a bunch of random metrics. None of it's organized and Google does a pretty bad job usually of the default column set up. So in this video, I'm going to show you my preferred column set up, how to actually set it up, and how to analyze that data. For those who don't know me, my name is Austin leclair, co founder of Grandma Ads. We manage millions and millions of dollars for our 100 plus clients on Google Ads, so. So we know a thing or two about reviewing and setting up data in a Google Ads account. Let's dive in. Okay, so when you log into a Google Ads account, it's going to look something like this. Now mine is currently organized. In most cases it's not. In most cases all of these columns of metrics are going to be completely random and some of it doesn't make any sense. Right. If we go to the actual column settings, there's, there's, there's too many, there's so many things that you could add to your columns in the account to, to review data. It's a lot, right? It's very, very overwhelming. Especially if you're newer to Google Ads. It's overwhelming. Well, you don't need like 90% of that stuff. And so I'm going to give you the layout that I typically use. Now it's not always, in some cases I have to change things up and I'll show you how to actually like set these columns up. But this will give you the core metrics that I usually like to look at within an account. And really all you're trying to do when you, when you have a campaign view like this, of all the campaigns enabled in your, your Google Ads account, all you're trying to see is, you know, the primary metrics which are going to be usually how much you're spending and how much you're converting on, right? So if it's legion how many conversions you're getting at what cost and if it's E commerce, it's how many conversions you're getting in regards to usually like a roas, right? So you spent X to generate X in actual purchase revenue. So those are usually the core primary metrics you're going to be looking at. And then you're going to have metrics you want to review that are going to be more for diagnosis purposes. Right. And those metrics will be mainly used to, to see if there's problems or inefficiencies within your campaigns and I'm going to break those down in that. So let's go ahead and dive into my column setup and then I'm going to show you how to actually set that up and then how to analyze it real quick. I have two quick offers. One, if you currently run Google Ads and you need some help, go get a free audit. My team here at Grandma Ads will do an audit of your account if you qualify. The link to go get that free audit will be in the description below. If you want to upskill your Google Ads knowledge, then go check out my group called PPC Copilot. We've got hundreds of people in here. We do weekly Q&As. I've got a classroom course material in here, Q and A recordings, resources. There's a ton. So if you want to go learn more about how to get better at Google Ads, this community is for you. I'd love to see you inside. All right, back to the video. So I'm inside of a real account. Campaigns will be blurred out, but I've got search campaign, shopping campaign and some performance Performance max campaign running in here to to give you an idea what's enabled. Now one thing I do, especially if I'm looking at like historical data, there's this filter up here for campaign enabled. You sometimes do you want to make sure you have enabled and paused on if you're looking at historical data. Now when I'm looking at like present time a lot of times I know what campaigns have been paused out recently. So then I clean it up by looking at that enabled. But that will that will actually filter enabled and paused for you to clean up the data that you're reviewing. Now I don't need to know campaign types because I know what you know a search campaign is. I know what a shopping campaign is and I know what a performance max campaign is. And I also will name my campaigns with a naming convention that includes search or shopping. Usually it's abbreviations as well as like pmax. So you know my search campaigns, I use an S for search for shopping it's sh. P Max. I'll label just like P Max just to give you an example. So none of my columns I use actually say campaign type. I think it's useless because you can get all that data through a naming convention or just by looking at the little icons that Google has for the campaigns. Now I have campaign usually first column second is going to be budget. That's going to be obviously very important so budget is this how much you're willing to spend per day? This is where if you're making budget changes, you can easily just hop in, edit this, change the budget. Then I do keep the status of the campaign. So this just gives me an idea. If I'm limited by budget, if there's issues, if it's eligible, this says bid setting limited. A lot of. Sometimes this stuff's a bit useless, but this status column I do keep, this will keep me updated if there's any specific issues. Limited by budget is an interesting status to have. I have some strategies around that. I think I've already done a video on what to do when you see limited by budget in the account. So that video, if you want to go check out, will be in the description below of this video. If you want to go deeper into that. Okay, next column I like to put and listen like, you know, budget status, bid strategy. None of this needs to be in a specific order. It's just an order that I've worked with. But bid strategy is the next column that I have. This lets me know what bid strategies are being used for these campaigns. Now when I start making optimizations or if I am reviewing the data and it looks like, well, hey, why is this campaign not doing well? I mean, bid strategy is going to be usually a pretty big piece to how the campaign is performing. And so I like to know from just a quick glance at looking at an account what bid strategies are being