Say "ROAS" to a client and watch their eyes glaze over. It's not that they're incapable of understanding it. It's that nobody ever bothered to translate it into a sentence about their own business. Ad platforms are built by and for people who live in the platform every day. Clients don't. They run a dental practice, a law firm, a landscaping company. They think in patients, cases, and jobs booked, not in clicks and impressions.
Every jargon term you use without translation is a small tax on the relationship. The client either nods along without understanding, which erodes trust slowly, or asks you to explain it, which costs you both time on every call. Translate once, in writing, and you don't pay that tax again.
Here's the reframe for every metric a client is likely to see, and why the plain version lands better.
ROAS → "For every dollar you spent, you got $X back"
ROAS as a ratio, "3.2x," means nothing to someone who doesn't spend their day in Google Ads. Say it in dollars instead: "for every dollar you spent on ads last month, you got $3.20 back in bookings." That's a sentence a business owner can hold in their head while making a budget decision. It's the same number. It just speaks their language instead of yours.
CTR (click-through rate) → "How many people who saw your ad actually cared enough to click"
CTR is a diagnostic number for the person managing the account. It's rarely something a client should be staring at directly, because a low CTR in isolation doesn't tell them anything actionable. If you do need to reference it, frame it as interest, not a raw percentage: "your ad is catching people's attention less than it used to, which usually means the message needs a refresh." Skip the number entirely if you can. Talk about what it means instead.
CPA (cost per acquisition) → "Cost per booking / cost per case / cost per job"
This one matters enough that it should never appear as generic "CPA" in a client-facing report. Rename it to the exact outcome your client cares about. A dental client cares about cost per booking. A law firm cares about cost per case inquiry. A home services company cares about cost per quote request. Same math, different label, dramatically different comprehension. The number is only useful once it's attached to something the client can picture happening in their business.
Impressions → "How many times your ad was shown"
Impressions sound impressive as a raw count, "412,000 impressions," but that number alone tells a client nothing about whether it's working. Most clients don't need to see it at all. If it's relevant context, frame it as reach: "your ad reached about 40,000 different people in the area this month." Leave the raw impression count out of the client-facing report unless it's directly tied to a decision.
Frequency → "How many times the average person saw it before ignoring it"
Frequency creeping upward is a real signal, ad fatigue is setting in, but the number by itself, "frequency is 4.2," is meaningless to a client. Translate the implication: "people are starting to see this ad too often, which is why we're refreshing the creative this week." Now it's a reason behind an action, not a stray statistic.
Clients who leave an agency most often cite dissatisfaction with delivery, not results, as the reason, according to Focus Digital's 2026 agency churn report. A client who never understood what the numbers meant can't tell the difference between a campaign that's working and one that isn't. Jargon they can't parse looks the same as bad performance from where they sit.
Impression share / quality score / conversion rate → skip unless it changes the decision
A good rule for any metric: if you can't finish the sentence "...and that's why we're doing X," leave it out of the client report entirely. These are working metrics for the person managing the account. They belong in your internal notes, not in the email a business owner reads on their phone between meetings.
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Book a free audit call →Handling it live, on a call
Reports are one thing. A live call is another, because a client can ask a follow-up question you didn't script for. The safest habit is to always answer in the client's unit before you answer in the platform's unit. If a client asks "how's the campaign doing," lead with "you're getting bookings at $28 each, well under your $45 target," and only mention ROAS or CTR if they specifically ask how you got there. Most won't. They wanted the business answer, not the mechanism.
It also helps to have one line ready for the moment a client repeats a term back to you incorrectly, which happens often once they've heard it enough times to feel comfortable using it. Don't correct them. Just keep using the plain version yourself and the conversation stays productive instead of turning into a vocabulary lesson nobody asked for.
The one rule that covers all of it
Anchor every conversation to the client's actual business outcome, not the platform's default vocabulary. Bookings, cases, patients, jobs, revenue: pick the one metric that maps directly to money in their pocket, and report everything else in relation to it. A client who hears "you got $3.20 back for every dollar spent, driven mostly by your Brand Search campaign" walks away from that conversation smarter about their own business. A client who hears "ROAS was 3.2x with a CTR of 2.1%" walks away confused and nodding.
Do this consistently, every report, every call, and something changes over time. The client stops asking "is this working?" because they already know how to read the answer themselves. That's the actual goal. Not a smarter-sounding report. A client who trusts what they're looking at.