PPC Reports: We Can Do Better

Creating PPC reports is a big part of every PPC professional’s job. Whether you work in-house or at an agency, it’s almost always necessary to report on campaign performance.

When I started doing PPC in 2002, reporting usually involved downloading raw data into Excel and trying to make sense of it. Today, there are countless tools available to help create PPC reports. Some are paid, like Optmyzr, Swydo, and reporting tools within bid management platforms like Acquisio. Others are free – Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, and the reports section of Adwords, to name a few. Most reporting tools include a WYSIWYG editor that helps you easily create graphs and visualizations.

I’ve been writing about PPC reports since 2011. And yet, in 2017, I still regularly see reports like this:

If I needed to quickly answer the question “how are my campaigns doing?”, I couldn’t do that with this report.

Folks, we can do better.

A good PPC report should tell a story, It should immediately make its key points clear, with visuals. Use graphs and color coding to help tell the story:

Contrast this image to the previous one. At a glance, I can tell that we are below our target for responses, and that our CTR and budget are below target as well. From that, I can infer that we are below target on responses because we have not spent what we thought we would. As an agency, this isn’t a great thing to report to a client, but it’s immediately clear what is happening and what needs to be done about it.

Visuals like this make it easy to focus on insights and recommendations: why are we underspent? What are we going to do to fix the issue? That’s the info that clients are looking for from a report – not a dump of numbers without context.

If you’re creating reports consisting of numbers in Excel, it’s time to rethink your reporting. Even adding a simple Excel graph showing KPI performance over time can make a difference in how easy the data is to digest. Resist the urge to throw data into the report just because it exists. Every element of the report should have a purpose and should illustrate how the campaigns performed against goals and objectives. For example, is performance by device really necessary? If you’re not going to do anything different in the campaign as a result of the data, don’t include it.

And if your campaigns don’t have clearly defined goals and objectives, stop everything and read this post.

Creating good visuals in a report doesn’t require fancy BI tools. The health check in the example above is a simple Excel chart with added circles created in PowerPoint. Mountain graphs aren’t necessary either – you could use two lines and achieve the same objective.

The point is, we can do better. PPC reports shouldn’t require a math degree to decipher. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.

What are your favorite PPC reporting tactics? Share in the comments!

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What’s In a Good PPC Report?

Whether you’re an in-house or agency PPC professional, chances are you’ll need to provide regular reports on campaign performance.

There is usually a lot of talk on SEM news sites and forums about the type of data available from the PPC engines; the metrics seem nearly endless. Stats are available on CTR, CPC, conversion rate, conversion rate by position, data by network (display vs. search vs. retargeting vs. social PPC, etc.), Google Analytics or other web analytics data… The list goes on.

But few people seem to discuss how and what data should be presented.

Numbers Need Context

Unfortunately, too many PPC reports just regurgitate a bunch of numbers from AdWords, adCenter, and web analytics. Clients and upper managers receive spreadsheet upon spreadsheet with impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion – and no context whatsoever. They look kind of like this:

report example
While PPC pros know what those numbers represent, even a seasoned professional will have a hard time deciding whether the numbers are “good” or “bad” without context – so imagine how your client, or chief marketing officer, feels when he or she gets this spreadsheet in their inbox. They’re probably full of more questions than answers:

•    What happened before this time frame?
•    What’s typical for this time of year?
•    What is the goal of this PPC campaign?
•    Are the numbers up, down, or sideways?
•    Why are the numbers up, down, or sideways?
•    What the heck does this mean, anyway?

A good PPC report relies less on the numbers themselves, and more on why the numbers are meaningful. One way to remember this is to ask yourself the question “So what?” when looking at data:

•    What insight can be drawn from this data?
•    Are key metrics following normal seasonal trends, or is something off the mark?
•    If something’s off the mark, why?
•    Did you run a particularly successful ad copy test?
•    Was there something in the news that spiked click-throughs, but didn’t drive conversions?
•    What’s going on, and what does it mean to the advertiser?

In fact, at gyro, all of our reports and most of our presentations include a What, So What, Now What section. This format helps us to focus on what’s important to the client, rather than charts and graphs.

If you must include charts with total impressions, clicks, and conversions, put them in an appendix at the end of the report. Some clients and bosses really do like to pore through raw data, so let them – but only after you’ve told the key story.

Or, show the data in a meaningful way, like this:
sample summary slideThis one slide in a report often tells business decision makers everything they need to know about their PPC campaign, in one easy-to-grasp view.

The new report function in Adwords is another way to quickly create meaningful charts and graphs.

Numbers Should Align with Goals

A surprising number of PPC campaigns are launched every day before campaign goals are defined. When I see a campaign with a mish-mash of keywords, the home page as the landing page, and no conversion tracking, I can be pretty confident the campaign has no goal.

A PPC campaign without goals is like grocery shopping without a list. You may come home with a cart full of groceries, and you may have gotten some deals – but did you buy what you really needed? Smart grocery shoppers never set foot in a store without a list, and smart PPC advertisers never log in to AdWords without a goal in mind.

To that end, a good PPC report should include a statement defining the campaign goals, and whether they were achieved.

•    Is there a target cost per conversion you’re trying to reach?
•    Are there certain products on which you were trying to increase sales this month?
•    Did you launch a campaign with new and different goals?

Every chart, graph, and narrative should be created with the following in mind: how does this information illustrate whether the goals were achieved?

PPC generates so much data that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds looking at “interesting” statistics. But just because something’s interesting doesn’t mean that it’s important. If it doesn’t relate to goals, leave it out!

Numbers Should Point to Recommendations

In many ways, PPC reports are kind of like looking in the rear-view mirror, reviewing what’s already happened. But that doesn’t mean the report should only reflect history.

A good PPC report should include recommendations and plans forward, so the client or boss knows what will happen next. In fact, the recommendations should form the basis of any conversations that come out of the report: the dialogue should be centered on next steps in the optimization process. This is the “Now What” portion of the report.

The next time you prepare a PPC report, keep these tips in mind. Your client, or your boss, will thank you.

What about you? What elements are must-haves in your PPC reports? Share in the comments!

Editor’s Note: Portions of this article appeared at Search Engine Watch on August 9, 2011.

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