Agencies (no matter their size) often rely on inefficient tools and processes to handle their Google Ads reporting. For example, it's not uncommon for marketers to rely solely on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint to create and distribute PPC reports to their clients.

But these manual processes come with major drawbacks:

• They make it difficult to scale your agency's services. Manually creating reports requires constant hands-on management which means your marketers can't easily take on new clients. This limits your revenue streams and agency growth.
   
• They make it more difficult to show value to your clients. The metrics and visualizations you can show are limited to the screenshots you can pull out of Google platforms.
   
• They expose the potential for human error. Having a manual process creates the opportunity for someone to accidentally put in the wrong number or mess up a calculation.

A Google Ads reporting tool can solve each of these problems.

It can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend on creating reports, which frees you up to focus more on revenue-generating activities like strategy and optimization. And it can provide a simplified and automated way to create reports and prove your value to clients.

Adding a reporting tool to your tech stack can simultaneously reduce your overhead, increase client retention, and improve overall campaign performance. As a result, it's much easier to grow your client base and increase profits.

But what specific features should an agency look for in a Google Ads reporting tool?

That's what this article is about.

In this post, we cover 4 key features of a scalable and customizable Google Ads Reporting Tool(specifically tailored for digital marketing agencies):

• API Connectors Built for Marketers
• Marketing Dashboard Templates That You Can Customize
• Dashboards That Scale Across Clients
• Automated Google Ads Reports

Want to see how easy it is to scale your Google Ads reports with TapClicks? Try our free 14-day trial.

1. API Connections Built for Marketers

API connections allow you to pull data sets out of tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads, and integrate them into your reporting tool. But managing these connections is a lot of work.

To do this in-house, you need someone on your team with API knowledge. And they need to consistently check connections to ensure they're working (since they constantly change and break due to platform updates).

With TapClicks, API connections are managed by our team. This saves you time because you don't need to worry about constantly monitoring platform updates that can cause your reporting system to break. We ensure these connections are up to date for you.

We also make it easy to drill down into your data. For example, when you're building a Google Ads campaign, you may be targeting certain demographics or time blocks to optimize for the best conversion rate. With TapClicks, when that data is connected to your paid media dashboard, you can easily segment down to see how those specific metrics performed.
 

A Large Library of Instant-On Connectors

We have over 250 different live API connections that can be set up within a day.

For your Google Ads reporting, we have Instant-on connectors ready to go for: Google Ads, Google Display Network, Google Analytics, Google Search Console (for SEO campaigns), and more.

Here's how quick it is to set up an Instant-on connector with TapClicks:

Click on Google Adsfrom your TapClicks dashboard.

Then, login with your Adwords account credentials and authenticate TapClicks.

Once that's done, you can start pulling analytics data into your TapClicks dashboard (with up to a year of historical data).

2. A Marketing Dashboard That You Can Easily Customize

One of the big pain points of using manual reporting processes is how time-consuming it can be to make even small changes to your Google Adwords reporting dashboard.

If you're working out of a spreadsheet, this means changing rows and columns, not to mention using long, complex formulas.

But with TapClicks, changes are easy to make.

When you get started on a dashboard, you can either create your dashboard from scratch, or you can use one of our ready-to-go templates.

We have templates for a variety of different marketing services, from a Facebook Analytics Overview dashboard to a Display Services dashboard.

All templates are 100% customizable, whether you make your own or use ours.

In this example, let's focus on the Google AdWords template.

After selecting the Google Ads template and connecting your Google Ads related platforms to your account you can edit your dashboard to reflect which KPIs you want displayed.

Dashboards are made up of widgets. These widgets can be removed completely or edited. You can even change the date range of data for individual widgets.

For example, you may want your overall dashboard to reflect May's numbers while showing May and April data within your Average Cost Per Click (CPC) widget.

Creating and Editing Widgets

If you want to add different widgets, you can easily create a new one.

Just click the plus (+) sign in the top right corner of your Google Ads dashboard.

From there, you can select which data sources you want to include in your widget.

Plus, you can pick how you want the data organized (such as by ad groups or date range).

Then, you can pick how you want the data displayed (a table, a chart, a bar graph, etc.).

Once you're done setting the parameters, just click Save and your new widget is now on your Google Ads dashboard.

3. A Marketing Dashboard That Can Help You Scale

As your agency grows, your marketers can quickly become responsible for dozens of different Google Ads dashboards. This is even a problem in more sophisticated tools like Google Data Studio.

When you need to make changes to one dashboard, you then need to make them to all dashboards.

But when you make a dashboard with TapClicks, you're creating a universal dashboard template for your Google Ads reporting across all clients.

When you edit that template, the edit can be applied across all of your client dashboards at once.

With most reporting tools, template edits are not automatically applied to live dashboards. They'll apply to new dashboards, but you still have to go and make those edits to your live dashboards.

This is a huge gain in efficiency that allows you to easily manage more reporting dashboards.

FYI: You can also choose to make an edit to just one dashboard if it's a change that you need to make for one client.

4. Automate Your Google Ads Reports

With TapClicks Report Studio, you can create your Google Adwords report from scratch, or use a report template that is designed to help you showcase your top ad performance metrics.

Our report templates are white-label so you can customize them to your clients' brands (or your own). And we've designed them with storytelling in mind to help you contextualize performance for your clients.

Each report template has sections to add data as well as context via editorial notes and descriptions.

Schedule Your Reports to Send Automatically

We also save your agency a significant amount of time by letting you schedule recurring reports.

When creating a recurring report, you can select how often you want reports to be sent out: every day, every week, every other week, on specific days of the month, and so on.

Plus, reports can be scheduled for a set period of time (like if you signed a 3-month statement of work) and can be sent in all the main file types (PDF, PPT, CSV).

Set Custom Permissions and Let Your Clients View Their Dashboard

While scheduling recurring reports drastically cuts down on the time your marketers will spend on tedious reporting tasks, TapClicks goes one step further and lets you set up custom permissions for clients who want to view their Google Ads dashboard.

Basically, this is a version of your Google Ads reporting tool(that you customize with the widget you want) that is client-friendly. This means it has notes for the client and will not include sensitive information such as markup costs.

This lets your client access their report when they want to see a specific data point (to answer a question their stakeholders may have) without having to email you for a last-minute custom report.

How to Incorporate Your Google Ads Reporting Tool into Your Agency's Operations

Above we focused on 4 key features of a quality Google Ads reporting tool that digital marketing agencies need to show value and grow their operations.

But when you use TapClicks, you have the option to optimize your entire marketing operations process.

We break down marketing operations into three main pillars.

• Planning: Agencies can use TapOrders to submit client orders. (If you currently use a CRM platform, you can funnel that data directly into TapClicks via one of our Instant-on connectors.).

• Execution: Once the order is submitted, your marketers and creatives can use TapWorkflow to help them manage the approval workflow process. The client data is easy to reference, so your team can reach out to the customer, build the campaign, and work together to launch the Google Adwords campaign. Plus, TapClicks customers can launch Google Adslive from within our platform using our Google Ads push integration.

• Measurement: Because your data sources are already hooked up to your TapClicks dashboard, you'll get the performance data you need to adjust any campaigns as necessary. From there, you can easily build and schedule reports.

Want to see how easy it is to scale your Google Ads reports with TapClicks? Try our free 14-day trial.

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