What if I told you that you could save yourself hours a day on reporting? I know it sounds like this is the beginning of a cheesy late-night infomercial, but late last year, our team discovered a tool that greatly reduced the amount of time we spend updating client reporting and projections.
Reporting is an integral part of managing PPC accounts, but it can also be the most time consuming. I used to spend at least the first hour of the day updating reports for clients. Now, all my reports are updated automatically while I’m sleeping.
So, what is this amazing, time saving tool? It’s Supermetrics, a reporting automation tool that can be used to import all your metrics from multiple channels into one spreadsheet. It can integrate data into both Google Sheets and Excel. Most of our reporting is done via Google Sheets so we can easily collaborate and share reports with our clients and internally.
Below is a list of the available data sources Supermetrics can access:
I’m guessing you may have clients that want to see data from a few of these sources. Let’s take a closer look at Supermetrics add-on for Google Sheets so you can see how it can transform your reporting.
Building A Report
Supermetrics Installation and Sheet Setup
To install Supermetics, you’ll want to navigate to “Add-ons” within your Google sheet and select “Get add-ons” from the drop down menu. Then search for “Supermetrics” in the search bar.
Once you have Supermetrics installed, you’ll access it from the same “Add-ons” menu. To start building reports, you’ll want to select “Launch sidebar” from the Supermetrics menu.
Now you can begin building your report. For this example, we’re going to use Supermetrics to build out a projection sheet that will update automatically every morning.
Data Source
First, you’ll select your data source (Google, Bing, etc). For each data source you want to pull data from, you’ll need to create a new query. Almost every ad platform we use for our clients is available within Supermetrics.
Next, you’ll select the accounts you want to pull data for. You can choose multiple accounts to get a summary of performance, or you can choose to split data by account to see data separately. Most of the time, I’m building a specific report for just one client so I’ll select that client from the list.
Date Range
Then you’ll set the date range you want to look at. Since I am building a report for projections, I want to look at the last 7 days. To do that, I can select “Last X days” from the drop down and put any number of days. You can also choose if you want to include today in the date range. Since I only want full days of data, I will leave this option unchecked.
The date ranges will update automatically each day, unless you choose a custom date range. Supermetrics gives you any date range you could need, including both Month-to-date and Month-to-yesterday, which I also use for projections reporting.
Metrics
The final required piece is to select the metrics you want in your report. Basically any metric available in the interface will be available to select in Supermetrics. The only time I’ve had an issue is when a platform creates a new metric, it can occasionally take some time for it to become available in Supermetrics.
For this example, I chose clicks, impressions, cost, and conversions. You can choose formulas as well, like clickthrough rate, but I prefer to create those formulas within Google sheets just out of personal preference.
Filters
If necessary for the report you want to generate, you can also choose to split data by rows or create filters to only pull certain data from the account. For example, if clients want to see brand vs non-brand performance separately you can use the filter option to pull data only from campaigns containing “non-brand.” Of course, this will have to be part of your naming structure within your account. You’d then have to run another query with the filter to include only brand campaigns.
Once you’ve set up all of the parameters for the query, you’ll click the blue “Get Data to Table” button. You can also use the button dropdown to change from a data table to a chart.
The data will import into the cell you have selected on the spreadsheet, so be aware of that before you run the query.
Scheduling Reports
Once you’ve built out all of the queries, you have to determine how you want to update the data. You can either choose to update it manually or schedule an automatic refresh. For pretty much every instance, I have my reporting set to refresh automatically in the early morning hours.
From the Supermetrics drop down, select “Schedule refresh & emailing” to set up automatic updates. You can update on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. If you have Supermetrics Pro, you can even run updates hourly.
The Benefits of Supermetrics
Supermetrics has completely changed how I run my work day. I used to spend the first 30-60 minutes updating reporting for the day. Now, not only do I have up-to-date performance and projections each morning when I login, but it allows me to provide clients with reporting on a much more frequent basis than before with fewer man hours required.
It can take a bit of time setting up the report initially, but then it pretty much runs automatically from then on. Supermetrics will save time on reporting so you can invest those hours into optimizing your clients’ accounts.
You can get a 14 day full feature free trial to see if it’s something you want to invest in. For our company, it is definitely worth the cost compared to the time it saves us.
This post was not sponsored in any way by Supermetrics, I just love the tool this much.
Have you tried out Supermetrics? Please share your reporting tips in the comments – we’d love to hear them!
Don’t forget to check out the rest of our posts in our series Get Your Time Back: A Little PPC Automation Goes A Long Way.