applied to the campaigns. Then clicks. So this is how many actual clicks these campaigns got depending on the time frame of data that you're using. And you've got, you know, your little time frame analysis over here. You can do a start and end date. And so right now this is set to the last 30 days. So you know, these campaigns in total got 40,597 clicks. And I can see the click breakdown then by campaign. Same with impressions. How many impressions did the campaigns get? And then with that you've got ctr. So that's click through rate, right? And that's the percent of clicks you got based off of the amount of impressions. So these are again, these are good indicator metrics. I'm going to break those down a little bit further. And then average cpc, right? What are you paying per click at the campaign level? Now you can dive deeper into the weeds and look at ad groups and keywords. But again, just quick glance reviewing data. What's my average CPCS on these campaigns then? Costs. How much are we spending in cost on the campaigns? Right. And that's going to then correlate with also your, your, your budget column here. So if you change that, obviously it's going to change how much you're spending. So I like to see where the cost is coming from. A lot of times when I do an analysis, I'll actually filter then by cost and then I also filter a lot of times by conversions as well. All right, so then after cost, we have the conversion column. In the conversion column, this is just showing how many conversions we got at each campaign level. And conversions will be whatever you're tracking as your primary conversions. Sometimes you, a lot of people will use account level conversions. In some cases there will be specific campaign conversions. If I need to know what's being actually tracked as a conversion, I can go up to this segment icon up here. I can go to conversions conversion action and this will actually share, show me what conversions are being counted here. In this case, it's very simple. It's an E Commerce business, so it's just purchases and all campaigns are just using the purchase conversions. So I know that this 127.89 conversions in this column is actually 127.89 purchases. Then with that we've got our cost per conversion. So this is how much I'm paying to actually get one conversion. And again, this is an E Commerce account. So this is how much I'm paying to get one sale. All right, then we've got conversion rate. And this is just, you know, out of your clicks, what percent are you actually converting? And so I always like to review that data. The lower the conversion rate, usually, you know, that's an indicator to me, something's off. Again, I'll review that a bit, a bit later in this video. And then we have conversion value. If you're E Commerce, this is important. If you're legion and you're not pushing values back, then it's not really that important. You're really just going to be looking at, you know, your, your cost per conversion column the most. But conversion value, this is how much value you're actually generating. So this is E Commerce. This is how much revenue we've actually produced by the campaigns. And then with that we have conversion value by cost. And that is nothing more than, well, the name, it's in the name, right? So it's conversion value and you divide that by cost and that gives you this return on ad spend metric. And that's a, you know, a percent of the efficiency that you're getting from these campaigns. So here we've got a 2. That means we spent or we generated 30,598 in conversion value and we spent 15,195 to actually generate that. That gave us a a 2x right? Or a 200% ROAS is what most people would say here. And then this column is going to be more in a decimal so it's like 2.01 but this would be a 200% row as that you just generated. Now I also like to add value by conversion, especially in accounts that have fluctuations in average order value. So this allows me to see if there's any differences in the AOV or the value divided by conversion in those campaigns. So I, I do like to keep this column set up for e commerce clients and then we go into by time metrics. I have an entire video on a deep dive into what conversion by time means. But if you are looking at an account and you're looking at present day timeframes, right. So if I'm looking at like last seven days or last 14 days and in many cases even the last 30 days, I like to use the buy time metric. And this is so this is a column that I will set up. This allows me to know what I'm truly producing in present time. And to give you an example, last 30 days, my conversion by time is 754. My conversion column is 620. Well why is that? Because there's a time to delay to conversions, right? And your conversion column is actually going to track to the time someone clicked the ad. So, so if they click an ad but don't convert for seven days, the conversion goes back to the day they clicked, not the day they purchased or converted. The conversion by time will report the day the conversion happened. And so when you want to know performance, what performance looks like in a short period of time or present time, you want to use the buy time metric. It's going to give you a better picture of what your true performance is. Again it can get kind of tricky or complicated when you start thinking about it. I have a full video on that with like a little stick figure visual thing that hopefully will simplify the topic. But add by time column when you're, when you're, especially if you have a lot of time delay to some of your conversions. It's less important if you get conversions like quickly, right. Like someone's clicking and converting same day. So in Legion accounts and you don't see a huge discrepancy but in E commerce you a lot of times will so Conversion by time is a metric I'm always using when I'm looking at like short, short period time frames or recent time frames. Now I have then CPA or cost