Ads reporting

How to read paid-performance reporting without blurring it into organic traffic

Ads reporting is the paid-performance surface inside SG-Dashboard analytics. Spend, paid clicks, cost efficiency, conversions where present, campaign-level movement, and cost-per-conversion math live here — kept visibly distinct from organic search, direct visits, and local-presence signals. This page covers what the surface answers, what it does not answer, and how to read the numbers without conflating paid and earned traffic.

The internal rule SGEN follows is that paid signals stay exact and source-specific. A click you paid for is not the same data point as a click that came from a Google search result, and the reporting layer preserves that difference rather than averaging them together into a single performance line. Operators get to see the cost consequence of paid activity at a glance, and stakeholders get reports that do not quietly hide ad spend inside generic traffic summaries.

What is this for?

Ads reporting tells you what your paid traffic cost, what it delivered, and how that compares period-over-period. You reach for it when the question is about money in versus result out — not about every visitor your site saw.

Read this page when you need to:

• Answer "did this campaign earn back what we spent on it?"
• Compare cost-per-conversion across two paid platforms.
• See whether last week's spend moved any of the outcomes you care about.
• Hand a stakeholder a paid-performance summary that does not blur into organic numbers.

The surface pulls from connected ad platforms (Google Ads first; other platforms surface as integrations land). Where an ad platform exposes campaign-level spend and click data, SGEN renders it here. Where it exposes conversion data, SGEN relates that conversion data to the cost.

Good use cases

Weekly paid-performance read. Open Ads reporting on Monday for the prior week's window. You see spend, paid clicks, and (where wired) cost-per-conversion broken out by connected ad source. The picture takes about thirty seconds to absorb. You leave with one of three reads — paid is pulling its weight, paid is under-delivering, or paid is masking an issue elsewhere.

Campaign-spike investigation. Forms or phone taps spike. Open Ads reporting. If a campaign date range matches the spike, the paid source is the explanation and the cost-per-result confirms whether the spike was efficient. If no campaign matches, the spike came from organic traffic, referrals, or a non-paid source — and you go look at Analytics or Attribution next instead.

Pre-budget review. Before a quarterly budget conversation, pull a 90-day Ads reporting window. The cost-per-conversion trend tells you whether the platform is getting more or less efficient over time — independent of whether total spend went up or down.

Stakeholder reporting. When the team asks "what did we spend and what did we get?", the Ads reporting view answers it in one screen — without forcing you to manually subtract paid traffic from total analytics to find the gap.

Validation that a tracker is firing. When a new ad campaign goes live, the first paid clicks should appear in Ads reporting within the platform's own reporting cadence (some platforms aggregate hourly, some daily). A flat-zero row a day in is the early signal that something in the integration is off — wrong account, missing scope, or an ad set that never went live.

What NOT to use this for

Organic search ranking analysis. Ads reporting covers paid placements only. The fact that a keyword shows up here does not tell you anything about how that keyword ranks organically. For organic ranking, the place to go is Google Search Console through Integrations.

Total site traffic. Paid clicks are one source of traffic. Direct, organic, referral, and social all live elsewhere. If your question is "how many people visited the site this week", you want Analytics, not Ads reporting. Reading Ads numbers and assuming they cover total traffic is the single most common misread of this surface.

Source-to-outcome storytelling for non-paid channels. When you want to answer "what source produced this lead?", the right surface is Attribution. Ads reporting tells you what your paid spend produced — Attribution tells you what every source produced.

Live financial reconciliation. The numbers here are the platform's reported numbers, on the platform's reporting cadence. They are accurate enough to make operating decisions, but they are not a substitute for the platform's billing invoices when an accountant needs to reconcile a charge.

