Categories
Reporting

5 Tips to Building Your Digital Marketing Reports

‘Plan – Launch – Optimize’. While you follow this principle to gain the best out of your marketing campaigns, here are 5 tips to get you going with building digital reports.

TIP 1: Define your KPIs

To define your KPI, start by revisiting your objective that has been agreed upon by the key stakeholders. Next, map the objectives against various metrics. Have a look at the table below that lists out a set of sample KPIs based on different objectives.

Objective Possible KPIs
Awareness/ Visibility
  • Impressions
  • Reach
  • Views
  • Clicks
Lead Generation
  • Number of form-fills
  • Number of asset downloads
  • Cost per lead
Sales
  • Number of sales
  • Average revenue
  • Cost per sale
  • ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
Engagement
  • Number of interactions (Likes, comments, shares, etc.)
  • Time spent on the website
  • Pages per session

Tip 2: Reason to build the report

Are you building your report to showcase the results to your Stakeholders, or is the report going to help you optimize the account? The format of the reports will change based on your answer to this question. Stakeholders want to see an overall performance, a summary of how the campaign is doing. While a report meant for inputs to optimize campaigns will dig deeper and identify each and every metric that has seen a change in the positive or negative direction.

Here are examples of the format you could follow for each of the requirement:

Stakeholder report: An overview of what is happening in the account, what is working and what is not, where you stand against your goals & what’s the next steps planned

Analyst report: A detailed breakdown of performance based on metrics (KPIs) for each elements such as campaigns, ads, landing pages, etc which can be used as a base to optimize your campaigns

Tip 3: Select a Format that is Repeatable

While zeroing down on a report format, remember that this has to be done on a regular basis. So ensure that you capture the right KPIs and that the format should be easy to continuously replicate. 

Tip 4: Analyzing the data

This is the most important step in building reports. While analyzing the data, start with the top down approach. Identify the performance at an account level, do you see an increase or a dip in performance? If you find an improvement in performance, start digging in deeper till you reach the lowest level of tactics like keywords, placements, text ads, banner ads, etc, and identify the different causes of the impact by analyzing the metrics that are your KPIs. Once done, don’t forget to repeat the same exercise for tactics to identify the ones that saw a dip in performance. This will help you catch instances that will continue to negatively impact your campaign.

Tip 5: Automate Your Report

Since you are going to build the same reports over and over (in terms of format), start optimizing and automating your reports to save time and reduce human error. There are various ways of getting this done – 

  1. You can use APIs to fetch data faster in a format that is easier to analyse, and build Macros to initiate your analysis
  2. You can also manually fetch the data and use Macros to build the required format and initiate your analysis
  3. The 3rd option is to identify a 3rd party tool that generates your stakeholder/analysis ready reports

Implementing these 5 tips will help you define your report, analyze your data, and finally save on time. This can have a direct impact on the campaigns you run as you can start optimizing based on the insights and the time saved can be used to define your next steps.

DataMyth is a report automation tool that provides insights and reduces the time taken to build reports from an average of 7 hours a week to a few minutes. Interested in checking out DataMyth? Fill out the form.

Categories
Research

5 Tips to Build keywords for your Google Ads Campaign

Identifying the right set of keywords is the starting point to defining your campaign once you have your strategy identified based on the campaign objective. When identifying the keywords, the goal here is to ensure that you identify the keywords that your audience would search for when looking for a solution you provide. This blog contains 5 tips which helps you to define or find the right set of keywords to include in your campaign.

1. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience

You know your product/service well. Write down the terms which are highly relevant to your business along with the terms your  potential audience would use to describe or search in a Search Engine. This list will become your base to start searching with using keyword Planner tools like ‘Google Keyword Planner’ or ‘ahref’. 

For example, if you sell women’s watches, your base list may contain terms that customers would use – “women’s watch”. Along with it you can also add terms such as “women’s sports watch”, women’s formal watch”, “watches for women” and “ladies watches”. This list can also include your brand name. 

2. Add generic keywords to maximize reach 

To expand your reach, you can test generic keywords associated with your product/service. A word of caution here – these are highly competitive keywords with low relevance. You would need to keep a close watch and ensure that you are constantly adding negative keywords to weed out irrelevant traffic and avoid unnecessary spends.

These  keywords may not drive high quality clicks, However, you can test these keywords and based on performance decide which ones to keep. An additional benefit of using generic keywords is – you can identify core keywords from the list of search terms that you may have missed in your initial set of keywords.

For example, if you have “watches” as your keyword, this might trigger you ads to appear for search terms such as “repair watches”, “kids watches”, “watch shop” etc. You can add negative keywords like “-kids”, “-repair”.

3. Control your ad visibility with the use of  match types

The match type determines how closely your keywords match the search terms. Keyword match types explained by Google:

Image source: Google Ads Help

Do note, it isn’t necessary to have all the match types added to your campaign. You can use these match types to control the visibility of your ads, and control the relevance. Broad match can serve your ad on a wider variety of user searches and exact matches can help you get specific to the user searches. Also, exact matches would work perfectly as you can control what keywords you want to be present for and showcase your ads, you will miss out on other important keywords where your competitors can cash in. Finding the right balance between these match types will be key to defining the performance of your campaigns

4. Build keyword clusters based on a common theme/intent

Clustering your keywords on a common theme helps you show the right ad for the right keyword as you can write highly relevant ads for each cluster.These clusters will now become your ad groups.  Following this rule to define your ad groups also gives you control to ensure that the ads are relevant, which you can keep improving over the course of time. What you would definitely want to avoid is putting all your keywords in one adgroup. For example a user looking for “women’s luxury watch” may see an ad that is generic to women’s watch.

5. Negative keywords are a huge positive

As mentioned earlier, negative keywords are used to exclude your ads from appearing on searches with that term in it. Choose your negative keywords very carefully. Adding too many negative keywords might result in a lower reach. The best way to expand a negative keyword list is to check the “Search Term” report to identify the terms that may include your keyword, but are not related to your business. 

For example, if you are selling “sports watches” (broad or phrase match), your ad might have appeared for the search term “watch repair” or “sports watch not working ”. In this case you might want to add terms such as “repair” & “not working” as negative keywords. Once you identify the negative keywords, consider adding synonyms, singular or plural versions, common misspellings, and other close variations.

These are some basic tips to get you started. Ensure that you constantly check the performance, and optimize your keywords to drive the best performance.