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People working in agencies – what reports do you send?
This is a post for reality check and updates. I currently handle 2-3 clients and I have built all the reporting as per client's needs and also first principles thinking. I send a weekly performance report built on looker studio (all the important KPIs along with CPC, search impression, and keywords report) and I also do a weekly call with sales guys to understand lead quality and get feedback.
People working at agencies, do you send anything more than that? Are there any tools that I can leverage for better reporting? What am I missing?
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1 Reply
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You’re absolutely on the right track!
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Doing monthly reports right now! Break down by campaign including budget per campaign is good too. Checking bounce rates for landing page to assess possibilities of increasing CVR with web edits its is another good metric for the “how do we get more leads/sales without budget increase”
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I handle most things digital at an agency, so I report on just digital but often it’s not the only report being sent. (I’m just not making the other parts of the report.)
But I use Looker Studio as well. I include all the basics like you mentioned, with sections to look at campaign type, geography, keywords vs search terms if it’s relevant. I usually have an overall analytics page (mainly ga4 connector) in addition to a Google Ads page. The GA4 page has sections for acquisition, geography, and engagement by page and conversion. Sometimes other stuff if it makes sense. And then if I have access to other channels like Facebook Ads or posts, LinkedIn, search console, etc, I’ll add pages for those too especially if our team is actively involved in them.
My best Looker Studio reports almost always include some of the client’s own data, which I typically can’t just pull from a data source. (The companies we work with are on the smaller side so if you work with clients who have Salesforce or something maybe you could get that data without relying on them.) They usually just send me whatever sales spreadsheet/export they currently use monthly or weekly and I visualize it on the report, slicing and dicing it however makes sense for them. Then we can compare the sales to where advertising dollars are going (or where they should be going). And if our tracking is on point or not. I also have some clients who ask for custom stuff like categorizing all of their page views or contact forms by something unique to their business, like departments or vendors.
Again those are my MOST useful reports but not the majority as it relies on the client being willing to share all that data (and remembering to share it). Or being involved in their data enough to ask for more custom reports.
So that’s a long winded way of saying that as far as Google Ads goes, it sounds like you are making useful reports. If you have access to other data it is nice to include it to see PPC in the greater context.
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like others said, landing page and BR, I work for an in-house team, not agency but because we work on lead-generation we have a report (that’s still in further development) in trackign the integration between the ads and actual leads. like what kind of keywords actually resulted in sales, offline conversion…etc. It’s a strenuous and long-winded process and can still be prone to human errors/trackign issues etc. but it really sets a whole different standard to the client/company.
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lookerstudio monthly reports are the staple here.
The reports have everything from Google ads conversions to META ads ROAS to Search console rankings.
TikTok ads have their own reports because their API is not as robust and rich in data as the others.
Hope it helps
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I don’t do fancy reporting.
In the end, there are only 4 numbers that really matter:
1. Google Ad Spend
2. Gross Profit (from Google Ad Spend)
3. my Google Ads Management Fee
4. your Net Result ( ‘net result’ = ‘profit’ – ‘ad spend’ – ‘management fee’)Here’s what that looks like:
https://nilsrooijmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/img_667c68a110359.pngAnd here’s how I automate that via Google Ads Scripts:
https://nilsrooijmans.com/google-ads-monthly-reporting-script-my-very-basic-version/ -
I would avoid weekly reports. I’ve only had this when I worked in house or with agencies that insisted on it, and every time it instilled a bad habit of the client having unhealthy expectations.
It moves the goalpost wrongly to short term results and you get the client asking why a single week was worse than the week before.
It also sets short term actions for the sake of appeasing the client. Rather than a longer term healthy goalpost.
Monthly reports and quarterly reviews ideally.
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Yall send reports? Where are the account managers? That’s one of the benefits of an agency, you’re supposed to get help.
Our team sends clients monthly Looker Studio reports with basic KPIs across their services.
Our clients LOVE that they’re basic.
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You may be over-reporting from an effort vs. reward standpoint. I’m not clear if you are personally managing weekly report generation and distribution, or are you using Looker’s built-in email+PDF function?
“Weekly calls with sales guys” Are these calls with your internal sales team to discuss feedback from clients, or calls with client sales teams to learn about lead quality directly?
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Jesus. I worked with an agency which made me do in depth weekly reporting – like, explaining why CPM for each creative dropped or increased, for each campaign, every week, for EACH metric. These reports took my soul out and I felt our clients didn’t get a full picture and were just more and more confused WoW. These reports were sometimes up to 15 Google Docs pages long (my boss insisted on this). I quickly noped out there.
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Sounds like you’re doing some good stuff but I would dial back the weekly reporting. You’ll start getting blasted on a down week and you’re also not giving yourself enough time to allow changes to do there thing so any significant changes may make a week look pretty bad.
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I used to work for an agency where used to send a weekly Looker Studio report. On top of that, a monthly PowerPoint with all the bells and whistles for the client to read.
The thing is, literally no client ever read those. They didn’t care about the Looker Studio report either.
As I started working solo, I realized one thing: clients don’t care about fancy reports and 95% of the metrics we look at (impression share, CTR, CPC, etc). They care about sales/leads and how much they spent.
So now, every Monday, I just send 4-5 bullet points on Slack with a brief overview of KPIs, what’s happening, what’s working or not working, what we’re doing about it, and anything we may need from the client.
I also have a super simple Google Sheet tab that the client has access to so they can see the daily/weekly/monthly data whenever they need.
We have a weekly call to review these bullets and usually takes 15-30 minutes and we’re good to go.
That’s it
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I teach the client first for 2 sessions about how to read a marketing report then create a weekly updated spreadsheet link that I send weekly. No need to do pdfs in my work.
I use pdf monthly or quarterly to add more data and info over time with big red and green arrows.They are already sold in the first two sessions as almost nobody does that.
This also for good contracts (almost 6 figures annually consultancy costs).
If things go bad I share exactly the reasons with analytics (the more things go south more time needs my analysis I have analysed 1bn revenues year GA accounts).
In years of experience I have always spotted the problems. To solve them is more complex 🙂
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