Glossary

A Frugle export normally has one row per campaign per month. Performance Max campaigns have one row per serving channel per month. The numbers come straight from the Google Ads API with no reprocessing beyond converting cost out of micros, so the vocabulary below is Google's, not ours. If a figure here disagrees with the Google Ads UI, the cause is almost always one of the caveats in reading the numbers safely.

The columns §

month

The month the activity happened, as YYYY-MM. Frugle reports monthly because Google keeps monthly data for roughly eleven years but discards daily and weekly detail after 37 months — monthly is the only granularity that covers a full account history.

campaign_id

Google's numeric ID for the campaign. Stable forever, including after the campaign is renamed or removed, so this is the column to join on. It is long enough that spreadsheets may show it in scientific notation — import it as text.

campaign_name

The campaign's current name, not its name during that month. Renaming a campaign rewrites its whole history in this column.

status

The campaign's status right now, not during that month — see campaign statuses. A paused or removed campaign with spend in an earlier month is entirely normal.

channel_type

The campaign type, except for Performance Max where it identifies the serving channel — see campaign types. It is not a placement-level breakdown.

cost

Money spent that month, in the account's own currency (the currency column). Google reports cost in "micros" — millionths of a currency unit — which is why the value carries six decimal places. No currency conversion is applied.

impressions

Times an ad from the campaign was shown.

clicks

Clicks Google billed for. Not the same as sessions or visitors in your analytics tool, and it will not match them.

conversions

Conversions Google attributed to the campaign. Often fractional, because attribution models split credit for one conversion across several campaigns. Counts against the date Google attributes the conversion to, which can differ from the click date.

conversions_value

The total value of those conversions — but only if the account sends values with its conversions. Accounts that don't are often configured to report a value of 1 per conversion, which makes this column mirror conversions instead of representing revenue.

currency

The account's billing currency, repeated on every row so a file is readable on its own. See the warning about mixed currencies under reading the numbers safely.

Campaign types (channel_type) §

Google calls this the advertising channel type. It is a fixed list, so the table below is every value the column can hold. The "how often you'll see it" column is a rough guide for a typical advertiser, not anything Google publishes.

Campaign statuses (status) §

Reading the numbers safely §

• Don't sum cost across currencies. Each row is in its own account's currency and Frugle applies no exchange rates. Adding a USD row to a EUR row produces a meaningless number. Check the currency column before totalling anything that spans accounts.
• Status describes today, spend describes then. Filtering to ENABLED silently drops the historical spend of every campaign since paused or deleted, which is usually not what you want when reconstructing a budget.
• Conversion columns are not comparable across accounts. They depend entirely on which conversion actions each account defines, its attribution model, and its conversion window. Two accounts counting different things will still both report a number here.
• A jump in conversions_value usually means tracking changed, not that revenue exploded. If value equals conversions for several months and then leaps into the thousands, someone almost certainly turned on value tracking partway through.
• Zero-spend months are shown, not hidden. A month with no activity but existing campaigns appears with zeros. A month missing entirely means Google returned no data for it at all.
• The current month is partial. The most recent row covers only the days elapsed so far, and Google may still revise recent conversion figures for days afterwards.
• Manager accounts have no spend of their own. Totals live in the client accounts beneath them, which is why Frugle asks you to pick a client account.

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