A Simple Spreadsheet System to Track Ad Spend and ROI Across Facebook and Google Ads

Facebook Ads Manager and Google Ads each show you a clean dashboard — for their own platform. Neither tells you what you actually need to know once you’re running both: total spend across the two, blended cost per order, and whether the business as a whole is profitable. That gap is what this spreadsheet fixes.

Why the Platform Dashboards Aren’t Enough

Ads Manager’s ROAS number only counts what Facebook can track — it has no idea what Google Ads spent that same week, and vice versa. Run both channels for a month and you’ll have two dashboards each telling you their own channel “did well,” with no single number telling you whether the business actually made money once both bills came in.

The Columns That Actually Matter

Keep it to one row per day, per channel:

• Date
• Channel (Facebook / Google)
• Amount spent
• Orders generated (from your own order tracker, not the platform’s claimed conversions — see why below)
• Revenue from those orders
• ROAS (revenue ÷ spend) — a simple formula, not a manual calculation

Why Order Counts Should Come From Your Own Tracker, Not the Ad Platform

Both Facebook and Google Ads report conversions based on their own attribution window, which tends to run a little optimistic — a click today counts an order from a week later, even if the customer also saw the other platform’s ad in between. Cross-check weekly against your actual order tracker so the spreadsheet reflects what really shipped, not what each platform is claiming credit for.

Blended CPR Is the Number That Matters Most

Add total spend (Facebook + Google) for the week, divide by total orders for the week — that’s your real cost per result, independent of which platform gets the credit. This is the number to watch when deciding whether to shift budget between channels, not either platform’s individual CPR.

Where to Pull the Raw Numbers From

• Facebook: Ads Manager’s breakdown by day, exported or copied in
• Google: the same data your Search Terms Report review already has you pulling weekly — add spend and conversions to this sheet at the same time
• If both channels are properly tracking, the numbers should already be accurate — see our conversion tracking setup guide if Google’s numbers look off

Automating the Manual Parts

Once the sheet’s structure is proven manually for a few weeks, the daily copy-paste step is exactly the kind of repetitive task worth automating — see our AI automation tools guide for how a workflow like this actually gets built, and our rollout guide for how to introduce it without breaking the manual process you already trust.

Adding a Third Channel Later

The same structure scales cleanly to a third channel — TikTok Ads, most commonly — without redesigning the sheet: add rows for the new channel using the same columns, and the blended CPR formula already accounts for total spend and total orders regardless of how many channels feed into it. The mistake to avoid is building a separate, differently-structured sheet for the new channel instead of extending the existing one — that recreates the exact fragmentation problem this whole system exists to solve.

A Simple Chart Worth Adding

Once a few weeks of data exist, a basic line chart plotting blended CPR over time (one point per week) surfaces trends a table of numbers doesn’t show as clearly — a CPR that’s gradually climbing over a month looks obviously different on a chart than it does scanning a column of similar-looking numbers row by row. This takes a few minutes to set up in any spreadsheet tool and turns the sheet from a record-keeping exercise into something that’s actually useful to glance at weekly.

What to Do When a Channel Shows a Loss

A single week where a channel’s blended CPR looks bad isn’t automatically a signal to cut its budget — normal week-to-week noise, a slower sales week, or an audience still in its early learning phase can all produce one rough week without anything being structurally wrong. Before reacting, check whether the pattern holds across at least 2-3 consecutive weeks and whether spend actually stayed consistent during that stretch (a channel that had its budget changed mid-week isn’t showing a clean comparison). A real, sustained decline across multiple stable weeks is the actual signal worth acting on.

Keeping This Sheet From Going Stale

A spreadsheet that isn’t updated consistently is worse than not having one at all, because it creates false confidence — glancing at a sheet that hasn’t been touched in three weeks and assuming it still reflects current performance is a real risk once the habit slips. Tying the weekly update to something that already happens on a fixed schedule (the same day the Search Terms Report gets reviewed, for instance) keeps it from quietly falling out of the routine once the first few weeks of novelty wear off.

A Common Mistake

Judging a channel’s ROAS the same week you increase its budget. A sudden budget increase usually needs a few days to stabilize before the ROAS number means anything — comparing week-over-week averages instead of single days avoids overreacting to normal daily noise.