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PPC Reporting Tools You Need in 2023
Looking for the best PPC tools for 2023? We walk you through our top choices and the value they can add to your advertising campaigns.
We found that only 23% of marketers are confident they’re tracking the right KPIs. For paid marketers, proving their impact and ROAS is an absolute must.
But when paid marketers have to deal with conversions, leads and long sales cycles, it can become trickier to track the effectiveness of your ads.
To help, we delve into:
So, let’s get stuck in.
A PPC report is a report you can create to demonstrate the results of your PPC campaigns. To create a PPC report, you need to analyse key metrics that will highlight the effectiveness of your ads.
Without a PPC report, you lack visibility of how your ads are working to hit your target KPIs. And without that, you’re going to struggle to improve and optimise them.
PPC reporting tools can help you optimise your ads, reduce wasted spend and streamline your targeting.
After all, PPC isn’t easy. And there are certain roadblocks in the way when it comes to reporting on your PPC campaigns in particular.
Let’s explore them one by one.
Not every user is going to land on your website after clicking an ad and convert right away. Imagine if they did! Sadly, each user has to go through their own customer journey from awareness to consideration to the decision stage.
Related: Learn more about tracking customer journeys and touchpoints
With PPC, you don’t know where each user is within their own customer journey. Your ad might be working to drive awareness of your brand and product. Or, it could be helping to drive the decision stage.
Of course, your targeting should be set up in a way so that ads can be specified to hit the right people at the right time. But each stage of the buyer’s journey can be made up of multiple touchpoints.
According to Think with Google, customer journeys are getting longer and longer. For those interested in purchasing a flight, they could have over 500 touchpoints before converting.
So, with all this data in play, and all of these touchpoints to consider, how can you attribute a closed sale back to a PPC ad that formed one small part of one very long journey? And, even more importantly, how can you determine that ad played a significant role?
That leads us nicely to point two.
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When you’re setting up a PPC campaign, your goals will differ depending on your business type and your industry.
For example, if you work in eCommerce, you can work to drive direct sales (though you’ll still have the issue of attribution if customers have long journeys).
However, for many marketers using PPC, you’re more likely to drive leads and offline conversions.
When we say leads, we mean people who contact you via form fill, live chat or call. As far as offline conversions go, they’re hard to track.
🚀 Pro Tip
If you’re struggling with offline conversions, read our complete guide to offline conversion tracking here.
But what’s the difficulty here?
Well, let’s use an example.
First, let’s imagine you have no tracking set up. How are you reporting on the performance of your campaigns?
Secondly, let’s imagine you have lead tracking set up so you can count when new leads come in.
How do you know new leads are a result of your PPC campaigns?
Thirdly, you might have lead tracking set up and you might have tracking set up to be able to attribute leads back to the source.
But, a lead isn’t revenue.
So while you’re proudly highlighting how many leads your campaigns generated, what can you say about revenue?
When you’ve got leads and offline conversions to deal with, very little without proper tracking tools.
Now you know why you might need a PPC reporting tool in your marketing stack, let’s go through some of our favourites. Remember, not all of these are essential. But the tools we’ve listed below could help you take your paid advertising to the next level.
Let’s see which PPC reporting tools made the cut.
We couldn’t write a guide to PPC reporting tools without mentioning our own product, Ruler Analytics.
Ruler is a marketing attribution tool that allows marketers to track leads through the full customer journey so they can attribute closed revenue back to the influencing marketing sources.
The great thing about Ruler is that it can attribute value via multiple models.
Related: Learn more about attribution modelling and what it can do for you
So, you can switch between attribution models to better understand how channels, campaigns and ads are working to drive you more leads, and more revenue.
It’s perfect for those looking to prove the impact of their PPC campaigns and who want to double down on what’s actually working to drive sales, not just leads.
Pricing: Marketing attribution starts at £199 per month. Book a demo here. If you’re not ready for a demo, learn why you need Ruler in your life with this eBook.
Agency Analytics is a great cross-channel aggregation tool for PPC marketers. Bonus, it also works to support SEO content too.
This tool is packed with key features and PPC advertiser will love including a white label PPC reporting tool and capabilities to integrate with over 50 apps.
Its dashboards will tell you your ad spend from Google and Facebook ad campaigns and allow you to quickly understand your outputs and return.
Pricing: Pricing for the service starts from $49 a month with discounts of 20% available for annual plans.
Swydo is built for PPC marketers as it lets you combine data from sources like Google Ads, Facebook Insights and Bing Ads to create customised reports.
One cool feature is that you can set (and then monitor) your KPIs. This will help you keep optimised to your client or business needs. You can then schedule reports to go weekly, monthly, or even every day.
Pricing: Prices start at $64 per month for 20 clients with discounts available if you opt for an annual plan.
Octoboard has some nice features with PPC tracking to follow your site visitors, whichever path they took to your website.
Templates are available so you don’t have to create your reports from scratch, and reports can be automated, so you don’t even have to remember to send them to your clients. There’s also a useful option to allow your clients to log into Octoboard themselves, but only see the data you allow them to see. You can import your own data and take advantage of a variety of integrations (50+), from Bing Ads to Zendesk.
Pricing: Octoboard has two pricing options available. The business plans start at just $9 per month while the agency option starts at $30 per month.
DashThis offers automated reporting, premade templates for your reports, and the ability to import your own data. One other nice feature of DashThis is that you can clone and group your reports, saving time if you have similar clients who’ll need the same type of reporting.
The dashboard again features all your data in one place, from PPC ads to SEM, with email marketing, eCommerce and social in there too. You can customise this dashboard with widgets, dashboard headers, comments and note boxes. This is a really good feature as every agency is different and it allows you to prioritise what you need.
Pricing: Prices start at $33 a month for 3 dashboards.
Reporting Ninja allows you to automate your reports and customise them to suit. It gives you the option of reporting only on Facebooks Ads or Google Ads, etc, or producing a full report that combines all of your PPC analytics.
The reports are clear and well laid out with written data, graphs and charts to make it clear what’s happening with your campaigns. Reporting Ninja provides a template library and widgets so you’re not building your reports from scratch. You can also give your clients their own login, so you don’t have to remember to send reports.
Reporting Ninja only has 16 integrations and can make standalone reports as well as combined ones.
Pricing: Prices start at $20 per month for 10 reports.
AdEvolver is still in beta, but once released it’s going to be a must-have tool for paid advertisers.
Described as a one-stop-shop for 1-click ad and negative optimisations, and fully automated budget management, you’ll be able to:
To learn more, join the waiting list.
Using PPC reporting tools can help businesses, and particularly agencies, keep track of their efforts and ensure they’re staying optimised to get the best results. But remember, while a lot of these reporting tools help you create and schedule reports easier, they don’t give you the full picture.
Ruler Analytics is the only tool listed that allows you to track leads through the full customer journey. Whether leads come through via call, form and live chat, you can ensure complete visibility of how many leads you’re generating and how much revenue you’re driving too.
Related: How Rally used Ruler as a north star to prove which paid ads worked and which to double down on
Want to try Ruler for yourself? Book a demo with our team, or learn more about why you need Ruler by downloading our eBook. You’ll discover the three core elements of Ruler’s functionality and what it does to track leads from start to end.
