While other Ads grading tools try to scare people with a bunch of metrics, we decided to simplify ours down to something everyone can understand: money.

Specifically, how much money your campaign is wasting on non-converting activities and the aggressiveness and efficiency of your cost for each of those conversions.

The math isn’t very complicated, either.

For the Wasted Spend calculation, we simply compare the amount of your AdWords spent on non-converting activities (i.e. sales, leads, or whatever you have defined in your campaign) and your total spend over the past 90 days. For well managed campaigns, this number would be 30% of your AdWords spend or less (we allow for some non-converting spend for testing new keywords and other ideas); anything over that amount is just burning cash.

The CPA Aggressiveness Score compares the Cost per Acquisition (CPA, aka cost per conversion) of your converting activities against the CPA for the entire account for the past 90 days. This usually generates a number between 1 and 2.5 (or higher if it’s really a mess), and we’ll explain your score in a handy chart after the test is done.

Warning: Waving these numbers in the face of your in-house PPC team or your search agency will always make them defensive.

We can’t know everything about your account from this test; however, we choose to look at the past 90 days because anything your PPC team might be testing that causes wasteful activities for that long is still wasteful.

Good luck!