To remain cost-effective, your PPC campaign needs a funnel performance report.

Without it, your ad spend could be falling into a black hole. How can you expect your ads to perform well if you don’t know what’s going on with every channel? That’s why you need an understanding of how your channels and KPIs engage with each other.

What is a funnel performance report?

A funnel performance report gives you a brief overview of how your funnel is performing. It breaks down your spending, impressions, clicks, conversions, and Cost Per Action (CPA). You can also compare KPIs against past performance and find which campaigns are costing you the most and where you’re getting the best returns.

A breakdown of funnel reports

Now let’s look at each section of a funnel report and use Adzooma’s reporting tool as an example.

Cost

The first part of the funnel is cost. This is an important section of the report because it tells you how much you’re spending. But it doesn’t tell you the full picture on its own, so it’s best not to take this element as a sole indicator of success or failure.

Impressions

The second part is impressions. This is how many times your ads have appeared in a search for the given time period. You also get a small box inside the funnel giving you the click-through rate (CTR), or how many clicks you’ve got per impression as a percentage. Although cost per impression (CPI) isn’t part of the funnel, this is a good indicator of value for money. Ideally, you want a low CPI with a high CTR to make your campaign cost-effective.

Clicks

This is how many times your ads have been clicked in the given time period. Clicks can’t be judged on their own and that’s why you have CTR to show you how effective the ads were in terms of copy. You can also calculate the cost-per-click (CPC) for better analysis of your ad spend. The box inside the Clicks funnel shows you the conversion rate (CVR) which is how many conversions you’ve had per click.

Conversions

Conversions are how many times someone has interacted with your ad (eg. clicked a text ad or watched a video ad) and then took an action you deem “valuable” to your business. This could be anything from buying a product you sell to signing up to an email newsletter.

CPA

CPA stands for cost per action or cost per acquisition and it signifies how much you’ve paid for your conversion. As not everyone will interact with your ad when it appears in their search, your CPA will generally be higher than your CPC. But you need your total conversion value to be higher than your CPA. If it costs £100 in ad spend to generate £95, you’re losing £5 for nothing.

Benefits of using a funnel performance report

Success in PPC doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every part of the funnel plays a role and if one section is causing problems, you need to know what it is and what to do about it. A funnel performance report does just that. But what are the main benefits of using one?

You can visualise your performance

Some people prefer numbers and written data to get a picture of their performance. But many prefer to “see” what’s going on. A funnel performance report gives you precisely that. Adzooma’s intuitive interface makes it much easier to hone in on areas for improvement.

They give a better analysis than goal completions

Tools like Google Analytics are brilliant but they don’t always give you exactly what you want. Goal completions, for example, show you when you’ve hit a target but on their own, they don’t show you how or why. That’s why many professionals use secondary tools with more in depth features to fill in the gaps (tools like Adzooma for example.)

They’re the perfect tool for A/B testing

Split testing (or A/B testing) is an important way to test the effectiveness of an ad. A funnel report can help by showing the results of your tests. If conversions are low, consider changing how the ad is written. Is it engaging enough? Is it accurate and transparent? If it’s performing well, keep an eye on the funnel and use that as a benchmark should things dip in future.

Plug your conversion black spots with Adzooma’s funnel report with Adzooma

Congratulations, you know everything there is to know about funnel performance reports. Now put your knowledge into practice with Adzooma’s reporting tool.

As you’ve seen, the funnel contains 5 metrics:

• Cost
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• CPA

But in the table below, you include additional metrics like:

• Engagement rate
• Invalid clicks
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Bounce rate

And rest assured, you won’t need a calculator or a degree in Applied Mathematics to understand the report. All the information you’d ever need to make informed decisions on your campaign are right there on the page.

Combined with other free reports Adzooma offers, you’re set with a hefty PPC reporting toolkit. And there’s integration for Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Microsoft Advertising with multi-account management.

Now all that’s left to do is to join Adzooma for FREE today.