per conversion by time and then I have conversion value by time. So I'm looking at my CPAs and my revenue and then I have a ROAS by by time. So that's going to be conversion value by cost. But just by using the conversion by time metrics this way, I'm getting all of this data here, right, But I'm getting it now with the by time data. And I'm going to show you how to set those up here in a bit. But these are row as by time and CPA time will be custom columns that you have to set up. They're not preset columns that give Google gives you. And again, I'm going to show you how to do that. Then I like to add my impression share metrics. So I've got search impression share, search top impression share, search absolute top impression share and then search lost impression share by budget. These allow me to see what my impression share is for campaigns. And then am I losing impression share due to budget? And then how often. So search top impression share, how often my ads show in the top spots. And then absolute top impression share would mean the number one spot. So how often you're showing up number one. I have an entire video that breaks down reviewing search impression share metrics in the weeds, how to analyze it further and what to do about some of those. So go watch that video. I'm not going to go in the weeds on that. But that is data, those that I love to look at. So I always have those columns set up. Now how do you actually set all of this up? So there's this column icon up here. This is actually where you can remove everything and then choose it. All right, so if I wanted to remove certain things here, I could just easily go click X. And then if I wanted to actually go in and set up these metrics, I just go one by one and click them. So I'm actually going to remove most of these and just show you how to set this up. So again, bid strategy type is something I like. This is actually under a recommended column. So we're going to go bid strategy type. That's a very easy one. You'll notice campaign budget and status, these are locked. These are just standard columns. So if I remove everything and then hit apply, these will always kind of show up for you. Like you don't have a choice to remove Those and so Google makes those mandatory. So that's why there's that lock key. But here again, I'm going to add bid strategy type and then I've got my performance. So I go clicks, impressions, click through rate, average CPC cost. Then when we get into conversions, it's my conversions cost per conversion, conversion rate, conversion value, conversion value by cost. Right now the buy time metrics. Here we are. So we have conversion val, conversion by time, conversion value by time. And actually I just noticed I forgot to add value by conversion, so let's add that too. So then we've got the by times, conversion by time, conversion value by time. So I'm going to add these and you can also even do value by conversion by time. So we'll, we'll set that up as well. But you'll notice I don't have cost per conversion or conversion value by cost by time. Google doesn't give you those metrics. So let me show you how to actually set those up. You're going to go down to custom columns. So I'm still in this modify columns for campaigns. I'm a scroll all the way down to custom columns. Here you can actually create a custom column. And so here if I want a conversion value divided by, we'll go like cost, right? And then we'll just do by time. So this then would be like essentially row as by time. All I'm doing then is going to add that data. And so here you're going to. I think. Yeah, there we go. We can do cost and then we're going to do. Well, hold on, buy time. So you can just search, right? Like I can just type. So buy time. And I'm doing conversion value by conversion time here. Then we've got to divide by cost and there we go. And this will then equal, right? My, my return on ad spin, but by by time metric, which again they're not giving us. So here, if I hit save, this would save that. Now I already have this built, so I'm going to show you what this looks like here. So we've got this all set up. Conversion value by conversion time divided by cost. Boom, that's saved. Now I can add that. And then I also have CPA by time, right? So that's just cost by divided by conversions by conversion time. And I'm going to add this as well. So that gives me then those two metrics as well that are missing in the preset columns. So I've got that data now then I want to go to competitive metrics for Search, impression, share, top, absolute and then lost due to a lot. Again, I look at the budget. A lot of times you can also do search loss due to rank. And so sometimes I will add that. But a lot I most cases I'm looking at search loss due to budget because like if you, if it's not lost due to budget, then it's lost due to rank. Again, I have a full video that breaks all of that down. So you don't really need to know what some of that means right now. But these are the preset and columns that I like to have set up. Now if you can't, you know, if this is like new to you and you're just trying to figure out, all right, where is this metric at? Just search it. So like if you want conversion by conversions, by conversion times, just start searching conversions and you can easily just do a quick search and then find that metric you're looking for. Now you set all of that up. The worst thing that can happen is. It's not the worst, it's just annoying is you, you do all of that, you kind of have your preset columns and then the next time you go and log in, it's all mumble jumbled, right? Like Google somehow forgot to to have the, the settings of the columns that you just set up saved. And then now you have to go back in and click and reorganize all of it. So you can hit save your column set and then just name it whatever you want to name it. Right? And so I'm going to again, I just canceled all of that out and it's like, oh