So, Let’s Talk About Pay Per Click Reporting

A massive part of demonstrating the value of any PPC campaign and the costs related to it comes down to good pay per click reporting.

But often, during my PPC audits for potential clients, I find there is either no reporting in place or if there is, then it's not providing valuable information to the business owners.

If you can relate to the above, the content below should benefit you.

Within this blog, I cover some of the basic metrics you should consider including in your future pay per click reports.       

Pay Per Click Reporting - The Basics

For those unsure on the meaning of PPC reporting, it’s a document that contains the data on the performance of your pay per click campaigns.

In an ideal world, this data should be laid out in a meaningful, insightful and actionable format.

Most ad platforms offer reporting capabilities, and a great additional consideration would be Google Analytics or Google Data Studio.

What does it contain?

At the least, a good pay per click report should communicate how much the PPC campaign spent and how much did it bring in!

Let’s look at this in more detail

How much money you have spent? = cost

It’s important to know how much you have spent on your pay per click advertising campaigns.

Why?

On a broad level, it can help you understand if you have spent the expected budget and a positive/negative return investment. You could also see if your spend is going up or down compared to the previous period or same time last year to spot trends and opportunities. 

These could be trends that your costs are decreasing compared to last year and have an opportunity to put the budget in new areas of the campaign.   

How many conversions do you have? = sales / leads

A conversion is a valuable action(s) a user takes on your website after clicking through on your ad.

Let’s look at an example case.

A valuable conversion (action) would be a sale on an eCommerce site.

By tracking how many sales have come from paid adverts, you can measure your return on investment and find out if this type of advertising is working for you

Value of conversions 

Staying on the sales as a conversion type, the total sales value for a given period again helps you understand your return.

For example, let's say you spend £3,000 on Google Ads for the month without knowing the value it brought in - you are kind of in the dark!

If you know your sales value from Google advertising was £15,000 then you have a return of 400% - in other words for every £1 you invest in advertising you're getting back £4 in profit.

You can go one step further and add all your costs associated with the sale and PPC management costs. But the above is the bare min you should know.

The cost per conversion

The final piece of a basic PPC report is the cost per conversion. It is the total cost of the PPC spend divided by the number of conversions you got.  

For instance, let’s say your online pet food store spent £1,000 during January advertising on Google Ads. From that £1,000 you had 200 sales (conversions)

£1000 / 200 = £5.00 per conversion    

So here you can see that it cost you £5.00 per sale.

Other important pay per click reporting metrics 

Many metrics and insights can make up a report. The main point is that it’s meaningful to your business and it helps you make important decisions.

Below is a list of other metrics you may consider adding to your reports to:

  • Number of clicks
  • Number of impressions
  • Click-through rate
  • Impression share
  • Cost per click
  • Conversion rate

What metrics do you use?

I would love to hear from you to add to the list!

Stacey Pledge Google Ads Specialist

About Stacey Pledge

I'm a Google Ads Specialist helping clients across the UK, Europe and the US get the best from their Google Ads campaigns and reach their business goals.

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