Reporting
Paid Advertising Metrics Explained
By Adedon · Updated 2026-08-14
What paid advertising metrics should I actually watch?
Watch a short stack: spend against plan, the business result you chose (qualified leads, purchases, revenue), efficiency (CPA or ROAS using that result), and a few diagnostics (CTR, CPC or CPM, frequency, conversion rate). Quality (sales-accepted, refunds) sits next to platform counts. More metrics are available; most of them are how reports become unread. Name definitions once and reuse them.
Outcomes before diagnostics
If you start the meeting at CPM, you will never get to pipeline. Start at spend and outcomes. Use diagnostics when an outcome moved and you need a why.
Volume versus efficiency
You can buy more volume at worse CPA, or less at better. The metric stack should show both so nobody ‘wins’ by shrinking to one converting retargeting ad.
Platform metrics are not finance
Impressions, clicks, and platform conversions are operational. Bank deposits are finance. A healthy reporting culture keeps both and labels them.
A default Adedon stack
Spend, results, CPA or ROAS, qualified rate if we have it, frequency (Meta), search waste notes (Google), and changes made. We will add diagnostics that earned a sentence, not a dashboard of 40 columns.
Frequently asked questions
Should I watch ROAS or CPA?+−
Ecommerce with values: ROAS (plus margin context). Lead gen without values: CPA for a named action. Watching both without values is theater.
Are impressions a vanity metric?+−
They are a delivery metric. Vanity is using them as the goal of a sales campaign.
How many metrics in a weekly email?+−
Fewer than you think. If the owner will not read past line six, you already know the cap.
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