Report cards provide insight into a student’s understanding of their schooling. In digital marketing, PPC reports have a similar function. Marketing reports matter whether you are a marketing agency or managing your business’s PPC campaigns. These check-ins keep your finger on the pulse.
Monthly PPC data can help you track a business’s goals and progress, and also unexpected gaps or rev up positive responses. The best performance reports are digestible and forward-thinking. They address the current business state while directing you toward future steps.
Our experts have achieved this! So, we’ve shared a downloadable PPC reporting guide at the end so that you can take these learnings with you. Before downloading it, take your time to read more about the structure and metrics we’ve included below. Furthermore, you can fully understand a PPC report and how to create one. Just keep reading!
Why Are PPC Reports Important?
Monitoring and assessing marketing campaigns is essential. Pay-per-Click reporting summarizes the performance of your campaigns for a date range of your choosing. With a PPC report, you learn how to interact with your desired audience and how effective your efforts are concerning your goals.
Admittedly, these documents can be complex to build. These technical documents get overwhelming because they include loads of marketing data. This means that creating a PPC report from scratch is a time-consuming task.
Whether you consider regular reporting a tedious task or not, accounts thrive off of them. Many already rely on automated PPC reporting tools to make this easier for marketing teams. PPC reporting software helps pull enormous amounts of data practically and efficiently with just one click. These PPC reporting tools make all the difference in helping you save time when building a client report.
What Are the Benefits of PPC Reports?
Explaining the importance of PPC reporting is one thing, but actually knowing how it can personally benefit you and your business is another. PPC reporting can help you by:
- Understanding what’s working and what isn’t in an account
- Learning how PPC efforts influence your website’s traffic and performance
- Using the report data collected to help you optimize your strategy
Now, let’s go ahead and dive into each of these benefits in further detail.
Understanding What Works (And What Doesn’t)
Suppose you’ve always relied on Google Ads to capture campaign leads. To expand to new audiences, you are setting up campaigns on Microsoft Advertising.
This strategy can broaden a business’s reach to a more affluent, mature audience, and monthly reports become the key to progress.
Data across campaign types, ads, and audiences will reveal how effectively each advertising platform performs for any business. Having a report that displays performance and easily compares it to Google Ads is ideal. Over a few months, you will wonder whether switching to Microsoft Advertising is getting you closer to your goals or not, all thanks to easily accessible information provided by PPC reports.
Learn How PPC Efforts Influence Your Website’s Performance
PPC efforts aim to get users to visit and engage with your website. But, once they arrive, not having data can drop the ball on the customer experience journey. You won’t be able to tell what’s working against you. To not be completely blindfolded, metrics like average session duration and bounce rate can keep you with a steady vision.
Data can suggest content changes or loading time improvements that can enhance a user’s experience with your brand. Including a website performance overview in your reports can help you point out which pages are getting a higher bounce rate and direct you into optimizing them for better performance.
Optimize Your Strategy Based on Report Data Collected
Let’s take this into perspective and think of a new travel agency that required assistance with its PPC. They were experiencing decreased bookings. A review and audit of their accounts revealed they were targeting the wrong audience, which in turn was affecting their ROI. The New York, Washington D.C., and Boston areas offered a great deal of opportunity and weren’t even targeted correctly.
Say that we set up campaigns in Google Ads for them and aligned them with their objectives. We carefully inspected monthly performance reports for the next few months to keep campaigns looking sharp. Account changes improved in the following ways:
- Saw an increase in traffic, calls, and online quotes
- Turned at least 10% of clicks into conversions
- Stayed in the top three positions in the SERPs and outranked competitors
And all of this was backed up by using monthly performance reports to show us what needed to be worked on to get better results.
Sections Your PPC Reports Should Include
If you segment data by conversion action, you will see how many campaigns led to actions your team deemed valuable and how much revenue each generated. The same goes for where actions are taking place within marketing efforts. Below, we’ve broken down these sections to keep our audience engaged and turn them into more digestible material.
PPC Overview
A PPC overview is an introductory section in a report, as it introduces account data logically and easily. An excellent report tells a story, so this snapshot helps establish the narrative with the most important metrics. This goes hand in hand with taking a quick look at those metrics across Google and Microsoft and comparing them right there and then. You can see how both work side by side and capture varying audiences and opportunities in each advertising network.
