Manually creating PPC reports for clients requires time-consuming and tedious tasks that become roadblocks as you scale your business.
When you sit down to create a PPC report, you need to:
- Gather your PPC marketing data out of each digital marketing platform. This means pulling data out of Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and any other paid media tools you're using.
- Organize and visualize that data. Agencies often use Excel spreadsheets and Google Data Studio (or Powerpoint) for this.But as your client list grows, handling dozens of different dashboards or slide decks becomes unmanageable.
- Send the report to your clients. Most clients want weekly or monthly reports, and some request last-minute reports. These reports need to tell a compelling story showing the value you offer.
Agencies can use PPC report templates to help streamline this process, but templates don't solve the underlying problem: compiling data into dashboards and creating reports is a recurring task, without automation. It will always be a significant drain on labor, and it can limit agency growth.
With manual PPC reporting, you're stuck spending more time building and sending reports than you are developing new PPC strategies (which bring in revenue).
The solution is to use a customizable PPC dashboard that automates your reporting.
Not only will this make it easier for your agency to grow, it will lower your operating costs by reducing the hours spent creating reports.
In this post, we cover how TapClicks can be used to create value-driven PPC reports for your clients.
Specifically, we take an in-depth look at how to:
- Set Up Your PPC Dashboard Template
- Create and Schedule Recurring Client Reports
- Provide Clients with Dashboard Access for Seamless Reporting
If you're ready to improve (and expedite) your PPC reporting process with a scalable and customizable dashboard, click here for our free 14-day trial.
How to Set Up a PPC Dashboard in TapClicks
The first step of setting up your PPC reporting dashboard is to select from one of our pre-made templates or create your own dashboard from scratch.
Both options are customizable, but most of our clients start with one of our templates to save time. Then they modify it to fit their needs.
(See the image above for examples of the templates we have built and ready to go, including an analytics and paid search dashboard, social KPI overview, and more. Each template includes an executive overview widget with high-level data on key metrics like conversion rate, average CPC, etc.)
Unlike other reporting platforms, TapClicks dashboard templates provide unparalleled scalability. You can set up a master template to use across clients, and when you make a change to the template, it's automatically applied across all of your live dashboards.
For example, let's say your focus starts moving away from click-through rates (CTR) and cost-per-click rates (CPC) towards share of voice, and you want each client's dashboard to feature this new metric.
Instead of having to go to each client's dashboard to make those changes, you can just modify your PPC dashboard template, and all of their dashboards will automatically update.
This differs from most reporting tools, where a change in your template still needs to be manually applied to each of your live dashboards. Even for small agencies, this can be a huge time suck. And for scale agencies, it's even worse.
Connect Your Data Sources to Start Pulling in Data
After you've created your PPC template, you can start pulling in data from paid media platforms.
TapClicks has over 250+ different live API connections with marketing-specific platforms.
For paid media, we have ready-to-go connections with all the major players, including Facebook Ads, Google Ads Manager, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, Bing Ads, and Twitter.
(Note: You can also view your PPC campaigns within the context of larger marketing strategies such as SEM efforts or even client sales performance because TapClicks has ready-to-go integrations with eCommerce platforms, analytics tools, SEO tools, and more.)
To connect your data sources, login to each platform via your TapClicks dashboard, authenticate TapClicks, and we start pulling in your data that day.
Unlike a more complicated business intelligence software or less sophisticated tools like spreadsheets TapClicks was made for digital marketing agencies.
The data is pulled in from each platform and organized for you in a way that compliments how your team built and designed your ad campaigns.
You don't need to spend time setting up API connections or managing those connections to factor in advertising platform updates because we do this for you.
We also allow you to view your historical data, pulling in up to 12 months of data so that you can begin analyzing performance before you even start your first campaign.
Plus, as you start running ads for your clients, you can contextualize your results by comparing them to important metrics from previous periods.
Once your data is pulled into TapClicks, it's time to customize your dashboard template.
Creating and Editing Dashboard Widgets
A dashboard is made of widgets, which are completely customizable.
You can customize how your widgets are organized, the visualizations you use (from pie charts to graphs), and change the time frame of the data displayed within each individual widget.
You can also create a new widget to add to your dashboard.
When making a new widget, you can select which data sources you want to view, along with how your data is organized and displayed.
For example, do you want it organized by date range or views? Do you want your widget's data to be displayed as a chart, table, etc.?
Once finished, your new widget is now on your PPC dashboard.
Create and Schedule Recurring Reports
Because your data sets are organized and updated in real-time within your TapClicks PPC dashboard, it's easy to get started on creating and scheduling your client reports.
Create White-Label Client Reports
You can create a report from scratch, or use one of our pre-designed report templates. (We have templates made for specific channels such as Facebook Ads and YouTube, or for types of services, such as PPC marketing.)
How you create a report in our Report Studio is similar to how you make a report in PowerPoint. The main difference is that PowerPoint generally lets you add graphics to a slide. In Report Studio, you can add graphics and data.
Plus, with TapClicks, it's easier to create white-label reports that tell a story around your PPC performance. Storytelling is better than simply reporting metrics, because data doesn't exist in a vacuum what good PPC performance means depends on each client; their expectations and their previous marketing campaigns.
By using executive summary slides you can give context to your data, remind the client of previous conversations or agreed upon goals, and focus their eyes on the bigger picture of your marketing efforts.
Schedule Your Reports to Send Automatically
Once your report is created, you can set up recurring reports that will go out to your client at a frequency you determine.
(Note: You can also make a Quick Report, which is perfect for when it's the end of the week and a client asks for a last-minute custom report.)
Let's take a look at setting up scheduled reports.
You can choose when the report goes out, such as:
- Every day
- Every week on a specific day
- Every other week
- Every 1st and 16th of the month
- Every month on a specific day
- Every quarter on a specific day
You can select which date range you want included in the report, any stop date (eg. if you're only contracted for a 6-month engagement), and which type of file you want to send (PDF, PPT, CSV, etc.).
Set Custom Access Permissions to Further Reduce Reporting Tasks
Another way to significantly reduce the time you spend creating and sending reports for clients is to give them access to their own PPC dashboard.
TapClicks lets you set custom access permissions and annotate your metrics.
So your client only sees what you give them access to, and they can view any notes you provided to help them better understand what a metric means in the context of overall PPC performance.
This lets your client look at their report when they want versus reaching out to you and asking for a last minute update.
Creating a Customizable and Scalable PPC Reporting Process with TapClicks
Marketers spend way too much time reporting on campaign performance. They're too busy editing rows and columns and making changes to dozens of different PPC reports.
As a result, they have less time to focus on revenue driving tasks, like improving return on ad spend (ROAS) or re-working campaigns to meet a client's goals.
To get ahead of the curve and to efficiently demonstrate value to your clients you can use TapClicks's customizable PPC dashboard to cut down on manual tasks your team has to do.
With TapClicks, you can:
- Make changes to show key metrics in one dashboard template, and have those changes be reflected across all clients.
- Bring in data from nearly any platform (whether search engine or social media tools) to contextualize your data or get all of your PPC data sets into one dashboard.
- Create and schedule recurring white label reports tailored towards your clients.
- Set client permissions that let your clients log in to a client-friendly dashboard and view data without waiting for a report.
By using these tools, your agency can quickly bring on new clients (and scale up services with existing clients) without having to worry about bottlenecks forming or a dip in performance.
If you're ready to improve (and expedite) your PPC reporting process with a scalable and customizable dashboard, click here for our free 14-day trial.
