How to Read an Ad Agency Report: 8 Monthly Questions to Ask

In January 2026, thousands of advertisers simultaneously saw conversion drops of 15–40%. Campaigns hadn't changed, and neither had the budgets. On January 12, Meta permanently removed two attribution windows from its Ads API — seven and twenty-eight days post-view — causing a portion of conversions to stop being tracked. Contractors who stay updated with platform changes warned their clients in advance, as Meta had announced this shift back in October 2025. The rest attributed the drop to seasonality.

A report is not a ornamental piece of collaboration; it is the sole tool you use to manage your money in advertising.

Metrics That Look Convincing But Solve Nothing

Impressions, reach, and CTR (click-through rate) are diagnostics for specialists, not grounds for managerial decisions. Even more dangerous are the metrics that appear financial.

ROAS measures revenue, not profit. A campaign with a 500% ROAS on a product with a 5% margin operates at a loss, and the platform algorithm won't notice: it was taught to maximize revenue, not profit.

The cost per lead from the dashboard is always understated. Every platform claims the conversion for itself: a user sees an Instagram ad, Googles the brand name, and buys — both ad accounts report success. A one-minute check: sum up conversions across all platforms and compare them to actual orders. If the first number is higher, you aren't seeing results, but a sum of competing claims on them.

Eight Questions

1 How much does a customer cost, not just a lead? A lead is an intermediate metric. Ask for the cost of a paid order: how many leads convert into payments and what is their profit margin.

2 Does the report align with what the sales team sees? If the contractor reports from the ad account while you count from the CRM, you are discussing two different realities.

3 What portion of the budget goes to those who were already planning to buy? Retargeting and branded search ads yield the prettiest numbers because they catch existing demand. According to test estimates, only about a third of such conversions turn out to be truly incremental. A quick check without an analyst: turn off the channel for two weeks and monitor the revenue.

4 How do you control Performance Max? By default, this automated Google campaign cannibalizes your brand traffic and claims credit for it. Since 2025, Google has offered campaign-level negative keywords, brand exclusions, and search term reports for Performance Max. If a contractor claims nothing can be seen there, they simply haven't opened those reports.

5 How is tracking configured? A single browser pixel in 2026 loses a significant portion of events due to ad blockers and iOS restrictions. The standard is a pixel combined with server-side tracking via Conversions API with deduplication, preventing a single purchase from being counted twice. The Event Match Quality score for key actions should be closer to 8 than to 5.

6 What did you turn off this month? A healthy report contains not just launches: stopped creatives, narrowed audiences, new negative keywords. If items are only added month after month, that isn't management — it's expense expansion.

7 What happens if we increase the budget by 30%? Scaling is non-linear: the cheapest demand exhausts first. A contractor who promises "just more of the same" hasn't calculated the economics.

8 How do you make money from our budget? It's an uncomfortable question, but it explains everything else.

Red Flags

The most common payment structure in the Ukrainian market is a percentage of the ad spend, typically 15–20%. Under this model, the contractor is incentivized to make you spend more, even when expenditures become unprofitable. A fixed fee or a hybrid model with performance bonuses eliminates this conflict of interest.

Further down the list: refusal to grant admin access, lack of transparency disguised as "trade secrets," accounts and pixels owned by the agency, and auto-renewing contracts requiring 90 days' notice. And a subtle marker: if a noticeable portion of analytics traffic drops into the "not set" category, the contractor isn't controlling UTM tagging — and consequently, their own numbers.

What an Honest Report Looks Like

At MAS Agency, we consider an honest report to be one that starts with financial reality: spend, leads generated, customer acquisition cost, and next steps. Tactical metrics come below. Crucially, it must include a section on what didn't work and platform policy updates over the month. Such a report is shorter than typical ones and less comfortable for a contractor, as there is nowhere to hide.

If you ask these eight questions and don't get eight clear answers, reach out to us: we begin audit and ad management specifically by breaking down what you were shown before.

Sources: Analysis based on Meta developer announcements regarding attribution window updates in the Ads Insights API and industry evaluations of their impact, Google Ads documentation on Performance Max search terms reports and negative keywords, Meta documentation on Event Match Quality in Conversions API, ad campaign incrementality studies from 2025–2026, and open industry reports on ad service pricing in Ukraine.