Campaign and Ad Performance Overview
Campaign and ad performance are a closer look at your marketing efforts. How are you reaching your target audience? What ads are getting you there? Here, you’ll see all of that in greater detail. This data helps you learn the nuances of the industry you’re working in and the local market’s response to your advertising campaigns.
You can even dive further into ad performance and segment ads by Search and Display networks. As you know, search campaigns depend on keywords to get the best ad placements on Google or Microsoft. Monitoring these ads will help you understand how to get better conversions and indicate what’s engaging your audience and what isn’t.
Website Performance
What does it take to optimize a website? Today, we have the technology to gather enough data from website visits and allow marketers to understand things that a website is lacking. This section is vital in grasping what is going on in a website and details metrics important to measure website user experience success.
Take, for example, a scenario where your PPC efforts exceeded expectations this quarter. Your campaigns are rocking it! Yet, your bounce rate has jumped significantly in recent weeks. This change can indicate that:
- There is a disconnect between ads and website content
- Something isn’t loading correctly on the landing page
- People aren’t finding what they’re looking for
With a scenario like this, we can say that reports can highlight these changes and spot when website metrics are performing poorly, so you can evaluate them and find the root cause.
Metrics You Need to Talk About in Client Reports
Enough about reporting sections; it’s time we get into the real deal, the numbers that will matter the most when assessing account performance with a client: the metrics. We can talk about metrics all day long. There are so many that it’s easy to lose track of time. However, below we’ve listed a condensed version of the metrics that matter the most.
Average CPC
Average cost-per-click (avg. CPC) is the average amount you’re charged for anyone that clicks on your ad. This is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks. Keep in mind that if a metric has the word ‘cost’ in it, you will want to keep a watchful eye on them as you wish to prevent costs from going up too much.
Conversions
Conversions are a metric that usually signals a PPC campaign’s success. They are tracked through users completing the desired action within a website and vary depending on your goals. Common conversion actions can sometimes happen because someone fills out a contact form or calls the business.
Cost Per Conversion
Cost per conversion, also known as CPA, can be defined as the metric that tells you how much you paid to generate a conversion or acquire a customer. This is significant because it directly relates to conversions, which can translate into sales. CPA tends to fluctuate across various industries and businesses, so it’s key that you have a benchmark of this metric to go from and don’t let it get too high.
Lead Generation
Lead generation, sometimes called “lead gen,” is about attracting prospects and generating interest in your services or products. A great example of a lead generation campaign is asking potential customers to fill out contact information in exchange for a downloadable e-book. It’s very usual for clients to be wary of the kind of lead volume that they want for their business, so you need to keep this metric close to your heart when optimizing for it.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a significant metric in assessing a website’s performance because it signals the percentage of users that left your website without performing any action. This rate is usually a good number to focus on, as it can provide insights into a website’s user experience. This metric can be confusing to understand, but all you need to know is that the lower the bounce rate, the more your users interact with your website.
Average Session Duration
The average session duration metric measures how much time someone spends on your site. The standard industry time is 2-3 minutes. Ideally, you want to keep your audience engaged, so you want this metric to increase instead of decrease. This metric can back you up on finding out how to make your website content more relevant, so users keep browsing on it rather than leaving.
These are all the significant metrics that you should include in your client reports. In this blog, we’ve focused solely on the important ones, but stay tuned for more PPC reporting metrics!
PPC Reporting FAQs
Eager to learn more? We’ve got answers for you! Here are some basic questions from businesses new to PPC.
What Is a PPC Report?
A PPC report is a performance summary for PPC campaigns. It covers all the activities your business invests in so that your team understands what’s doing well and what isn’t.
Why Is a PPC Report Important?
PPC reports are important because they’re the best in which you can display results to clients while staying on topic. Reports help you view specific areas in an account and assess what you can replicate to keep performance sharp and successful. It’s important to be communicative as efforts build up.
Reporting Frequency
Before we go, an important question needs addressing: How often should you provide a report?
Overall, we can all agree that viewing data month over month is a great industry practice. Since we’re talking about long-term data analysis per account, monthly reports satisfy clients’ needs and keep you on your toes when finding optimization highlights, etc.
Wanna have this information at hand? We’ve included a document with all the key metrics guiding your ad campaigns’ reports. Find the downloadable link below.
Now you know what a PPC report is and what it takes to build one. PPC reports tend to be a lot of work. We know, and that’s why our newest reporting guide walks you through each section in detail. Confidently navigate as we go over best practices—courtesy of our experts.
And if you’re having trouble creating an SEO report. Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. Check out our latest blog post.
