How to Create PPC Reports In Google Data Studio

Measuring the success of your Pay Per Click campaign – whether it’s for your own business or your clients’ – is not always easy. This is especially true when it comes to using the analytics in the typical tools used as they are not designed to provide analytics that’s beautiful to the eye.

For example, by default, Google Ads is not the prettiest of applications to look at especially if you don’t know the ins and outs of the tool. Often times the charts you want are not available and cannot be found easily, and you have to dig to find them.

Google Ads, by default, is the most common type of Pay Per Click program out there but it reports the data it sees using only one not so easily definable Time Series and the rest of the data is displayed using cells and rows, making it just a robust version of Microsoft Excel which for the purest is not the best reporting medium.

What Google Adwords Doesn’t Do

All of this is because Google Ads is a tool designed to help you manage Ads, not to interpret website data. It can tell you such information in an excel format about who clicked on your ads and how much you spent, but it can’t lay that information in a nice precise way for your boss or for your Supervisor.

Before you even start to look at Google Adwords data you’ll want to make sure that it’s connected to your Google Analytics account. If you’re going to a landing page that’s great to track conversions, but depending on your goals you might want to track things like events, goals, or even pages visited in Google Ads which you cannot do in the Google Ads platform.

This is all to say that your boss isn’t going to like sorting data into Google Ads and you as a PPC Specialist or as a Digital Marketer do not have the time to make graphs and to make charts or spend time in Presi if you’re looking to do your job right. That’s where Google Data Studio comes in.

Using Google Data Studio To Report Ad Performance 

Google Ad Studio is a great tool that can be used to visualize all of your data but before you begin though it’s important to ask yourself what the goals of your ads and campaigns are. This will help you to decide what kind of information is important to present.

Before you begin creating a dashboard on Google Data Studio, ask yourself these questions:

• What’s the goal of these campaigns?
• What trends do you want to see? 
• What do you want to track?
  

Once you have your goals defined, you can start creating the perfect dashboard for yourself and for your team.

Before we begin talking about items thought it’s also important to know the different types of charts available within Google Data Studio as these will be the tools that you will be using to present your data too to your team.

Google Data Studio has over 10 types of chart type and data display options s to choose from, to help you create the dashboard that you want.

Some of our favorite chart types and options include:

• Scorecard -> Are cards or tiles, that allow you to show off important numbers at the time period selected. So if you want to highlight current spend or even current clicks, Scorecard might be a selection option for you.
• Time Series – A standard type of chart for measuring actions over time, Time Series is a type of graph that’s how’s customers traction over a certain time period. 
• Bar – Bar graphs are items or units that are used to show comparison numbers, simply using horizontal bars.
• Pie – A pie chart is a type of graph, that shows data points in pie slices that equal 100%.  
• Table – A table is a series of data unit , that is used to show off a number of selections in ascending or descending order depending on the user.

Last but not least, before you begin you will need to ask yourself what is the time period you are looking to track, by default Google Data Studio tracks data of up to 24 days. We encourage you to move this up to 30-days to get the usual month period that defines a month.

Defining The Goals Of Your Google Ads

We mentioned that before you create your campaign, you need to ask yourself “What is the Goal of your Campaign?” this will help define what kind of Adwords report you will be using. If you’re currently running an Adwords account. Chances are you’ve heard the following questions at some point.

• How much money have I spent?
• How can we track this ROI?
• Are people actually tracking on these ads?

For this reason, alone it’s worth using Scorecards at the top of the document. Scorecards can be used to answer questions quickly and efficiently with a user just taking a glance. Common types of scorecards right here can be Clicks, Impressions, Conversions, CTR, and Ad Spend. Again this is the area of your business that you will be using to define where your customers are going to be looking to get snapshots of you.

It’s also worth setting up conversion tracking. Though that’s another subject we’ll get into another time. 

Once you have your scorecards set up, we encourage you to set up a graph tie that really hammers home what you are looking for. In common graphs, this can be “Clicks” or it can be a metric that is important to you.

Tracking Your Google Ad Trends

Tracking your goals with scorecards is great, but the next part of your goal will be to track trends of your PPC Campaign.

Time Series Graphs are a good point to show off trends, usually right below status cards to show off trends that can be seen in your campaign.  Great items to highlight include clicks, conversions, and spend on a daily basis.

Please note that it might seem like a good idea right off the top of your head to show off a number of Tracking Trends right here it can get overwhelming for the individual and we encourage using best practices when creating your campaign.

FIlling Your Google Data Studio Sheet

Once you have your top goals figured out, it’s important that you fill out your Adwords with charts that will help you get a better sense of not just if your Adwords account is achieving, but charts that will help you get a better sense of your customers as well.

You can always overburden your audience here, but put on your designer hat and chat with a UX professional if need be. You want to make sure that your information flows and make sense, not just that you have a bunch of 

Metrics such as Time of Day, Hours of Day, and Mobility Type can provide you great resources that you will help analyze your users that click on your ads and there’s also the ability within Google Data Studio to get as granular as you want.

Google Data Studio offers a number of options that help define your Google Ads account and make it easier for you to tell your Google ads story, so that you can focus on running the accounts.