Google Ads reports strongly and often takes credit for demand it did not create. This guide is for whoever runs paid search. It covers separating brand from non brand, what impression share tells you about headroom, and how Quality Score turns into money.
Separate brand from everything else first
This is the single most important habit in paid search reporting.
Brand campaigns bid on your own name. The people searching it already know who you are, usually because another channel introduced them. Those campaigns convert extraordinarily well and cost very little, so they flatter every blended figure they are included in.
Including brand in your overall paid search performance produces a number that looks excellent and cannot guide any decision. Increasing brand spend does not create demand, it harvests demand that already exists, and the ceiling is however many people searched.
Read brand and non brand separately, always. Non brand is where acquisition actually happens and where the honest cost per acquisition lives.
Impression share is your headroom
Impression share is the proportion of available impressions you received.
It answers the question budget alone cannot: is there more to buy. A campaign performing well at forty per cent impression share has substantial room to grow. The same campaign at ninety per cent does not, and additional budget will be spent on progressively worse queries.
The lost impression share breakdown tells you why you are missing the rest. Lost to budget means you are capped and raising it will buy more of the same. Lost to rank means your ad is not competitive enough to show, and more budget will not fix it. Those two have completely different responses and are easy to confuse.
Quality Score is a discount
Quality Score estimates how relevant your ad and landing page are to the query, and it directly affects what you pay per click.
The practical effect is that two advertisers bidding identically pay different amounts. Improving relevance lowers your cost for the same position, which is the rare optimisation that reduces cost without reducing volume.
The components are worth reading separately. Expected click through rate is about the ad copy. Ad relevance is about how closely the ad matches the query group. Landing page experience is about what happens after the click, and it is the one most often ignored because it belongs to someone else.
A low landing page score on an otherwise good campaign is money being paid every click for a fixable reason.
Search terms are where the waste is
The terms people actually searched, as opposed to the keywords you bid on, are where paid search budgets leak.
Broad match in particular will find queries you never intended. Reviewing search terms and adding negatives is unglamorous and reliably profitable, and it is the first thing to do on any account that has been running without attention.
Reading it against the board
Google reports conversions against the date of the click, not the date of the purchase. Tatheon reports revenue against the order. So the two will disagree on any given day and reconcile over a month.
That is expected rather than an error, and it is why the board shows both. Use Google’s figures to optimise within Google, where they are consistent. Use the reconciled figure to decide how much of your total budget paid search deserves.