How this connects to other features

• Analytics — covers what every visitor requested from your server (page views, 404s, form submits). Ads reporting layers on top by telling you which of those visits you paid for, and what they cost.
• Reports — packaged scheduled or on-demand analytics deliveries. A paid-performance report shape pulls from Ads reporting numbers and packages them for stakeholder review.
• Attribution — the source-to-outcome reporting law. Ads reporting tells you the cost; Attribution tells you which outcomes the paid source drove versus other sources. Read them together when you want the full picture.
• Integrations — Google Ads and other ad-platform connections live here. Ads reporting depends on the connector being healthy; if numbers look stuck, check the connector first.

Before you start

• The site has at least one ad-platform integration wired and authorized through the Integrations panel. Without a connected source, Ads reporting renders an empty-state placeholder rather than data.
• You are signed in to SGEN with admin access to the site. Ads reporting is admin-only.
• The connected ad platform has run paid traffic in the period you are looking at. New accounts with zero historical spend show a populated chrome but no rows.
• For cost-per-conversion math to work, the conversion side of the platform also needs to be wired — either through the ad platform's own conversion tracking, or through SGEN's own form / phone-tap signals where the integration supports it.

Where to go

1. Open the left navigation in SG-Dashboard.
2. Open Analytics.
3. Open the Ads sub-area within Analytics. The Ads reporting view renders for the default period.

The exact navigation label can shift as SG-Dashboard evolves; if Ads is not the visible label, look for Paid sources or a labelled split inside the main reporting view. The surface is consistent even when the entry point gets renamed.

Steps

1. Pick the period

The default period is usually the prior 7 days. Open the date-range picker at the top of the view and choose the window that matches your question — last 7 days for weekly health, last 30 days for a monthly read, a custom range for a specific campaign window. The page reloads with the new period applied and the URL captures the range so the view is bookmarkable.

2. Read the source rows

Each connected ad platform gets its own row (or a small cluster of rows broken out by sub-source — for example, Google Ads — Search and Google Ads — Display as separate rows). The columns are spend, paid clicks, conversions (where wired), and cost-per-conversion (where the conversion column is populated).

Read the cost-per-conversion column first. That number is the single most telling read for whether a source is pulling its weight, and it cuts through the noise of "we spent more than last week, so we got more results" reasoning.

3. Compare against the prior period

Most builds of the view let you toggle a period-over-period comparison. Turn it on for the same window length as your current period (last 7 days vs. the 7 days before that). A column shows the delta. Watch the cost-per-conversion delta in particular — rising cost-per-conversion is the early sign that a campaign is running out of room.

4. Drill into a single source where it matters

Clicking a source row opens a deeper view for that ad platform — campaign-level breakout, top ads, sometimes the spend curve over time. Use the drill-down when a top-line row tells you something is off and you need to find the specific campaign responsible.

What success looks like

• The view renders within a couple of seconds once the period is picked.
• Every wired ad-platform source shows at least the spend and click columns populated.
• For sources where conversion tracking is wired, cost-per-conversion renders a real dollar figure rather than a dash.
• A bookmarked view returns the same period and same source breakout on a second visit.
• A week-over-week comparison shows the deltas as signed values (positive in red for cost rising, green for spend falling at constant conversions, and so on).

What to do if it does not work

The view is empty even though the ad account is spending. The connector is the first place to look. Open Integrations, find the relevant ad platform, and check that the connection is still authorized. Permissions on the ad-platform side can lapse after a password change, a role change, or a security event — the connection appears healthy in SGEN but no data flows.

Spend shows but conversions do not. Conversion tracking is a separate wiring step from spend reporting. If the ad platform's own conversion pixels are not firing, or if the SGEN side has not been told which forms or phone taps count as conversions, the conversion column stays at zero. Audit the conversion wiring on both sides.

Numbers do not match what the ad platform's own dashboard shows. Some difference is normal — reporting cadences, attribution windows, and data-freshness rules vary between SGEN's view and the ad platform's native reporting. If the gap is more than a few percent, the most common cause is a timezone mismatch between the SGEN site's local time and the ad account's reporting time.

