Must-Have Data For Your PPC Reports

PPC reports help opti­mize how you con­nect with your tar­get audi­ence and sup­port vital busi­ness deci­sions.

Mark Hansen By Mark Hansen from Megalytic. Join the discussion » 0 comments

One of the most impor­tant tasks for a PPC pro­fes­sion­al is com­pil­ing and deliv­er­ing reports on the per­for­mance of AdWords cam­paigns to share with their boss or client. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, many mar­keters strug­gle to deter­mine the most suit­able data to include. You want to pro­vide the right infor­ma­tion to sup­port vital busi­ness deci­sions, but exact­ly what data is that? When deter­min­ing what data to pro­vide, make sure you’re show­ing over­all stats, while also break­ing out the details that your boss or client care about.


Breaking Down PPC Campaign Performance

There are sev­er­al ele­ments to include in your report when show­ing per­for­mance, but the most impor­tant ele­ments relate to con­ver­sions such as total con­ver­sions, cost per con­ver­sion, con­ver­sion rate, and more.

Depend­ing on your business’s goals, these met­rics can influ­ence how you man­age key­word bid­ding strate­gies and write ad copy that reach­es and influ­ences con­sumers. With this in mind, you’ll first want to break down per­for­mance by PPC cam­paign in your report, before pro­vid­ing spe­cif­ic details that give as much insight as pos­si­ble into the adver­tise­ments’ effec­tive­ness.

Below is an exam­ple of the All Cam­paigns report show­ing a month­ly break­down of per­for­mance by cam­paign.

All PPC Campaigns

While the “Search – Gen­er­al” cam­paign drove many more con­vert­ed clicks, the “Search – Brand” cam­paign drove a much low­er cost per con­vert­ed clicks. This data helps to show the val­ue of bid­ding on brand terms by high­light­ing cost effec­tive­ness.

Performance By Network

Fur­ther break­ing down data by net­work is cru­cial because search per­for­mance tends to sig­nif­i­cant­ly diverge from dis­play per­for­mance. In the Google search net­work, as well as its third par­ty search part­ners, vis­i­tors enter key­words or phras­es to find a ser­vice. Thus, those users are more inclined to click on ads. On the con­trary, dis­play ads are tar­get­ed based on audi­ence demo­graph­ics and page con­tent.

You should include this net­work per­for­mance data in your PPC report to help inform deci­sions of where to adver­tise. Mar­keters can close­ly exam­ine all net­works to see the com­par­i­son with­in con­ver­sion rates, as well as cost per con­ver­sion rates. This data allows you to deter­mine how to allo­cate your bud­get and what val­ue each net­work is pro­vid­ing.

Performance by Network

For exam­ple, the screen­shot above shows results by net­work from the sum­ma­ry row of the Cam­paigns view and you can see that search part­ners show a low­er con­ver­sion rate and high­er cost per con­vert­ed click than Google Search. In this case, if bud­get is a con­cern, you may con­sid­er exclud­ing search part­ners and strict­ly adver­tis­ing on Google.

Performance By Keywords

In an effort to improve ROI on your PPC cam­paign, you’ll also want to break down per­for­mance by key­word, in addi­tion to net­work. This will pro­vide you with valu­able infor­ma­tion that can lead to effi­cien­cy and bet­ter results over­all.

By look­ing at the Key­words tab in AdWords, you know what key­words are dri­ving con­ver­sions or are show­ing high poten­tial. You can then bid up on key­words show­ing val­ue, while bid­ding down or paus­ing those not con­tribut­ing to con­ver­sions.

Keyword Performance

In this exam­ple from a retire­ment community’s AdWords account, we’re look­ing at results from the high­est vol­ume key­words. We can see that “senior hous­ing” has dri­ven the most con­vert­ed clicks, while “inde­pen­dent liv­ing” has dri­ven none, thus we may want to bid low­er on that key­word.

Conclusion

Build­ing reports to mea­sure cam­paign pro­duc­tiv­i­ty helps mar­keters see the “big­ger pic­ture.” For PPC pro­fes­sion­als, report­ing mean­ing­ful sta­tis­tics, as well as goals that have been accom­plished, is imper­a­tive for com­mu­ni­cat­ing suc­cess. Using the avail­able charts from Google AdWords, you can build a PPC report that pro­vides insight­ful data to opti­mize how com­pa­nies con­nect with their tar­get audi­ence.


What data do you find most help­ful when eval­u­at­ing an AdWords campaign’s per­for­mance? Do you have any oth­er help­ful tips to share about what should be includ­ed in PPC reports?

Mark Hansen

Written by Mark Hansen

Founder and President, Megalytic

Mark Hansen is the Founder and President of Megalytic , the leading tool for building web analytics marketing reports. Megalytic is used by digital agencies, marketers, and business owners for faster, more insightful and better looking analytics reports. Mark writes a regular blog about Google Analytics best practices, and now provides insight on Google AdWords following Megalytic's latest integration with the tool.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

Discover why brands and agencies choose Linkdex

  • Get started fast with easy onboarding & training
  • Import and connect data from other platforms
  • Scale with your business, websites and markets
  • Up-skill teams with training & accreditation
  • Build workflows with tasks, reporting and alerts

Get a free induction and experience of Linkdex.

Just fill out this form, and one of our team members will get in touch to arrange your own, personalised demo.