PPC Reporting

PPC reporting is how you answer whether your ad spend is working, not a spreadsheet dumping ground. It connects money out (costs) to business results in (revenue or leads). I used to think more data was better, but now I know the trick: a good report has a clear decision attached. If your cost per acquisition is £50 and your average order value is £40, you are losing money. That's a report worth reading. The rest is noise.

You collect spend, clicks, conversions, and revenue. But the key is to filter by what you control: keywords, audiences, landing pages. A report that shows impression share but not CPA tells you nothing about profitability. I pull data from Google Ads, Google Analytics, and the CRM. That way I see not just the click but whether that click turned into a paying customer five days later.

My standard report starts with a one-line summary: "This month we spent £5,000, got 120 leads at £41 CPA, ROAS 2.2x." Then I show the trend: last month was £4,200, 90 leads at £46 CPA, ROAS 1.9x. That immediately tells you whether you are improving. Then I drill into campaigns: Brand campaign CPA is £20, non-brand is £60. That's where the decision lives. I also include a chart of conversion paths based on Google Analytics attribution. That helps explain why some keywords get credit even if they didn't get the last click.

The goal is to make the next optimisation obvious. If CPA is rising, check keyword segmentation. If ROAS is flat, test ad copy. A report that ends with three clear next steps is better than one with fifty numbers.

You need PPC reporting every time you run paid search, even a £100 test. Without it, you cannot decide where to increase or cut spend. It matters most when you are justifying budget to a boss or a client. A clean report showing a ROAS of 4x makes the case better than saying "we got a lot of clicks."

Reporting also matters when you optimise. It reveals that one ad group has a CPA of £30 while another is £80. You shift budget accordingly. I learned this the hard way when I kept reporting total impressions and nobody cared. Now I focus on the metrics that flag action.

When running integrated campaigns, PPC reporting helps compare with organic. For instance, if your paid search converts at 2% and organic at 1%, you might reallocate budget based on PPC data or adjust landing pages. That's where [PPC and SEO working together](/ppc-and-seo-working-together/) pays off. Another edge case: seasonal trends. Month-over-month comparison stops you from mistaking a holiday spike for a real improvement. I also use [SEO vs PPC](/seo-vs-ppc/) comparisons to decide whether to shift spend between channels.

Reporting matters during account structure changes too. If you split a campaign into two, reporting shows within a week whether the new structure performs better. Without it, you are guessing. I also find it critical for client relationships. A report that highlights what went right and what you are fixing next builds trust. It turns a budget conversation into a strategy conversation.

I used to include every metric: impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, quality score, impression share, conversions, CPA, ROAS. The report was ten pages and nobody read it. Now I pick 3 to 5 metrics tied to the goal. For lead gen, that's CPA and conversion rate. For ecommerce, ROAS and revenue. The rest sits in a backup sheet I only open if something looks off.

I also ignored segmentation. For months I looked at campaign-level data and missed that one ad group was bleeding money. A keyword with 200 clicks and zero conversions was hiding in the totals. Now I break by keyword, device, and time of day. That's how I found that mobile traffic had a CPA twice as high as desktop. I paused mobile and saved 30% of the budget.

Another mistake: I treated attribution as fixed. I reported last-click conversions as truth. But when I compared to a data-driven model, I saw that keywords like "what is PPC" were assisting sales even though they rarely got the last click. Now I always add a note on which model I used and how it changes the picture. I also include an assisted conversions column.

Finally, I forgot to include a "what to do next" section. Raw numbers without next steps are just noise. Every report now ends with three bullet points: what to increase, what to pause, what to test. That small change turned reports from archive documents into meeting agendas. I also started using [the SEO and PPC handshake](/the-seo-and-ppc-handshake/) framework to align my reporting with organic data, which caught a few attribution leaks.

If this is your problem today, [How SEO and Adwords Work Together](/how-seo-and-adwords-work-together/) and [Pay for Performance SEO Companies](/pay-for-performance-seo-companies/) are the notes I'd open next.