What a client actually wants from a PPC report

Client PPC reports tend to be a dashboard export with a covering note. They contain a great deal of information and answer almost nothing that was actually asked.

The questions behind the meeting are nearly always the same three.

1. Did I make money?

Not clicks, not impressions, not click-through rate. Money in against money out, as directly as your data allows.

If you can measure revenue, show revenue against spend. If you can only measure leads, show leads against spend and use an agreed value per lead — agreed in advance, in writing, so the number is not being invented in the meeting.

If you genuinely cannot connect ads to outcomes, that is the most important finding in the report and should be at the top, not omitted.

2. Is it getting better or worse?

One trend, over a long enough period to be meaningful. Month-on-month is noisy; a rolling three-month view against the same period last year is honest.

Show the trend even when it is bad. A report that only shows favourable comparisons is transparent to anybody paying attention and destroys trust permanently when noticed.

3. What are you doing about it?

The part most reports skip. A short list of specific actions, with expected effect and who is doing them.

And crucially: what happened to last month's list. Done, not done, done and it worked, done and it did not. Without that, the recommendations are decoration.

What to cut

Metrics with no decision attached. Impressions, click-through rate, average position — unless one of them is the subject of a specific action this month.

Every campaign listed individually. Summarise; put detail in an appendix.

Screenshots of the interface. If the client wanted the interface they would open it.

Percentage changes on small numbers. "Conversions up 300%" on three conversions is a number designed to mislead, and everybody can tell.

The structure that works

One page: what happened, what it means, what we are doing, what happened to last month's list. Everything else behind it for whoever wants to check.

The compression is the work. A report that takes an hour to read gets skimmed; a report that takes four minutes gets discussed, which is the entire point of having the meeting.