Quick answer: This self-check scores your current marketing agency's monthly report against a fixed checklist of 14 report-line items — 10 classed as vanity metrics, 4 as revenue metrics — and returns both a score and the specific questions to ask your agency next. No login or report upload required — every item is a tick-box against your own report.
What makes a metric "vanity"
A metric is vanity when it goes up without your bank balance following. The test: if this number doubled, would revenue move? For most reach, impressions, likes and follower-growth reporting, the honest answer is no — they're diagnostics at best, decoration at worst, for a business whose actual goal is leads or sales rather than brand awareness.
The 4 that actually matter
- Cost per qualified lead (or booked consultation) — not raw leads.
- Conversion rate through the funnel — lead → qualified → consult/quote → sale.
- Cost per acquisition vs. customer value — the only metric that tells you if the whole thing is profitable.
- Return on ad spend / attributed revenue — the number your accountant cares about.
This is the same framework behind our full vanity-metrics audit guide, and the same reporting standard we hold our own client accounts to — see MY & SG ad benchmarks for the figures we report against.
Part of the paid media toolkit: one of 14 free tools organised by workflow stage — plan the budget, forecast the CPL, check the creative, verify tracking, audit the report.
Google Ads account audit: 10 checks before you trust the report
- Conversion actions and primary/secondary settings — only one or two actions should be set as primary; everything else is secondary. If every lead action is primary, Smart Bidding is optimising to the noise.
- Enhanced conversions / offline imports — a lead-gen account without enhanced conversions or offline-conversion imports is reporting on form fills, not closed business.
- Search terms review — recent weeks of actual search terms matched by broad and phrase match. Irrelevant terms burning spend is the single most common finding.
- Brand vs non-brand split — brand terms are cheap and convert well; folded into the account total they inflate every blended ROAS. Report the two separately.
- Performance Max asset and search-theme hygiene — PMax asset groups need actual assets (not placeholders), negative keyword lists at account level, and search themes that match the business, not generic category words.
- Location settings ("presence" vs "presence or interest") — "presence or interest" quietly serves ads to people searching about the location, not people in it. For local service businesses this is usually a leak.
- Auto-applied recommendations — if turned on, Google is editing campaigns outside the agency's or client's decision. Switch off for lead-gen accounts.
- Account ownership — the client should own the Google Ads account (not the agency's MCC in a way that can't be released). If the agency owns the account, you lose the history and tracking when they leave.
- Change history — the Change History log shows who did what, when. A quiet log means nothing is being managed; a chaotic log means no coherent plan.
- Budget-limited campaigns — campaigns capped by daily budget are leaving search-impression share on the table. Check the "Lost IS (budget)" column for the real ceiling.
For the search-terms deep dive, see the Google Ads search terms report guide; for how we run accounts to this standard, see Google Ads.