How to Effectively Monitor Meta and Google Ads Campaigns

Welcome to Part 2 of our 4X Series: Measuring the Impact of Advertising for eCommerce SMBs.

In Part 1 of this Series, we talked about why it’s important for small business owners to understand both the short-term and long-term effects of their advertising efforts. Building on Part 1, in this article we demonstrate how to capture important short-term metrics across two main ad platforms - Meta & Google. In this comprehensive guide, we re-iterate the metrics of interest and show you how to create your own reports on Meta & Google so you can start monitoring your ads effectively.

We’ll demonstrate how key metrics are presented in both Meta and Google Ads, providing examples of campaign performance and detailed interpretations. We'll focus on core metrics, while clearly distinguishing platform-specific terms as needed.

This guide assumes you have already created, configured, and launched an advertising campaign on Meta or Google. For Meta this means that you have set up your Meta Business Manager Account , your Meta Pixel , and your Facebook Ads Manager account . If you're using Google Ads, we assume that you have set up your Google Ads Account and integrated with Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

At this stage your campaign is up and running and you're ready to start monitoring its performance. We're going to walk you through the steps you need to take on each platform to generate a comprehensive, high-level report of your ad campaigns. Different channels may offer different metrics, they may use different names for the same metric, or they may even define a metric differently, but in this guide we'll be collecting the same core metrics across Meta and Google, so you can compare your campaigns to each other regardless of which channel they're running on.

To monitor key metrics for your Meta ad campaigns, use the Ads Reporting tool in the Ads Manager console
Step 1: Open the Ads Reporting tool in the Ads Manager console.
Step 2: Click on "Create report" and select the "Pivot table" layout.
Step 3: Choose your desired date range from the drop-down menu.
Step 4: Under "Breakdowns," select "Campaign name" for a high-level overview of each campaign's performance.
Step 5: For more detailed data, also select "Ad Set Name." This will display metrics for every Ad Set within each campaign, providing a more granular view of performance.

Meta provides a whole bunch of metrics, and a lot of them are some sort of variation of the same thing, which can be pretty overwhelming when you're first starting out with the tool. If you search for "clicks" under the Metrics tab, for instance, you'll see about a dozen different options.
All of these metrics are useful for something, but we're just going to pick out one Meta metric per core metric in our report. These are:

If you want to learn more about the diversity of related metrics that Meta offers in its reports, see the Appendix at the end of this article. We've collected a broad set of important metrics and we explain what each of them is and why it's useful.

We'll get these metrics using Google Ads Report Editor tool. Select your campaign and create a report. Before we generate the report, we need to define a custom function to get the Cost Per Mille impressions (CPM). If you don’t need to get CPM, you can skip this step and continue with the rest of the guide and get all the other metrics.

Step 1: Start from any of the Campaigns, Ad groups, Ads, or Keywords views in Google Ads.
Step 2: Click the columns icon in the upper right corner of the table.
Step 3: Select "Modify columns" from the dropdown menu.
Step 4: Click "Custom columns" and then select "New column."
Step 5: Name your column "CPM" (Cost per Thousand Impressions).
Step 6: In the editor, define the formula as Cost / Impr. * 1000 to calculate CPM.
Step 7: Set the column format to "Currency" to display the CPM in monetary terms.
Step 8: Click "Save" to finalize and save your custom column.
Step 9: Return to the report editor to include the new CPM column in your reports.

As with Meta, there are many columns available. See the Appendix for more information about other relevant metrics. These are the fields we're using to get our core metrics:

Understanding how different advertising platforms present key metrics is vital for creating cohesive and effective ad reports. In the table below, we offer a side-by-side comparison of how Meta and Google Ads label these essential metrics.

When you create a report following this guide you'll end up with a table like this one below, in which we use some hypothetical campaign values. We'll use this to diagnose some common situations.

Analyzing the data from Table 2 allows us to pinpoint specific issues and opportunities within each campaign. Below, we break down these findings.