Conv. Val / Cost
What every euro of Google Ads spend brought back in tracked conversion value.
What it means
Conv. Val / Cost is the conversion value Google recorded divided by the cost of the ads that earned it. It's a ratio, not a percentage: 3.5 means €3.50 of tracked value came back for every €1 spent. Both halves are Google's own numbers, so it covers only the conversions Google can attribute, inside Google's window, valued the way your conversion tracking is set up to value them.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Conversion value is the total value Google recorded against tracked conversions for the rows and dates you're looking at. Cost is the spend behind them over the same period.
Worked example. €4,000 of Cost and €14,000 of conversion value. 14,000 ÷ 4,000 = 3.5.
The figure that decides whether 3.5 is enough is your margin, not 1.0. If €100 of sales leaves you €35 after product, delivery and fees, the ads cover their own cost at 1 ÷ 0.35, which is about 2.9. At 3.5 you're clearing the bar; at 2.5, every sale the campaign buys costs you money while the ratio still looks like a return.
When there's no Cost on a row the app shows 0 rather than a blank, so a 0 means either no spend or spend with no tracked value behind it. Read the Cost column before you read anything into it.
It answers the question
For every euro Google spent, how much value came back? That's the ranking question — sort the column and the campaigns paying their way separate from the ones being carried.
Why it matters
It's the one column that prices the outcome instead of describing the activity. Impressions, clicks and conversion rate all tell you how the machinery ran; this tells you whether running it was worth the money, in a form you can hold against your own margin.
It also decides where the next euro goes. Two campaigns at the same Cost and different ratios aren't two campaigns performing differently — they're one you should be feeding and one you should be questioning, and the column ranks them for you in a single sort.
What good looks like
The band is a general one and doesn't know your costs. Your own threshold is arithmetic, not opinion: divide 1 by the share of a sale you keep after product, delivery and fees. Keep 35% and the ads cover their cost at about 2.9; keep 60% and they cover it at about 1.7. Read it beside CostCostRead against conversions and value-per-cost, never alone. too — a spectacular ratio on a campaign spending €40 a month is not a finding.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Move budget to the rows already above your threshold | Shift spend out of campaigns below your margin line and into the ones above it | Account-level ratio up within a fortnight | 1–2 weeks | Total conversions can fall with it. The campaigns you starve are often the ones creating the demand the winners then harvest, and that only shows up a month later. |
| Fast Add negatives where spend has no value behind it | Pull the search-term report and block terms with real cost and no conversion value over 60 days | Same value on less spend | 1 week | Discovery queries go with them, and Search IS on the broader theme falls. Block too widely and you lose terms that convert slowly rather than never. |
| Slow Raise the conversion rate on the page, not the bid | Fix the landing page — real delivery dates, visible price, fewer checkout steps | More value from unchanged spend | 3–6 weeks | Development time, and each change needs long enough to be judged. Move pages and bids in the same week and you learn nothing from either. |
| Slow Send the value you keep, not the order total | Set conversion values to what a sale is actually worth to you rather than the full basket | A ratio you can compare against 1 instead of against a margin | 1 quarter | The number drops the day you change it and every comparison with earlier periods breaks. Automated bidding also re-learns against the new values, so performance is unstable for a while. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
A ratio on its own hides its size. The same 4.0 can sit on €200 of spend or €200,000, and only one of those is a business decision.
Scaling and improving
More money in and a better return on it. Rare, and usually means a campaign was budget-limited rather than demand-limited. Raise in steps and re-read after a week, because it doesn't hold forever.
Efficient and small
You cut the waste and the ratio improved. Efficiency without volume is a throttled account, not a healthy one, so the next move is finding room to reinvest.
Buying growth at a worse price
Expected when you scale into colder auctions, and fine while you're still above your margin line. It becomes a problem the moment nobody has written that line down.
Spending less, getting less back
Both moving down together points at something breaking rather than drifting. A conversion tag that stopped firing makes exactly this shape and costs nothing to rule out.
One is the return, the other is the price of a sale, and together they say which half moved. A falling ratio with a steady cost per sale means the sales got smaller — mix, discounting, a cheaper product taking over. A falling ratio with a rising cost per sale is an auction problem instead, and the fixes have nothing in common.
Google's view against your store's view. Google counts what it can attribute inside its own window; your store counts what actually arrived. A wide and stable gap is normal. A gap that suddenly widens usually means a tracking change on one side, and reading only the Google figure would have you scaling on a number your bank account disagrees with.
Common misreads
Only if your products cost you nothing. Below 1 ÷ your margin, every extra sale the campaign buys loses money — and that line sits well above 1 for almost every store.
A row with no spend shows 0 here, and so does a row with spend and no tracked value. They're different problems with the same display, and the Cost column tells you which one you're looking at.
It's buying people who already knew you and were on their way. The value was largely free and there's rarely more of it available to buy, so it flatters the account average and can't be scaled.
Also called
Conversion value / cost · value per cost · Google Ads return on ad spend
See yoursYour conversion value against cost for the period, and the same ratio by campaign so you can rank where the budget goes.
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