PPC Dashboards: 4 Must-Have Capabilities Marketers Need

14 Oct

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:

Create a fuller picture of their data.
We offer the most sophisticated insights into popular advertising platforms such as Facebook and Google. Plus, we don’t limit our connectors to CPC data sets — you can also pull in data from email marketing platforms, CRMs, and eCommerce sites. This gives you a more accurate review of your digital marketing performance.
Increase time spent on running campaigns, not reporting on them.
Reporting processes are often so fraught that there are only one or two team members who know how to create scheduled PPC reports. This also means that any custom reporting request is going to take a significant amount of time to complete. By spending so much of their time managing reports, account managers have less time to spend on improving ongoing campaigns and often don’t have the bandwidth to scale up marketing efforts across clients or brands.
Scale their services and campaigns.
There is a direct relationship between fraught reporting processes and limited growth — the longer it takes your team to report on campaigns, the less likely they’re able to handle new campaigns.
Adapt to new marketing metrics and trends.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) change over time, as advertising platforms consider customer behavior and change which metrics are weighed as important. With TapClicks, our team of connector specialists monitor these changes, so when your team realizes it needs a new metric, we’re already working on importing it into your dashboard.

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.

Connecting Data Sources to Your PPC Dashboard

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.

Using Your PPC Dashboard to Reduce Reporting Time

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:

Custom white-label reports for different recipients.
Your head of marketing is a different audience than the CFO of the company or the founder. Some stakeholders want granular detail of each campaign, while others want a bigger picture of how margins are being impacted. With TapClicks, you can create different reports for different recipients by simply clicking which data sets you want to include.
Recurring and automated reporting.
Instead of having your marketers spend an entire day (or more) creating reports, you can use TapClicks to send out reports on a recurring schedule. Plus, you can set up alerts so your marketers are notified when a metric hits a new low or high. For example, if your conversions drop below a specific percentage or ad spend increases to the point where a PPC ad set is no longer profitable. This helps your team spot any potential hiccups before they build a performance report.
One-off reports in a matter of minutes.
Sometimes report recipients will ask for an additional, one-off report. In this report, they may want to view two different datasets together for the first time. Without TapClicks, you’d need to create this report from scratch, which is time-consuming and frustrating. With TapClicks, you simply select the metrics that you want to be included — over the time period you want covered — and a report is quickly generated.

How TapClicks PPC Dashboards Adapt to Changing Metrics

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.

How TapClicks Helps Marketing Teams Scale

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).

Final Thoughts

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:

Drastically reduce the amount of time they spend on creating reports.
Get a fuller picture of their marketing efforts by bringing in real-time sales data.
Always be ahead of the curve as data connectors update how metrics are valued.
Scale-up their client list or successful marketing strategies across an entire brand.

If you’d like to see how TapClicks PPC dashboards can transform your marketing operation, try our free 14-day trial.