Most marketing teams handle their pay per click (PPC) reporting by exporting data out of various advertising platforms and into one dashboard — often developed in-house using Excel spreadsheets or software like Google Data Studio. Getting all relevant data into one platform helps them evaluate the efficacy of their marketing strategies across various channels without having to log into each channel individually.
From there, marketers create reports and send them to internal and external stakeholders. They could be for clients, vendors, management and executive teams, or other departments.
But there’s a significant difference between a bare-bones PPC dashboard that offers limited reporting features and an all-in-one-marketing dashboard that emphasizes reporting and analytics. Without a more sophisticated tool, marketing teams are substantially limited in their ability to grow (their teams, the scope of their campaigns, or client lists) and their ability to identify opportunities to increase profitability.
We made TapClicks to rectify this by empowering marketing teams to:
In this post, we’re going to discuss how TapClicks incorporates these four functionalities into our reporting and analytics software, giving examples of how we help marketing teams increase profitability, save time, and scale up their marketing efforts.
If you’d like to see how TapClicks PPC dashboards save your team time and money, try our free 14-day trial.
While it’s a given that PPC dashboards need to pull in data from advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, LinkedIn Ads (and much, much more), it’s critical to understand that not all connectors are created equal.
A connector works with a platform’s API to pull data out of that platform, and it does this by telling the platform what data it wants and how it wants it presented. We’ve worked with clients over the past ten years to make the most advanced connectors to popular advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Bing Ads.
We also give marketing teams substantial historical data. For example, you can set up your TapClicks account with your Facebook Ads account and pull up to a year of data on the same day. Then, you can analyze your previous campaign performance and see which ad groups worked best for you in the past, so you don’t have to wait for new data to trickle in before you start making changes.
Your PPC reporting tool should have access to an extensive list of ready-to-go marketing connectors, but it also should have connectors to CRM platforms (like Salesforce) and eCommerce platforms (like Magento and Shopify).
By pulling this data and merging it with your PPC data, you can see the direct impact of your PPC marketing on your bottom line. That’s how you increase the profitability of your marketing strategies because otherwise, you can be increasing your impression rate or your return on ad spend (ROAS) without actually improving your bottom line.
Finally, because all of your relevant data is in the same dashboard, your marketing team doesn’t need to toggle between different platforms to analyze marketing strategies. With TapClicks, you can blend your Google Adwords data and your Facebook Ads data to evaluate overall cost per conversion or pinpoint which ads are increasing your ROAS.
In-house marketing teams need to report upward, to heads of department and higher. Agencies need to report to both internal teams and their clients.
The problems with both types of reporting are similar: reporting is time-consuming.
The more time your team spends on creating reports, the less time they spend on managing and improving marketing campaigns.
Our reporting tool helps take a process that usually takes hours or days and trims it into minutes.
We do this by helping you create:
As advertising platforms adapt and evolve, key metrics also change over time.
For example, once measuring click-through rates (CTR) was the gold standard of PPC reporting tools. But as paid search grew more sophisticated, the value of CTR diminished. Now, agencies and brands are trying to measure their “share of voice” that they have within their respective industry. This means marketing teams need to know the overall number of impressions and market reach.
Suddenly, the connector you have that was good for pulling CTR data out of your advertising channels isn’t indicative of your overall PPC performance.
At TapClicks, we have a team dedicated to managing the connectors — the API connection and what data is pulled out of the platforms. So, as the industry changes, we update our connectors to bring you the data sets most relevant to your marketing strategies.
One of the biggest obstacles of using a light-weight or in-house reporting tool for your PPC dashboard is that it stunts growth and scalability. The problems we listed above (long reporting processes, an inability to adapt to changing metrics, lack of data connectors) snowball into a bloated reporting arm of your marketing team that isn’t as efficient as it could be, thus limiting your growth.
This stunted growth occurs across marketing agencies, brands, and media companies.
If you’re a marketing agency that can’t scale because your marketers don’t have another day in the week to handle another client’s reports, then you’re not going to see growth. Your team won’t be able to take on new clients. Plus, they won’t be able to try more advanced campaigns with your current client list, because they’re spending so much of their day managing reporting.
Similarly, if you’re managing an in-house marketing team for a large brand, it’s difficult to scale winning strategies across various regions if you’re not using a user-friendly reporting tool. As a brand, you want your marketing results easily accessible by the various stakeholders who have to sign off on new campaigns.
Finally, media companies use our platform to complement their media planning tools with advanced reporting and analytics. TapClicks can be used easily in tandem with tools such as Mediatool, AdBook+, and WideOrbit. That way, your media analysts can easily manage dozens of ad campaigns and take the data TapClicks pulls out of various platforms to help lower your overall cost per acquisition (CPA).
Just as PPC campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum — they are dependent on SEO strategies, brand awareness, eCommerce conversion rates, and so on — PPC dashboards require more than just PPC connectors pulling Facebook and Google data into pre-made widgets.
Instead, PPC teams can use TapClicks to:
If you’d like to see how TapClicks PPC dashboards can transform your marketing operation, try our free 14-day trial.