Marketers and marketing teams can quickly get overwhelmed with the amount of manual reporting required when managing even the smallest number of Google AdWords campaigns.
The more time marketers spend on recurring reporting tasks, the less time they have to work on revenue generating activities like optimizing campaigns and improving their marketing strategies.
To alleviate this time-consuming burden, some of our clients previously tried automating their AdWords reporting in Excel spreadsheets using complicated scripts.
But using AdWords scripts in Excel requires team members who can comfortably (and efficiently) use SQL.
Plus, using scripts in a spreadsheet is more of a bandaid than a long-term solution. Account managers will still need to manage multiple spreadsheets and manually create reports.
This makes it difficult to scale because your marketers can only handle so many reports in a week.
At TapClicks, we offer specialized reporting and analytics tools that can simplify and automate your AdWords reporting process.
In this post, we cover how to automate your Google AdWords reporting in three steps:
- Connect your Google AdWords account to TapClicks with a live API connection.
- Use our customizable reporting templates to create AdWords dashboards where you can organize and analyze relevant datasets.
- Schedule recurring reports to your stakeholders and customize your reports to show value.
If you're ready to see how easy it is to automate your Google AdWords reporting with TapClicks, try our free 14-day trial.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Automate Google AdWords Reporting with TapClicks
Below, let's look at how you can automate your Google AdWords reporting with TapClicks in three easy steps.
Step One: Connect Your Google AdWords Data Source
The first thing you need to do is connect your Google AdWords account to TapClicks.
In the upper left hand corner of your dashboard, click on Manage Data Sources.
After you click on that, you'll see the catalog of all the data sources we offer.
When you connect your Google AdWords account to your dashboard, TapClicks starts pulling in data that day, but it also pulls in historical data.
Because we take a deep pull of your historical data, you can start analyzing your AdWords campaign performance going back up to a year.
Your data is pulled through a live API connection managed by the TapClicks team.
Any changes made to the platform's API are addressed by our team as they come up. This saves you time because you don't have to update how you pull in data to your Excel spreadsheet every time Google changes how its data is organized or how KPIs are measured.
Note: Right now, we have over 250 Instant-on data sources ready to go. They range from programmatic advertising channels, to social media platforms, to CRM tools, SEO tools, and more.
Assigning a Data Connection to a Client
When your data is pulled into TapClicks, you have the choice of assigning it to a client.
From the same dashboard where you picked your connector, you'd click on Assign to Clients.
TapClicks takes you to all the data pulled in from that platform. You can click on the campaigns you want to assign and then either assign them to an existing client or add a new client.
That's it. Now the right Google AdWords data is assigned to the right client.
Step Two: Create Your Reporting Dashboard
After you've connected your Google AdWords account to TapClicks and assigned the right campaigns to your client, it's time to create a dashboard.
You can create a dashboard from scratch or use one of our dashboard templates.
Our dashboard templates have been made over the last decade working with agencies, brands, and media companies.
We've taken what our clients most commonly need and created templates to help make their specific reporting and analytics processes easier and faster to execute.
By using our templates, you don't have to create a report from scratch each time you start a new campaign or onboard a new client.
Plus, changes you make to your dashboard template can be universally applied to all of your accounts. This saves you time because when you start measuring a new KPIs or data set, you don't have to go through each client account and update every dashboard.
Note: In the screenshot above, you're seeing just some of the templates we offer, including a Google Analyticstemplate, a Display Services template, and a Facebook Analytics template.
Let's look at an example dashboard for your Google AdWords data.
In this dashboard, you can see a Performance Overview widget at the top, including metrics like:
- Clicks
- Impressions
- CTR
- Avg. CPC
- Cost
In the upper right corner, you can set the date range for the dashboard.
But a feature our clients really love is that you can change the date range of each widget separately within the dashboard. This can be useful for several reasons, such as better illustrating a recent campaign win that doesn't fit neatly into the monthly recurring report.
You can also annotate a widget, move and resize it, and more.
These advanced editing features allow you to truly customize your dashboard to match your reporting needs.
Creating a New Widget
You can also quickly create widgets for your dashboard. You can do this whether you create your dashboard from scratch or you just want to modify one of our templates to better fit your specific services.
First, in the upper left corner click the plus sign. Then, you're taken to a widgettemplate where you can fill out the data category (in the example below we are pulling in data from Google Ads), along with the data view, metrics, dimensions, and time grouping.
Because we pull all of your Google AdWords data in a way that matches how you built out your Google ads campaign, you don't need to worry about mapping data to channels. We've already pulled in that data in a way that makes it easier for you to do reporting and analytics.
The above screenshot shows a bar graph, but as with most things in TapClicks, this is customizable.
In the New Widget section in the upper left hand corner, you can click whether you want a pie chart, table, or other type of visualization.
By using our templated dashboards or creating your own and editing widgets within the dashboard, you can make sure the dashboard template you're using is specifically suited towards the KPI's you want to report on.
Once that's done and you're ready to show value to your stakeholders it's time to automate the entire AdWords reporting process by scheduling recurring reports.
Step Three: Schedule Your Reports
Here is where we use reporting automation to set up recurring AdWords reports.
From your TapClicks dashboard, click on Reporting.
From there, you're taken to a forum that lets you fill out what report you're sending, where you're sending it to, in what format, and at what frequency.
For frequency, we have several options. You can schedule reports to go out daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, on a specific date, and on the 1st and 14th of every month.
You can also select different versions of the same report for different recipients. For example, you can send a monthly performance report without revealing margins and your own profitability to your clients. This lets your clients focus on the value of your campaigns.
Then you can send another report (with margins displayed) to your marketing managers and other department heads. This lets your internal stakeholders see the profitability of ongoing accounts and what services they should market more.
Once you're done scheduling your report, TapClicks takes over. The data is automatically pulled from Google Ads into TapClicks and then is organized into the dashboard and widgets you created. From there, we send a report to your recipients at the frequency you selected.
Note: Sometimes you want to create a one-off report to show a major win or shift in strategy. Simply edit the dashboard to match what you want your report to show, create a new report, and hit send.
Customizing Your Report
Our reports are white labeled so they can easily represent your agency or your client's brand. They are also made with easy to follow report templates where you can tell a story to your client.
For example, you can set up your Google Ads report to have an intro and executive summary where you go over the big wins in the past week. Then the following slides will give more specific detail. The Google Ads data you're showing is automatically pulled from your TapClicks dashboard, so it's always up to date.
Note: We also offer a number of free resources like our PPC report template and social media report template.
Final Thoughts: Save Time with Our Automated Reporting Tool
Instead of manually compiling AdWords reports in Google spreadsheets or manually setting up AdWords scripts in Excel your digital marketing team can use TapClicks to easily automate AdWords reporting.
With TapClicks, you can:
- Pull in real-time data from your Google AdWords account. This data is pulled in and organized within TapClicks, so you don't have to spend time manually mapping or re-configuring data sets.
- Create marketing dashboards tailored to your Google AdWords campaigns. Start off by using our dashboard templates, and then modify widgets as needed to include the information that's important to you and your client.
- Schedule reports to go out automatically. In our reporting tool, you pick when (and how often) you want your AdWords reports to go out. TapClicks takes the data from your dashboard and sends it out to the recipients you selected in the file format you chose.
If you're ready to see how easy it is to automate your Google AdWords reporting with TapClicks, try our free 14-day trial.
