Your contractor sends a report with CTR, CPC and ROAS – and you nod because it feels awkward to ask. We break down five numbers that are enough to control your advertising as an owner: what they mean, which values are normal and when it's time to sound the alarm.
In order of importance
How much ad spend one order eats up. This is the key number of the whole account: compare it with your margin and you immediately see whether your ads make or lose money. Everything else is detail.
How many hryvnias of revenue each UAH 1 of budget brings in. ROAS 5 = you invested 10,000 and sold 50,000 worth. The minimum acceptable ROAS depends on your margin: with a 30% markup, ads with ROAS 3 already roughly break even.
How many orders your ads brought in over a period. What matters is the trend: if conversions drop at the same budget, something has broken (the feed, the website, the season, competitors).
What percentage of visitors make a purchase. For e-commerce the benchmark is 1-3%. If your ads bring traffic and CR is below 0.5%, the problem lies with the website: prices, product pages, the cart.
What percentage of available impressions you capture. If your ads are profitable and impression share is 20%, there is room to scale 3-5 times simply by raising the budget.
Anti-metrics
"You were seen 500,000 times!" – so what? Impressions don't pay for products. For a store, it is only an intermediate number, still far from the end result.
Many cheap clicks without orders are worse than a few expensive ones with orders. A click is an expense, never an achievement in itself.
Activity in a report does not equal results. There is one right question for your contractor: what happened to the cost per order?
Rule of thumb: check cost per order and ROAS once a week, everything else once a month. If your contractor can't show these numbers within a minute, that is already a diagnosis.
We run ads with a one-page monthly report: spent, sold, cost per order, what we do next. And separately we will show you how these 5 metrics look in your current account.
📝 Get a review of my accountFree consultation. We will go through your current report together – with a translation from "ad speak" into plain language
