Cost
Also called: Spend
The ad cost Google recorded for the period you are looking at. It is what your ads accrued, not necessarily what you have been charged yet: your bill can be lower after credits, for example for invalid clicks.
The Google Ads terms in your reports, in plain English.
Google Ads has its own language, and most of it doesn't need to be learned. Here is what each term in your reports and alerts means. If AdPulse Guard uses a term that isn't explained here, tell us and we'll add it.
The money questions
Conversion
Also called: Sale, lead, action
An action you have told Google to count after someone clicks your ad, such as a purchase, a form or a call. You decide what counts. Google records a conversion against the date of the click, so it can appear in your reports days later.
Conversion tracking
The setup that tells Google when a click led to a conversion. If it breaks, your reports undercount, and any bidding strategy that aims for conversions is learning from the wrong data.
CPA
Also called: Cost per acquisition, cost per conversion
Cost divided by the number of recorded conversions: what each conversion costs you on average. Compare it with what a customer or a lead is actually worth to you.
Example: Cost of $500 and 10 recorded leads → a CPA of $50 per lead.
ROAS
Also called: Return on ad spend
Conversion value divided by cost. Conversion value is whatever value you record for your conversions in Google Ads; it is not checked against your real revenue. If your account records no conversion values, ROAS reads as zero, which means values are not tracked, not that your ads earned nothing.
Example: Cost of $500 and $2,000 of recorded conversion value → a ROAS of 4x.
How your ads are performing
Impressions
How many times your ad was shown. Being shown is not being clicked: lots of impressions and few clicks can be a sign the ad is not matching what people search for.
Clicks
How many times your ad was clicked. Google counts a click even if the person never reaches your website, so clicks can be higher than the visits your site records.
CTR
Also called: Click-through rate
Clicks divided by impressions. A falling CTR can mean your ad has stopped feeling relevant to what people search for.
Example: 1,000 impressions and 30 clicks → a CTR of 3%.
CPC
Also called: Cost per click
Cost divided by clicks: the average you paid for each click. It can rise when more advertisers compete for your keywords. Most Search ads are charged per click; some campaign types charge per 1,000 viewable impressions or per video view instead.
Example: Cost of $300 for 600 clicks → a CPC of $0.50.
Budget and pacing
Average daily budget
Also called: Daily budget
The amount you set for each day, which Google treats as an average. For most campaigns it can spend up to twice that on a single day, and you are not charged more than 30.4 times it in a month. How this changed in 2026
Budget pacing
Whether a campaign is using its monthly budget at the rate you intended, given how far through the month you are and the days it is scheduled to run. Too fast and it can overspend or run out early; too slow and you may be missing customers. On Pro, AdPulse Guard estimates this every hour for each campaign with its own budget, against an even pace through the month; it does not model ad schedules.
Example: Halfway through the month with 80% of the monthly budget used → pacing too fast.
Overspend
Spending noticeably faster than your budget intends. Common causes are a bid or budget change, new competition, or a campaign switched on and forgotten.
Terms you will see in our alerts
Spend spike
A campaign spent much more in its latest day than its average for the seven days before. By default AdPulse Guard flags it at more than 40% above that average. Sometimes that is good news, but it is worth knowing.
Conversion drop
Recorded conversions for a campaign’s latest day fell well below its average for the seven days before: by default, more than 30% lower. It can mean a real fall in demand, a tracking problem, or conversions that have not been reported yet.
Negative keyword
A word or phrase you tell Google you do not want your ads to show for. Without them you can pay for searches that were never going to buy, such as “free”, “jobs” or “how to do it yourself”.
Example: A roofing company that adds “roofing jobs” as a negative keyword stops paying for people looking for work, not a roof.
Health score
AdPulse Guard’s 0–100 summary of an account, built from its last 30 days of data and its open alerts, weighted by how serious each alert is, and recalculated after every hourly check. With no activity in 30 days, or fewer than 100 clicks, there is no score rather than a misleading one. It is not Google’s Quality Score.
This is the point of AdPulse Guard: you shouldn't need to learn any of this to know whether your ads are working. We watch, and we tell you in plain English.
Get alerted to changes worth investigating.
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