How do you measure success in PPC? With clear and effective PPC reporting. Here's how our Performance Report can do that for you.
PPC advertising is a great way to see a strong ROI on your budget. Done right, ads on Google, Facebook and Bing can get your business in front of the right people at the right time. The reality of achieving this, without wasting any money or time, is something that only the finest of PPC marketers can achieve.
What’s their secret? How do they do it?
In this article, I’ll look at why you need PPC reporting, the elements of a good PPC report, and how Adzooma’s Performance Report can overcome any challenges you may have.
Why you need PPC reporting
All marketing channels needs reporting but what are the necessities for PPC reporting?
1. Understanding your PPC campaigns
Well, it starts by knowing what’s going on with your existing campaigns. After all, how can you make changes if you don’t know how things are performing? You’ll just be making changes blind, and without a strategy, you won’t know what’s made things better or worse.
You also need to measure your goals and how well you’re performing them. A good PPC report reflects what you want to achieve, how you’re going to do that, and where you need to improve.
If you need help with setting goals, check out our PPC roadmap and our downloadable template.
2. A collection of important metrics
Having a grip on your key metrics is key. But it can be frustrating trying to interpret a wall of numbers. That’s where reporting can make all the difference. By finding the best report for your advertising, you can get current data on the pivotal aspects of your PPC campaigns.
When reports are done well, you can see what’s going well (and not so well) at a glance. Because all the hard work has been taken out of sifting through data, you can crack on with implementing changes that will see a significant uplift in your CTR.
3. Specific reports show specific results
Reporting is indispensable across the industry, but there’s a huge variety on offer.
A performance report can give you an idea of your account’s overall health – the bigger picture. Without seeing things in context, smaller metrics mean nothing. This is often the way agencies make it appear as though all their clients are doing amazingly – anything can look great framed in the right way.
But at the end of the day, vanity metrics aren’t helping anyone.
To succeed you need clear, concise, actionable information on your account. Once you have that, there’s little to hold you back. But, don’t just take our word for it.
What makes a good PPC report?
Your PPC report should demonstrate your campaign goals and how you plan to measure, track, and present them.
But throwing a bunch of numbers and graphs on a page is counterproductive. You need to present your PPC data in a way that is clear and succinct but, ultimately, shows your performance in the simplest way possible.
Here are some great articles on PPC data visualisation:
- How to Visualize Last Year’s PPC Data – and Learn From It
- 6 Advanced Ways to Better Visualize PPC Data
- The Importance of Data Visualization in PPC Reporting
- 12 Essential Data Studio Visualizations for Paid Search Marketers
- Top 5 Data Viz Tool Benefits (For PPC Managers)
Dashboard, slides, or PDF?
There are different ways to present PPC data and no single “perfect” presentation method.
3 of the most popular methods are:
- Dashboards (Google Data Studio, Databox, Klipfolio)
- Slides (PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, Visme, Prezi)
- PDFs (most PPC software platforms can export to PDF)
Choosing the right methods depends on your audience. In his article for SEJ, Corey Morris suggested using a dashboard or executive summary when presenting to the C-suite.
If you have never met with the C-suite, run your report by a filter of whether someone you have never met and who doesn’t know PPC metrics can understand what you are doing and if it is working. That is best done in an executive summary or dashboard at the beginning of the report.
A slide deck might work well for a larger audience as long as you keep things succinct. PDFs are easier to distribute to clients or PPC platform users as they can quickly export necessary data (more on how Adzooma’s Performance Report can help with that later).
What to expect from a report
Here are 3 important features you can find in a good PPC report:
1. Displaying metrics that matter
Clients only need to see the performance of metrics aligned with their business goals. Anything else is a waste of time and space on your report. Consider the following metrics and how important they might be:
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Cost-per-click or cost-per-conversion (CPC)
- Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
- Conversion rate
- Impression share
Read our article on PPC data for more information.
2. Inspiring progress and motivation
If a campaign is underperforming, the last thing a client wants to hear is negativity and no means of improving. Demonstrate underperformance as “challenges” rather than “problems” or “issues” and focus on ways to improve them.
Good PPC reporting focuses on your goals and gives insights into how to achieve them.
3. Reporting in plain language
A good PPC report should be short and sweet, not a copy of War and Peace. It also needs to be easy to understand. Complex jargon will confuse clients and they’ll leave without knowledge of what they might need to do or what to celebrate.
The solution is delivering accurate information and telling a story in plain language. Keep your reports no longer than 4-5 pages, and get straight to the point.
PPC reporting in action
Millions of reports are generated every day, but the quality varies massively. It’s all about using the right software for what you need. Here are some great examples of how choosing a report with the right features can make life a lot easier.
An obvious benefit to PPC reports is that they can save you a hell of a lot of time. The B2B digital marketing agency BusinessOnline saved over 960 hours through making use of a reporting platform. They found that through consolidating everything into one place, less time gets wasted and interpretation of data can happen at a higher level. This is particularly useful when you’re running campaigns across multiple channels.
The property group Countrywide needed to be able to understand their online performance to be able to invest in the right areas. Utilising a system which collected all the important data points in one place meant they were able to see a 33% increase in leads and 30% decrease in cost per lead, just from identifying where money was being spent.
Good reporting also enables you to paint a wider picture. PPC Hero talks about how using storytelling within your PPC reports can breathe new life into what they’re saying. As context is key, the introduction of a personal element not only helps keep people interested but means that you can get to the heart of the story quickly. But this only works if you have clear data to work within the first place – something you need good reporting for.
Adzooma’s PPC performance report
The Adzooma Performance Report allows you to see how each element of your Google Ads account is doing. Each section provides you with a score out of 100 meaning you can quickly identify areas to improve.
Optimising your ads is important, but it’s not about firefighting everything at once. Rather, you should look to understand the weakest areas of your campaigns and start there. By skipping straight to knowing what the problems are, rather than needing to sift through data to get there, you spend your time more wisely.
You can re-run the performance report whenever you like so you’ll be able to see which areas are improving as you make changes.
Some elements are even simpler: you receive a tick or a cross depending on whether it is something you are currently doing or not. For example, if you haven’t set up conversion tracking, you’re missing out on valuable information. The report will prompt you to fix this, and any other areas where simple changes could make a big difference.
The Performance Report is a quick and easy way to see how things are going. In the long run, you can save time, money and hassle like the examples above did with their problems. So if you’re looking to mimic their successes, try our free report today to see how your campaigns can become more impactful.
