Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is such a powerful tool to have in your overall strategy because its targeted approach will bring you more relevant prospects. PPC ads will show in search, display, video, and beyond when certain criteria are met. If you don’t have a solid plan surrounding PPC reporting, however, it will be difficult to utilize your data to the fullest extent. To ensure your efforts don’t go to waste, you need your analytics to be as concise and easy to follow as possible.
You’ll also need a PPC report that suits your goals and the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to measure. The report needs to consider your goals to make sure you’re measuring and reporting on what matters most to your business.
Article Contents
Understand Your PPC Goals and Metrics
The first step in building an effective PPC reporting strategy is to understand the purpose and main objectives of your PPC campaigns. Create a goal-oriented report that only focuses on data that is valuable to your organization.
Your goals will likely be determined by the type of industry you are running ads for and the type of campaigns you have in progress. We’ll break down the common metrics for campaigns within each stage of the buyer’s journey below. While these KPIs are a great starting point, it’s important to remember that they may vary depending on your organization’s needs.
buy keyword installs
Common Metrics for Awareness-Stage Ads
These campaigns are used to bring traffic to your site and create brand awareness. The KPIs for this stage are mostly on-site engagement metrics and brand metrics that include factors like:
- Bounce rate.
- Time spent on site.
- Reach.
- Impressions.
- CPM (cost per “mille” impressions, AKA cost per thousand).
Common Metrics for Consideration-Stage Ads
This is the interest, or consideration stage. These campaigns are designed to help people understand your brand and want to buy from you. Common valuable metrics for these campaigns are:
- Clicks.
- CPC (Cost Per Click).
- Views.
- CPV (Cost Per View).
- New user conversions.
- New user conversion rate.
- New user average CPA (Cost Per Action).
- New user ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).
Common Metrics for Decision-Stage Ads
Decision-stage campaigns help your audience move toward the final stages of your buyer’s journey. This is also where your audience has the strongest commercial intent. KPIs include:
- ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).
- Transactions.
- Sales.
- ROI (Return On Investment).
Common Metrics to Measure Simultaneous and Long-Term Campaigns
Moreover, if you’re running different campaigns to test different factors—such as channels, copy, creative, devices, and more—you must provide the metrics that will measure their performance. These include:
- Overall campaign metrics.
- Cost per campaign.
- Device performance.
- Channel performance.
- Best performing keywords and ads.
- Lessons learned for future campaigns.
Additionally, if you’re creating a report that goes beyond the past month, you can focus on:
- Month-over-month data (change in impressions, conversions, clicks, etc.).
- What worked and what didn’t work.
- Lessons you’ve learned.
- Benchmarking in order to compare the success of your work.
Let’s explore how you can do more with your data to strengthen the odds that your PPC reporting will be as effective as you’d like. Make sure you keep all relevant participants in the loop.
Add Context to Your Data
Include a summary of the findings of your PPC reporting. This should be an overview of your report that highlights the objectives and whether you were able to meet them as part of your work. Adding context to the metrics will help you identify if your PPC campaigns have been successful, but it will also help you explain the results to others in a way that is easy to understand.
A good way to explain your data is to provide answers to questions such as:
- What are the goals of your campaigns?
- What changed between this period and what you were doing before?
- What’s new? Did you launch any new campaigns, ads, or landing pages?
- What were the results?
- How would you summarize your KPIs?
- Do the results show a positive or negative change?
- Did you try anything new?
- What’s next?
Now we’ll learn how to take all of this information a step further. What you do with data and how you make it work for you makes all the difference—but most importantly, the whole process should be repeatable.
Developing a PPC Template for Your Ongoing Reports
Efficiency and consistency are the names of the game here. You’ll save time, money, and other resources in the long run by removing the guesswork. Having a template allows you to easily create new PPC reports that are consistent and cohesive.
Where Can You Create a Template for Your Reports?
You can handle your PPC reporting templates manually using Excel or Google Docs. Some executives and marketers might prefer to do things this way. If you don’t love data entry and you like to take advantage of some great software available today (like we do), you can try one of these robust tools:
ReportGarden
ReportGarden helps digital agencies create performance reports for themselves and their clients. This is done by linking their analytics, Google Ads, and Bing ads accounts through the use of an application programming interface (API) and manually loading data directly into their reports. This product offers strong segmentation possibilities, as well as data filtration from all the different ad services.
Supermetrics
Supermetrics picks up the data that marketers need and brings it to whichever platform you prefer for analytics, reporting, and storage—including spreadsheets, marketing data warehouses, and other data visualization tools. You never have to let scattered marketing data slow you down again—use the features to connect, analyze, automate, and move data to any destination you choose.
TapClicks
Automate marketing data in a unified platform for ease and convenience. TapClicks boasts a single set of automated marketing solutions (powered by your data) that are designed to work in unison with one another. Enjoy virtually endless customization options with your various connectors—all in one place.
Domo
Domo is the only cloud-native platform that can combine iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) capabilities for visualizations, predictive insights, and a foundation for building your own apps so you can take immediate action. They can modernize and mobilize any business process to run, serve, and learn on the fly.
This makes it easy for everyone to understand and improve operations as they happen. Key information can be delivered to end-users in sub-second query speeds to help advance your business’s value and competitiveness.
Typical Format for PPC Reporting
Follow this format to get started creating a proper reporting style for your PPC campaigns so you can improve your ads and see results in no time:
- Campaign summary.
- Specific campaign details.
- Specific ad details.
- Charts representing performance over time for valuable KPIs.
- Demographic data and comparison.
- Summary.
This is a great way to get on the right track, but there are many ways to customize standards for your company. Since no two businesses are alike, we recommend trying out new processes, tracking progress and performance, and pivoting if necessary. Growth often comes from updates and change (we’ll talk about how you can get a more personalized approach momentarily).
Cadence for Reporting
You can create reports monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Test it out and decide whether a higher or lower frequency works best for you and your business. Adjust the cadence accordingly, depending on the outcomes you measure. Analyses are critical, because they help you set a road map for the future.
Different methods and styles may work better for different verticals and companies, so don’t simply copy a formula if you read about it online or another company recommended it—even if they’re in your industry. It’s best to go with a custom plan.
How You Can Develop Better PPC Reporting for Your Business
There are many reasons to love PPC reporting and all it has to offer. In short, it’s cost-effective and you have control. When you take advantage of this popular tactic, you’ll spend money on keywords that have the ability to generate real profits—and avoid the ones that don’t.
Cut waste in your marketing strategy. Be as precise as possible to keep your team working smarter, not harder. PPC is a good fit for nearly any type of business, of any size, in any field. You can use it when you want to sell products or services, raise brand awareness, or generate new leads from search engines or social media platforms.
You’re missing out on enormous growth opportunities if you aren’t establishing a strong digital marketing strategy—and, of course, the subsequent PPC reporting that can help you get the most out of these efforts. The experts on our team can help you come up with the ideal plan for your business. We’ve had many years of experience creating optimized PPC reporting for our own agency and our clients alike.
