What Your Agency's Optimisation Report Is Actually Hiding

The Monthly Illusion

Every month, your agency sends a report. It shows ROAS trending upward, conversions increasing, and CPC decreasing. Everything looks healthy.

But what if the report is designed to show you what looks good rather than what matters?

The Metrics They Lead With

Most agency reports open with the same metrics: impressions, clicks, conversions, ROAS, cost per conversion. These are all platform metrics. They tell you what Google Ads did. They do not tell you what it achieved for your business.

Here is what is typically missing:

Contribution margin per conversion: What did you actually earn after COGS, shipping, VAT, and returns?

New vs returning customer split: Is the agency acquiring new customers or retargeting people who would have bought anyway?

Incrementality data: How many of these conversions would have happened without the ad spend?

Post-return adjusted ROAS: After returns are processed, what is the real ROAS?

Working capital impact: How much cash are you floating to fund this level of spend?

The Brand Traffic Trick

This is the most common form of inflated reporting. Your agency runs brand campaigns alongside non-brand campaigns, then reports blended ROAS.

Brand traffic converts at 8-12x ROAS because those people are already searching for you. Non-brand might convert at 2-3x. Blended together, the report shows 5x ROAS and everyone is happy.

But the brand traffic was virtually free. Those customers were coming regardless. The real question is: what is the ROAS on incremental, non-brand traffic? That is the number that measures your agency's actual contribution.

The Optimisation Theatre

Agency reports often include a section called "optimisations made" or "changes this month." Common entries:

• "Adjusted bid strategies" (moved a slider)
• "Added negative keywords" (basic hygiene)
• "Tested new ad copy" (changed one headline)
• "Reviewed search terms" (looked at a report)

These are maintenance tasks, not strategic optimisations. Real optimisation involves:

• Restructuring campaigns based on margin data
• Testing fundamentally different bidding strategies
• Analysing the interaction between ad spend and cash flow
• Questioning whether certain products should be advertised at all

What a Useful Report Looks Like

A report that serves your business should include:

1. Profit contribution: Total revenue minus COGS, shipping, ad cost, returns, and VAT
2. Customer acquisition cost by channel: What you paid for genuinely new customers
3. POAS by product tier: Which SKU segments are profitable after all costs
4. Budget efficiency: Diminishing returns analysis showing where the next pound of spend stops being profitable
5. Competitive context: Impression share, auction insights, and market positioning
6. Forward-looking recommendations: Not what was done, but what should change

How to Read Your Current Report

Next time your agency report arrives, apply this filter:

• Ignore blended ROAS. Ask for brand vs non-brand split.
• Ignore conversion count. Ask for new customer count.
• Ignore "optimisations made." Ask for strategic decisions and their rationale.
• Ignore month-on-month trends. Ask for comparison against the same period last year.

If the report cannot survive this scrutiny, it is not serving you. It is serving the agency's retention.