Reading Your Results (Google Ads)

📋 What you'll need: Your live Google campaign, and your Google Ads Planner (Spreadsheet 4, Results Log tab) to record what you find
⏱ Time: About 20 minutes a week, starting a week or two after launch — not before
✅ Output: A clear read on which keywords and ad groups are working, logged in Spreadsheet 4, and a simple keep, cut, or scale decision for each
Your campaign is live. Now the job shifts from building to reading — and on Google, reading well is most of what separates a campaign that quietly drains money from one that makes it. The good news: you don't need to watch dozens of numbers or log in every day. You need a handful of metrics, one weekly habit, and the discipline to leave the rest alone. This page shows you exactly what to look at, what "good" looks like, and what to do about it.
Everything you record goes into your Results Log — Spreadsheet 4, Results Log tab.
  • link to spreadhsheet 4
⚠️ Leave it alone for the first two weeks.
The most common — and most expensive — mistake is judging your campaign too early. For the first week or two, Google is in its learning period, working out who converts for you, and the numbers swing around. Pausing keywords or changing budgets in this window just resets the learning and sets you back. Let it run and gather data before you judge anything. The one exception is checking your search terms report for obvious waste, which you'll do below.

The Numbers That Matter

Google Ads shows you dozens of columns. Ignore almost all of them. Four numbers tell a small founder everything they need — and they build on each other: did people click, did the click cost what you expected, did it convert, and is Google seeing you as relevant. First, set up your view so these are all on one screen.
📌 Set up your columns once.
In your campaign, above the stats table, click Columns → Modify columns. Add: Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Avg. CPC, Conversions, Cost/conv., and Conv. rate. Save it as a set so it's there every time. For Quality Score, you'll look at the keyword level (covered below).
Cost per conversion — the one that decides everything
What it is: what you pay, on average, for one real result — one lead or one sale. Google shows it as "Cost/conv."
Why it's the one that matters: this is the number you compare directly against your Maximum CPA from Know Your Numbers. That comparison is the whole game:
  • Paying less per conversion than a customer is worth to you → the campaign is working, and it's a candidate to scale.
  • Paying more → it's losing money, and something needs to change or be cut.
There's no universal "good" number — a financial advisor who earns $2,000 from a client can happily pay $150 for a lead; a candle maker selling a $25 candle needs their cost per sale far lower. Good is whatever beats your Max CPA. This is why you worked your numbers out first: without them, you're staring at a cost per conversion with no idea if it's good or bad.
Conversion rate — where most of your money is won or lost
What it is: the share of clicks that turn into a result. Google shows it as "Conv. rate." Ten clicks and one lead is a 10% conversion rate.
Why it matters: it's the bridge between what you pay per click and what you pay per customer. A small lift here changes everything downstream — double your conversion rate and you halve your cost per conversion, without touching your budget. If your clicks are healthy but conversions are low, the problem is usually after the click: your landing page, your offer, or a mismatch between what the ad promised and what the page delivers.
What's reasonable: 5–10% is a fair starting range for a well-matched landing page, but it varies widely by business. Watch your own trend more than any benchmark — is it climbing as you refine, or stuck.
Click-through rate (CTR) — is your ad earning the click?
What it is: the share of people who click your ad after seeing it. Google shows it as "CTR."
Why it matters: on Search, a low CTR is a double problem — you're getting fewer clicks, and Google reads a low CTR as "this ad isn't relevant," which lowers your Quality Score and pushes your cost per click up. A healthy CTR does the opposite: more clicks and cheaper ones.
What's good: on Search, 3%+ is a reasonable floor and higher is better. Well below 3% usually means your ad isn't matching what people searched — the fix is tighter, more relevant ad copy that echoes the keyword, and making sure each ad group is themed tightly enough that one ad genuinely fits all its keywords.
Quality Score — Google's relevance rating, and your discount lever
What it is: Google's 1–10 rating of how relevant your keyword, ad, and landing page are to what someone searched. You check it per keyword: add the "Quality Score" column at the keyword level (Keywords → add the column).
Why it matters: it directly sets what you pay. A high Quality Score (8–10) can cut your cost per click by 30–50% versus a low one — for the same position. It's the closest thing to free money in Google Ads: improve relevance, pay less per click, get more from the same budget.
What's good, what to do: 5–7 is normal; 8–10 is where you want your main keywords. If a keyword sits at 4 or below, it's flagging a relevance gap in one of three places — the ad doesn't match the keyword, the keyword doesn't fit its ad group, or the landing page doesn't match the search. Fix the weakest of those three. Focus your effort on your highest-spend keywords first, where the saving is biggest.
💡 Read them as a chain.
CTR tells you if your ad earns the click; Quality Score tells you if Google sees you as relevant (and how much you pay); conversion rate tells you if the click turns into a result; cost per conversion tells you if it all adds up against what a customer is worth. When something's off, this chain shows you where to look — a weak CTR points at your ad, a weak conversion rate points past the click at your landing page, and a high cost per conversion is the sum of everything upstream.

