Successful Agencies Tell the Best Stories

KPIs: Create a Framework to Win and Tell your Story

It’s likely that your clients are as passionate about PPC metrics as they are about Excel pivot tables. We all know that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are usually boring, necessary, and regularly scrutinized. However, an experienced agency will map out campaign success from the beginning to reach goals; report organization and highlights will be something like interesting anecdotes and pictures from a well planned journey.

It is absolutely crucial to consistently educate clients about the meaning of certain metrics and KPIs, your command and control of those, and their relevance to business success. If goals are not clear, then you must take leadership and help to create them.

KPIs set the context for your achievement and should be landmarks within a journey from which you tell your story. Having KPI objectives per campaign is critical and the basis of the story you choose to tell. In general, consider a logical “divide and conquer” campaign organization and plan that resonates very specifically with each facet of your client goals.

Paint the picture: when reviewing KPI performance with clients, consider painting a complete picture that includes a clear description of challenges, opportunity, planning, and growth

Branded and compete campaigns can be the most exciting campaigns to talk to clients about. After all, branded campaigns almost always yield the most immediate success at the least cost. Branded search campaigns represent the “lowest hanging fruit.”

Paint the picture: present with the competitor brand behind a rifle scope image and show your command and control of the competitive intelligence data

Compete campaigns give you drama with trademark issues, bid competition, and ad messaging/call-to-action wars.

Out of any campaign chaos, there should be opportunity to trace back to your actions and show their success.

KPIs and their performance are different depending on campaigns. Often the KPI for branded campaigns is Return on Ad Spend (Revenue/Cost). While KPI performance goal levels might not be as high with other campaigns, strong focus and consistent success with non-branded campaigns is specifically where agencies can offer the most value and distinguish themselves.

For example, rather than simply offering to “create awareness” for a client’s brand, share the dramatic specifics of “I was lost and now I am found” as it relates to the brand in Search and Display networks by means of new performing placements, keyword coverage expansion, increased geo activity, campaign localization, interest targeting, use of ad extensions, and leveraging new ad networks.

Choose a story that reflects your work. Rather than simply showing the compete-related keywords, show your research of competitor strengths and weaknesses that matter and your efforts and plans to outperform in those areas (given adequate budget).

Continued: For your internal agency reporting, you need to be able to drill down into any AdWords report data and easily visualize reports in order to gain insights and make decisions; furthermore, you need custom ppc reports that can help you reach KPI performance goals that are crucial to your PPC reporting success. read more »

This blog post is part 4 in a series of posts:

• Dear AdWords Agency Tool, Please Tell Me Something New (Part 1)
• Template-based AdWords Reports (Part 2)
• PPC Agency Strategy (Part 3)
• Successful Agencies Tell the Best Stories (this post)
• PPC Reporting Tools Matter (Part 5)