How to Make Perfect PPC Reports for Your Clients?
Pay-Per-Click or PPC is a digital marketing strategy that marketers use to drive visitors to their website instead of actually ‘earning’ them. Every time a user clicks on one of their PPC Ads, the marketers pay a ‘fee.’ One of the most common and important sources of PPC is search engine advertising. You can display ads that are important and relevant to what users are searching for in order to drive them to your landing page or website.
PPC reporting can get complex and clumsy in a hurry. The chasm between what a client wants to know and what the PPC analyst provides can be surprisingly wide, and bridging this gap can be quite a challenge itself. To build a strong client relationship successfully, it is crucial to define, measure, and communicate the results effectively. Most of the communication happens through PPC reporting, which is why it is essential to give your best in it.
In this blog, we will discuss nine essentials that will help you in making perfect PPC reports for your clients.
- Transparency and Consistency
The first essential to make a perfect PPC report for your client is being transparent and consistent. As an analyst, you need to have an upfront and impartial approach to sharing the ads’ performance, whether it is going well or not.
Sharing the same information and stats in each report gives you the opportunity to build trust with your client and have an open conversation about what’s working and what’s not and how the strategy is progressing.
Moreover, having a consistent reporting format makes it familiar and easier to follow for the client. It also sets the expectations as to what and when your client should expect the performance report, whether weekly, quarterly, or monthly.
- Organizing the report
Keep the important content in advance and slip into the small details. Placing summary info and remarkable stats before keywords, ads, and ad groups will keep the client occupied.
You will probably have a few clients who won’t go past the first or second pages of the report, while others want to go through each and every detail. By organizing your report into general and prominent content in the starting and working down to the minute stats details and sections of the ad campaigns, you will be able to keep all kinds of clients engaged.
- Begin with goals
Often, as PPC analysts, we want to begin with the primary PPC metrics like CTRs, impressions, conversions, clicks, etc. but the clients usually prioritize ROI (return on investment) and ROAS (return on ad spend).
Realize what your clients are concerned about the most and how they report to their company’s stakeholders and make it the first detail you report on.
- Have an executive summary or dashboard
Always presume that your PPC report will be passed along to people who don’t usually meet you.
In case you’ve never met the C-suite of the company, test your report to see whether someone you’ve never met or who is not very familiar with the PPC metrics is able to comprehend what you’re doing and if it’s working or not. This is best done at the starting of the report itself in a dashboard or executive summary.
If you’ve your report customized to begin with client goal reporting (vs. PPC metrics) and start with important content upfront, then naturally, this will fit within the first two pages.
Utilize all the information within your reach to find answers to these questions:
- What is the strategy
- Are we hitting the client’s goals
- Highlights from the last reporting period, if any
- What are we going to do during the next reporting period
If you prepare your report in such a way that somebody who knows nothing about PPC or has never met you is able to understand it in simple terms, then you have made it.
- Include definitions
Keep in mind that your client might not remember every abbreviation necessarily or memorize how to calculate every stat.
So under each table, add a small section for helpful descriptions for the client’s reference. But also make sure that they are not insulting or obstructing in case the client is well-versed.
By providing descriptions in your reports consistently, you can make it more accessible and easygoing for your client, and gradually, you can go in-depth of the specifics.
- Divide performance data by intent
Not every keyword’s intent is to drive conversion directly. Don’t let attribution modeling and customer journey slip in your report.
If you emphasize conversions, but not all keywords, ad groups, and campaigns are emphasized on last-click attributed conversions, then make sure to divide your report appropriately.
You can unintentionally end up making your performance seem bad if you highlight conversions as a goal throughout your PPC report because not every campaign activity is actually expected to drive conversions directly.
Try to include reporting on the basis of steps in the customer journey, separation of branded and generic keywords, assisted conversions and revenue data, regional targeting, and other features that enable fair performance judgment per division based on intent.
- Combine everything possible
When it comes to rolling up stats, nothing beats Google Adwords.
Although if you are running ad campaigns on Bing or any other marketing platform, it will be helpful to combine stats to display how PPC is performing across all platforms. You can do this using any reporting software or manual methods too.
One aspect that Google or any other advertising platform often misses and doesn’t see is any third-party call monitoring data that you possess. You wouldn’t want to miss out on phone conversions or have them excluded in your PPC reports.
By adding data in your report, you can provide the bigger picture of the critical information negating the need for the client to do the calculations and make their own stats on the basis of your reports.
- Detailed information
Usually, agencies use their reports in a meeting or discussion about their efforts and strategies.
However, you can make your team use the reports as the plan for monthly calls. It is an excellent opportunity to review the details and get the client’s feedback. While few clients love seeing every little detail, some are fine with just the executive summary.
But we need feedback on fine details like ad copy and keywords even from those clients who only want the executive summary. That’s why it is essential to include the smaller details for reference, which can add up to even dozens of pages.
Whether you want or need to include these details in your report, either do it at the end in a postscript or make a separate supporting document.
Whatever you choose, don’t place pages of keywords in between the report as it will only ruin the flow of the content (as discussed earlier) and eventually harm your performance.
- Incorporate data beyond PPC conversions
In a lot of client relationships, PPC conversions are leads or engagement. In that case, if you work with the sales team, get customer relationship management (CRM) access, or figure out a way to gain feedback on the leads and activities that PPC is generating, you can effectively show the true effects of your efforts.
Or at least you will get valuable feedback and useful insights that will influence your decisions while controlling the campaign in real-time instead of waiting for the client’s input at the end.
Getting your hands on such data as soon as possible helps you in avoiding a situation where you are generating what looks like potential leads but later on get to know that none of them got closed or qualified.
Conclusion
Keeping these nine essentials in mind when preparing your PPC reports will make the process easier and meaningful instead of just being a routine activity. Moreover, it will help you in establishing a stronger and long term relationship with your clients.