Your Weekly Habit: The Search Terms Report

If you do only one thing each week, do this. The search terms report shows you the actual searches people typed that triggered your ads — which is not the same as the keywords you chose. Your keyword is "personal trainer," but the report might show you paid for "free personal trainer," "personal trainer jobs," or "personal trainer courses" — none of which will ever become a customer. Every one of those is money gone. This report is how you find them and stop them.
📌 Where to find it.
In your campaign: Keywords → Search terms (a tab at the top of the keywords section). Set the date range to the last 7 days. This shows every real search that triggered an ad, with its clicks, cost, and conversions beside it.
How to run your weekly review
Once a week, spend ten minutes here:
  1. Open the search terms report for the last 7 days.
  2. Read down the list of actual searches. For each, ask one question: is this someone who could genuinely become my customer?
  3. When you spot a search that's irrelevant — wrong intent, wrong service, someone looking for free or for a job — add it as a negative keyword. Select it and click "Add as negative keyword." But before you save, change the match type (see the callout below) — Google's default is usually the wrong one.
  4. Log it in your Google Ads Planner (Spreadsheet 4, Negative Keywords tab), so your list is building in one place over time. Jot the match type beside it (phrase or exact) so you have a clean record of what you're blocking and how.
  5. While you're here, notice the winners too: searches that did convert. If a strong converting search isn't already one of your keywords, add it — you've just found a term worth bidding on.
This one habit typically recovers 15–30% of wasted spend on a small account. A wedding photographer who cuts "free," "cheap," "courses," and "jobs" in their first few weeks stops paying for clicks that were never going to book a shoot — and every dollar saved goes to the searches that do.
⚠️ Change the negative keyword match type before you save — this one catches everyone out.
When you add a negative keyword, Google defaults it to exact match, which only blocks that one precise search. That means you'd have to add "free personal trainer," "free trainer near me," and "free fitness coach" separately — plugging one hole at a time. Instead, change it to phrase match, which blocks any search containing that word. Adding just "free" as a phrase negative blocks every search with "free" in it, now and in future. A simple rule: for a junk word you never want (free, cheap, jobs, course, DIY), use phrase match on that single word. For a specific unwanted phrase where you still want related searches, use exact match. One more thing — negative keywords don't include plurals automatically, so "job" and "jobs" are treated as different words; add both if it matters.
⚠️ Do this weekly, not once.
New irrelevant searches appear all the time as Google tests what to match you to — especially in the early weeks. A negative keyword list is never "finished." Ten minutes a week here does more for a small budget than almost anything else you can do in the account.

Keep, Cut, or Scale

Once a week, after your search terms review, open your Results Log (Spreadsheet 4, Results Log tab), fill in each ad group's numbers, and make one decision per ad group and per keyword. Just like your ads, there are only three: keep it, cut it, or put more behind it. This is where reading turns into action.
Keep — give it more time
For keywords and ad groups that are close but not yet clear: getting clicks, a reasonable cost per click, but not enough conversions yet to judge. Early on, you need enough clicks before a conversion rate means anything. A keyword needs a fair number of clicks (a rough guide is 100 clicks, or at least a couple of weeks) before "no conversions yet" actually tells you something. When in doubt and it's not clearly losing money, keep it and check again next week.
 
