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Is this a normal amount of analysis for a weekly report?
I’ve recently changed agency and I feel like I’m swamped with reports in my new role. In my previous job we had automated swydo reports go out weekly then created monthly reports using swydo with some additional analysis written.
In my new role we use Data Studio to show performance/results. But I’m being asked to write about 500 words of analysis per client in weekly reports. It takes me over a full day of work to complete all my reports for my 6 clients as I have to look as in-depth as product performance and price competitiveness of clients’ product sold. Is this a normal amount of reporting for weekly reports? All of this is on top of monthly reports that are usually slightly longer. That’s despite all but one of my accounts spending less than 2k per week.
I’ve spoken to my manager about it and he did sympathies but said I needed to be this in-depth with reporting. The only help he gave was more around the structuring of reports which he said would help speed things up for me – but I feel like it has hasn’t helped much.
Is this level of reporting normal in PPC or is my manager/agency being overboard with how much analysis is required?
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1 Reply
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That’s overboard but might be something they feature to get clients?
We do monthly reporting. Clients can ask for and pay for extra reports, or reports more often, but we could not sustain this level.
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It all depends on the spend and how actionable your findings are.
Spending $2k/month? You are literally not going to have anything statistically significant or actionable in a weekly report. It’s a waste of time for both you and the client to have that conversation.
Spending $2M/month? You better have a 20+ slide deck, with actionable insights on every slide, every single week. You start just talking metrics or reporting on the same chart week-over-week, you’ll be fired before you finish your presentation.
The expectations are different based on the spend.
IMO every bullet in a report needs to say “this is an opportunity, here’s how we’ll take advantage of it” or “this is a problem, we need to fix it”. If it’s just metrics without insight or action, it’s a waste of time for both parties.
I would imagine for a smaller client, at smaller spends, for weekly reporting you could do that easily in 2-3 bullets on 2-3 slides (or just talking through a datastudio dash and giving VO, with follow-up action in meeting notes). The 500 word minimum seems like a weird line in the sand to draw, unless it’s something specifically scoped in the contract and ‘detailed reporting even on small spends’ is something the agency is pitching to win newbiz.
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That is over kill all things equal. Are clients reading these reports and coming back with questions each week?
What you do weekly is what our agency does for a monthly report. Week to week most clients don’t have major changes that need 500 words of reporting… unless they are spending 6 figures / month. Most weeks you can sum it up in a couple lines to clients when talking about any major swing in numbers.
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Complete waste of time don’t bother with it
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I had an experience like that early in my career. I worked on a high-spend high-touch client that required daily email recaps every morning and weekly + monthly performance summaries.
The system I came up with to avoid typing all day was to develop a library of mad lib templates in Excel that were linked to a Power Point template used for the client presentation. ~90% of what I had to write would update automatically once I loaded the performance data set into Excel. You could probably do something similar in DataStudio.
I haven’t tried this yet but something else that might work would be to use a speech to text transcriber, record yourself talking about the account then use ChatGPT to summarize into bullet points or whatever format you need for the presentation then copy and paste the output into your slides until someone develops a tool to automate the copy/paste part. I’m guessing if you experimented with the prompts you could probably get the output you need with a single prompt to ChatGPT.
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I learned early on that the vast majority of clients don’t care much for complicated reports. They just want the bottom line how the campaign is doing. Treat them like women and children: give them what they need, not always what they want.
If you spend that much time on reports, you’re spending too much time on them instead of improving campaigns. Only one client insisted on weekly reports. Understandable since it was over 50,000 SKUs on both Google and Bing. My reports took less than 30 minutes usually and just two or three paragraphs on status, that’s all. Usually, a month to month comparison chart included, a quarterly chart at a quarter’s end and a yearly report.
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If you spend over an hour per client to write reports each week, that’s not a productive use of your time in my opinion.
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No client will ever read 500 words per week. If your boss is asking for that because he is going to read it and provide feedback to help you sharpen your blade, I guess it’s kinda justified, but if your boss thinks 500 words about clicks going up 8% and leads down 4% W/W is useful to the client your boss is a moron.
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Hi – I work at Skai (FKA Kenshoo) and our tech automates much of what you described for PPC management – literally our clients say it saves them hours per week. Happy to chat if you’re open to it?
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Create a report template.
We know (X is your goal)
We did (Y action which resulted in Z)
We will (perform next steps)
Refer to your roadmap and cover whatever is on there.
If you don’t have one, then make one.
“Hello mr POC,
Your goal for your campaigns has been to increase CTR across your search assets. This is because we need to drive more traffic to the landing page in order to increase the high-intent LP retargeting audience pool.
As discussed, we’ve been testing the new and approved copy across all the search campaigns with the goal of increasing the landing page traffic volume.
We’ve also made a few adjustments that would reduce the volume of low-quality traffic. This will allow us to allocate more budget over to the higher-quality traffic sources furthering along our strategy.
At this time, the test is still going and has yet to reach any statistically significant results. For this reason, we are unable to draw any conclusions at this time. To prevent any false positives that harm your campaigns in the future we will report back after X amount of time.”
This is something I would write if I had a ridiculous set of expectations like weekly reporting for a super small budget.
I might have paused a keyword or added 1 keyword to a negative list.
But the way I communicate it is I performed X action that will bring you closer to the goals we’ve set.
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