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.

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.

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.

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?