Cost-per-conversion looks impossibly low or impossibly high. First check that the conversion column has a sensible count — a tracking misfire that doubles the conversion count halves the cost-per-conversion, and vice versa. The cost-per-conversion math is correct given its inputs; the inputs are usually where the issue lives.

A source disappeared. Disconnected integrations stop reporting. Check Integrations for a disconnected or expired connection. Re-authorize where needed.

Examples

Example A — Weekly read on a small ecommerce site. Spend $507 on Google Ads in the last 7 days. Eleven conversions through Search at $37.45 each. One conversion through Display at $95.20. The Search numbers are healthy for the category; the Display row is the question — spending $95 to get one conversion is high enough that the next move is to drill into Display campaigns and pause the under-performers.

Example B — Campaign launch validation. You launched a new Google Ads campaign on Monday. Tuesday morning, Ads reporting shows the campaign row with about 12 clicks at $0.85 average cost. The conversion column reads zero — expected at this volume. Wednesday it reads 1 conversion at $9.50 cost-per-conversion. The early signal is positive; the recommendation is to let it run another 5-7 days before drawing conclusions on efficiency.

Example C — Period-over-period comparison. Comparing this week to the prior week: total spend $507 vs. $498 (+$9), conversions 12 vs. 14 (-2), cost-per-conversion $42.25 vs. $35.57 (+$6.68). The flat spend with a worse cost-per-conversion is the early sign of audience fatigue on the existing creative. The next move is a creative refresh on the top-spending ad group.

Where Ads reporting ends, other surfaces start

Ads reporting answers paid-cost-and-result questions. It does not answer:

• "Where did this lead come from across the full visitor journey?" — that is Attribution.
• "What pages did paid visitors land on, and what did they do once on the site?" — that is Analytics filtered by paid traffic, plus the ad platform's own landing-page report.
• "What is the lifetime value of customers we acquired through paid?" — that is a combination of Attribution, the order history, and an analytics tool outside SGEN that handles cohort math.

The intent is clean separation. Ads reporting stays focused on the paid-cost-and-result read. Adjacent surfaces handle adjacent questions without one swallowing the other.

A practical paid-performance rhythm

A team that runs paid traffic without ever opening Ads reporting either over-spends quietly or under-uses the channel because nobody can prove it works. A short weekly walk fixes both problems:

1. Monday — top-line read. Open Ads reporting for the prior 7 days. Read the cost-per-conversion column first. Anything more than 30% off the trailing 30-day average is worth a closer look.
2. Tuesday — campaign drill-down for the worst row. Open the source with the worst cost-per-conversion week-over-week. Drill into the campaign level. The top-spending campaign with the worst conversion rate is the candidate to pause, refresh, or re-target.
3. Friday — period comparison. Toggle the week-over-week comparison. Note any source where spend went up but cost-per-conversion got worse — that combination is usually audience saturation, not a creative or bid problem.
4. Month end — stakeholder summary. Pull a 30-day window and screenshot the source-level table for the stakeholder packet. Pair it with the Reports view from SG-Dashboard for context on organic alongside paid.

Privacy and reporting accuracy

Ads reporting is a read-through of what the connected ad platform reports back to SGEN. SGEN does not invent or interpolate paid-performance numbers; it surfaces the platform's reported values and renders them in a consistent shape.

That means two things in practice. First, the accuracy ceiling for Ads reporting is the accuracy of the ad platform itself — if the platform under-counts or attributes oddly, SGEN inherits the same view. Second, the reporting cadence follows the platform's cadence — some platforms refresh hourly, some daily, some longer for conversion data because of attribution windows.

When the number in front of you matters for a real money decision (a budget commit, a campaign kill, an account review), cross-check against the platform's native dashboard before acting. Ads reporting is built for operating reads; treat the platform's own dashboard as the auditable record.

Related reading

• Analytics — the operations-level analytics surface.
• Reports — packaged scheduled or on-demand analytics deliveries.
• Attribution — the source-to-outcome reporting law that pairs with paid-performance numbers.
• Integrations overview — how ad platforms get connected to SGEN in the first place.