Reporting on PPC is killing me! Once I “translate” the reports I get from a vendor I have to explain them to everyone else. Why is it so hard to produce a report that is easy to read and that makes sense? I get these reports that have a tone of numbers on them. I almost always find myself asking, “OK, I get the numbers. But, are these results good?”
I am no moron when it comes to SEM. I have been working in this arena for a long time. I just have better things to do that spend my time cutting through all the crap in a report to determine if the results are good or not.
Vendors hate me and I have no problem with that. They will give me their “standard” reports that they give to all their customers and I tear them apart. I tell them that I want “Crayon Reports”. That is my way of saying, I want the report to be easy to read and I want it to make sense to someone who knows nothing about search engine marketing. In addition, I want all the marketing fluff cut out of the report. Here is an example of the marketing fluff I am taking about. Many of the vendors I have worked with will double the results their campaign produced. Why? They note that there is an estimated 1 to 1 online vs. offline sale. In other words, for every sale made online another is made off line. That’s great, but I don’t want those numbers included in the reports that are given to me.
So, what do I want included in my crayon report?
- Impressions – Tell me how often the ads were displayed.
- Clicks – Tell me how often people clicked on the ads.
- Conversion – Use the two numbers above and tell me what percentage of people who click on the ads are buying.
- Cost – Tell me how much are we spending on the campaign.
- Sales – Tell me how much money we are making from the campaign.
- ROI – Tell me if we are making more money than we are spending.
Using these numbers and simplified information I have found it much easier to determine if a campaign is successful. I spend much less time analyzing reports and more time taking action. I can look at one of these reports and quickly determine that we need to make changes or stop a campaign entirely. The result is a big cost savings and more effective use of marketing funds. In addition, I spend much less time explaining the results to others.
