Search Marketing Reporting: 8 Metrics Clients Actually Care About
Do you produce search marketing reports for clients? Many agencies and Internet marketers deliver a summary of performance for PPC and SEO on a weekly or monthly basis, but who decides what data goes into these reports, what metrics to include, and which graph to use to visualize the data?
Remember the Dunkin Donuts commercial, "Time to Make the Donuts"?
This is how most search marketers feel in the beginning of each month. "Time to make the search marketing reports."
Monthly reporting is necessary to keep clients happy, but what you put in these reports is even more important. Even the easiest client in the world wants to see what is going on if they are paying you money to manage a marketing campaign.
Clients are unique and different, from B2C to B2B to e-commerce and lead generation, but the reporting process is usually very similar. Depending on what campaigns you are managing data for, reporting will be used from Google Analytics, AdWords, Bing/Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.
If your client is e-commerce, you can get revenue from most of these data sources, but if your client is B2B with sales over the phone or offline, this creates a common reporting challenge. Read this post about Googles new free Call conversion trackingif you need to measure call conversions.
Before working with a client, or at least before the campaigns are started, the goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) should be defined and agreed. How you decide to report these KPIs is up to you, but not agreeing and documenting that before you start will cost you clients, especially if performance drops.
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Search Marketing Reporting: 8 Metrics Clients Actually Care About