Most ad reports are designed to look impressive, not to be useful. Learn which numbers actually drive decisions and you can skim past the noise and see, in under a minute, whether your account is winning.
Start at the bottom line
Open every report from the bottom up. Before you look at a single click, answer one question: did the spend make money? That means looking at blended performance — total revenue against total ad spend across the period — not just the ROAS the platform reports for itself.
- Blended ROAS — total revenue ÷ total ad spend. The reality check.
- Contribution after costs — what's left once product, shipping and fees come out. ROAS that looks great can still lose money if margins are thin.
- Cost per purchase / lead against your target — the unit you actually manage to.
Then diagnose with the leading indicators
The bottom-line numbers tell you whether you're winning. These tell you why, and where to act:
- CTR — is the creative earning attention?
- CPM — what's it costing to reach people, and is auction pressure rising?
- Conversion rate — once they click, does the landing page and offer close?
- Frequency — are you wearing the audience out?
Leading indicators tell you what to fix. Lagging ones tell you whether the fix worked.
Ignore the vanity metrics
Reach, impressions, video views, post engagements, "estimated ad recall" — none of these pay your bills, and big numbers in those columns are the easiest way to make a losing month look like a winning one. They have their place in diagnosis, but they're never the headline.
Read trends, not snapshots
A single day is mostly noise. Look at 7-day and 28-day windows so you can separate a genuine trend from a Tuesday blip. The question is never "what did yesterday do?" — it's "which direction is this account moving, and what's one change worth making this week?" A good report should let you answer that at a glance.