shoot, I just set all of that up and now I've got to go back and add it one by one. Nope, all I do is go to columns and then here we go. I have an Austin column set save. Someone hit Austin and boom, there's my columns that I like to see. So I can one click, go ahead and just get all of the columns that I like to have within the account. Okay, now you've got the columns set up, you've got them set up correctly. I have an entire video on how to go like into optimizing an account and a lot of times it's reviewing all of this data, right? So if you want to go into the weeds of how to actually optimize account and what to do daily, what to do weekly and bi weekly, monthly, quarterly. I have a one hour full masterclass on how to optimize a Google Ads account. That video will be in the description below. So Go check that video out. And it deals with all of these columns and metrics because that's what guides you to make these decisions. But real quick, why do I have a lot of these set up? Okay, well a, I already talked about I need to know budget because this is what controls my budget. I need to know if there's status issues like these are limited by budget. Well, that's a problem, right? If I'm minting money and I'm limited by budget, then that means I should probably give it more budget. Again, I have full strategies on what to do there that I go deeper in the limited by budget video, which is in the description below. But this is something that I need to see. It's not something I do anything with. It's something that alerts me to go make strategic decisions on, right? To go make an optimize the account to make more money from my ad spend. Then if accounts are performing well or not performing well. I always want to know what bid strategy is being used and this is why from just a quick glance, I want to know what bid strategy types are set to the campaigns themselves. Then I've got my clicks and impressions. If my click through rate is really, really low. So if I see like a search campaign and I see a click through rate that's like below 2%, that's a red alert, that means something is off within this campaign. The message to the keywords that are being targeted message being the ad is not resonating. Maybe there's too many broad keywords in there or. Or maybe the ad copy is just horrendous. Right. This click through rate metric to me is just a metric that I can look at quickly and understand is this campaign operating in a healthy way? Right. So this search campaign has an 8% click through rate. That to me right now I don't need to go any further. This is doing quite well right now. If it were below 2%, that would be a red alert. That's something I need to go check and diagnose why that click through rate is so low. There could be issues within the account. Average cpc I just like to see what on average are we paying per click, right? And then this will translate into the bid strategies that are being used. And that also means, hey, if my cost per conversion is too high, right? Well why. And then I start looking at, well, what's the average CPC and what's the bid strategy being used? Okay, can we make adjustments there with the bid strategy to lower our average CPC to make my cost per Conversion lower for me to be profitable. So this is how I'm reviewing that data to help guide my decision making. Same with like conversion rate. If conversion rate's super low like this, this search campaign is only a 1.37 conversion rate. It's quite low. That's, it's lower than I would usually want to see. So here, this to me is like, okay, we need to go review what's going on in the search campaign. What are we bidding on? What we have good click through rate, right? But we have low conversion rate. So now this is, this is a priority for me to go hop in and review what's going on this campaign. Again, I break all of that down in the weeds in that one hour masterclass on how to actually optimize an account. But this is the indicators. These columns indicate where I should spend my time, where things are not working, what needs optimized. And then same with my, you know, my performance metrics of like conversion value by time and CPA by time. It's just this is what's gonna is, is, is this am I making money or am I losing money? And in the places I'm making money, how do I make more in the places I'm losing money, how do I decrease how much I'm losing? And that then goes into the optimization cycles that I have. And then same with my search impression share here again I have a full video on that, but I like to see how competitive I am. So if I'm like minting money in a campaign but I'm on low search impression share like this campaign right here is limited by budget. The search campaign and it's so limited by budget and less than 10% search impression share. So this means this campaign has a lot of room to grow. So a, if it's working and performing well, why are we limited by budget? And then that makes budget allocation decisions which ultimately could increase the amount you make from your account. So I always like having these impression share metrics set up for me to quickly review how my campaigns are doing in regards to the impression share I'm getting for the impressions that I'm eligible for for whatever keywords or products if it's shopping that we are actually bidding on within the auctions. Okay, there you go. You now know my preferred column set up inside of a Google Ads account. You now know how to actually edit and change the columns in your account. You know how to save a column set that way you can just one click use the column setup that you prefer. And you know what some of that data actually means. Now you're going to use all of that, right, in order to help guide and steer you to start optimizing the account. Go check out the next video on how to actually analyze and optimize a Google Ads account. I have an entire one hour masterclass on that, so go check that out next.