Cut — stop what's draining budget
For keywords that have had a fair run — enough clicks and time to judge — and are clearly losing money: spending well above your Max CPA with no conversions, or converting so expensively it can't be profitable. You have three ways to cut, from lightest to heaviest:
  • Add a negative keyword — when a specific search is the problem, block it (your weekly search terms habit).
  • Pause the keyword — when a whole keyword you chose is spending without converting, pause it. Its budget flows to the keywords that work.
  • Lower its priority — sometimes a keyword converts, just not as cheaply as others; you might keep it but not scale it.
Cutting isn't failure — it's the point of testing. A financial advisor who finds "financial advice" (vague, researchers) burns money while "financial advisor near me" (ready to hire) converts, should cut the first and feed the second. You're concentrating your budget on what works.
Scale — grow what's working
For keywords and ad groups clearly working — converting consistently below your Max CPA — there's really one move that matters at your stage:
  • Raise your campaign budget. If your campaign is profitable overall and Google shows "Limited by budget" on the campaign, increase it — by no more than about 20% every few days, so you don't reset the learning. Because Google favours what's converting, the extra spend mostly flows to your winning keywords and ad groups.
That's it. Resist the urge to over-engineer. You don't need to promote your winners to exact match, split them into new campaigns, or restructure — those are moves for later, once you have real volume and a reason.
Your phrase-match keywords are already capturing the searches an exact-match version would, so adding exact match now mostly just gives you more to manage for no real gain. On a small budget, the highest-leverage growth move is simple: keep cutting the losers (which feeds the winners automatically), and raise the budget on a campaign that's proven it makes money.
When a keyword or ad group is winning, the useful thing to do isn't restructuring — it's building on it: add closely related keywords you found converting in your search terms report, and make sure its ad and landing page are as sharp as possible, since every gain in relevance lowers your cost.
💡 "Should I promote winners to exact match, or split them into their own campaign?"
You'll read this advice everywhere — and it's real, but it's a big budget move. Both promoting to exact match and building separate campaigns only pay off once you have serious volume (roughly 30+ conversions a month) and a specific reason — tighter bid control, protecting a high-value term. Doing it too early just splits your small budget and your data across more places, making everything harder to learn from. For now: one campaign, phrase match, cut losers, feed winners. Come back to exact match and campaign splits when you've genuinely outgrown this setup.
The starved ad group — when to consolidate
Watch for ad groups getting very little traffic — a rough floor is about 1,000 impressions a week. Below that, an ad group is starved: it never gets enough data for Google to learn or for you to judge it, so it just sits there underperforming. This usually happens when you've built too many ad groups on a small budget, splitting your traffic too thin.
The fix is to consolidate. If two small ad groups are closely related, merge them into one with a slightly broader theme, so the traffic concentrates and the combined group gets enough volume to learn from. On a small budget, two or three healthy ad groups beat five starved ones. Fewer, fuller ad groups is almost always the right move when you're spending a little.

Your Weekly Rhythm

That's the whole job — and it's a rhythm, not a rebuild. Once your campaign is past its first couple of weeks, this is your weekly loop, and it takes about 20 minutes:
✅ Your 20-minute weekly review
  1. Check your search terms report → add irrelevant searches as negative keywords (phrase match), and spot any converting searches worth adding as keywords
  2. Open your Results Log (Spreadsheet 4) → fill in each ad group's numbers
  3. Make one decision per ad group: keep, cut, or scale
  4. Cut the clear losers → their budget flows to what's working
  5. If the campaign is profitable and limited by budget, raise it ~20%
  6. Check your Quality Scores on your main keywords → sharpen any ad or landing page that's dragging
  7. That's it. Close the laptop.
The founders who win at Google aren't the ones who tinker every day — they're the ones who leave the campaign alone to learn, then make a few sharp decisions once a week based on what the numbers actually say. Small, steady, consistent. Over a couple of months, that loop turns a rough starting campaign into a lean one that brings in customers at a cost you know you can afford.
🎉 You've built a complete Google Ads system.
Step back and take this in. You researched what your buyers actually search for, worked out what you can afford to pay, built a properly structured campaign, wrote ads designed to win the click, set up conversion tracking, and now you can read your results and improve them week after week. That's the full paid search system — the exact thing most small founders pay agencies thousands to run, built and owned entirely by you.
Whatever the numbers do at first, you now have something most businesses never build: a paid channel you understand and control, running in your business, working while you sleep.

Where to Next

You've built one of your two paid channels. From here:
  • Doing Google first? If your business also suits Meta, Module 3 builds a Meta Ads system alongside this one — reaching people who are scrolling, not searching. Many founders run both, and let their Results Logs show which channel wins customers more cheaply.
  • Ready to keep more of what you win? Module 5 — Organic Content & SEO and Module 6 — Email & Retention turn a paid channel into a full marketing engine — bringing people back and turning one-time buyers into repeat revenue.
Module 03 - Meta Ads (Paid Social)
Module 05 - Organic Content & SEO