There are so many acronyms and abbreviations in online advertising. It’s enough to make your head spin. There’s even two in the title of this article!

You’ll be familiar with PPC – pay-per-click – but what about KPI?

I’ll explain in more depth in a moment but KPI stands for key performance indicator. These are used to measure the performance of a particular metric.

Understanding KPIs in your campaign will make or break its performance. But they’re useless on their own. That’s why a KPI trends report can help you analyse what’s going right and what’s going wrong before it’s too late.

What is a KPI?

As I explained earlier, KPI stands for key performance indicator and acts as a value that shows how well you’re performing for a specific goal. KPIs are used in every industry – as long as you have a goal, you’ll have a KPI to measure its performance.

In terms of KPI trends, these show how those indicators change over time; whether they go up (perform well), go down (perform poorly), or stay the same. By tracking the trends in your goal performance, you can see if something needs to improve or whether a change you’ve made has actually worked.

Why are KPI trend reports so important?

So much of our professional lives relies on data: if you don’t have a handle on what your business is doing, it’ll fall apart very quickly.

KPI trend reports make life easier. They help you to make smarter decisions with the data at hand and make your campaigns more efficient. Those decisions include:

• How to improve
• How to grow
• How to reduce
• How to scale
• How to adapt
• How to segment

But one of the fundamental advantages of a KPI trend report is the ability to visualise your PPC campaign performance. When you’re reporting to clients or colleagues without in-depth knowledge, jargon won’t help. But a histogram or line chart will.

Types of KPI reports

Firstly, a word of caution. If you’ve been looking at ways to visualise your data, you may have encountered dashboards for KPIs. KPI dashboards are not the same as KPI reports.

KPI dashboards are better suited for performance monitoring on a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly). They show performance “at a glance” where anyone can look, get what they need, and go about their day.

KPI reports are made for deeper analysis. You can’t glance at a report and get everything you need. When you look at the different graphs and charts, you’ll have questions and you’ll need that trend data to answer them. That’s why different types of KPI reports are essential.

Here are some examples of reports you can create from KPI trends.

Cost

The first example is about cost. This is a crucial report to have because money fuels PPC and you need to know how much you’re spending in any given time period. A cost trend report gives an overview of your campaign spending between the current period and the previous period.

Going back to the six types of decisions mentioned earlier, this KPI trend report is the starting point for the following actions:

• How to improve your cost-efficiency
• How to increase spend
• How to reduce spend
• How to adapt to any changes

CTR (Click Through Rate)

I’ve covered the first P of PPC. Now here’s the C: clicks.

CTR stands for click-through rate and it’s measured by dividing the number of clicks your ads by the number of impressions (when your ad is seen).

Conversion rate

Conversion rates are the number of conversions / the total number of interactions.

ROAS

ROAS stands for return on ad spend and measures how efficient a campaign is. While other reports offer more granular insights by pinpointing specific metrics, ROAS gives a combined view and shows which methods are working and which need to be improved.

Cost per conversion

Cost per conversion describes how much you paid for a conversion. So if a campaign cost £200 and resulted in 10 conversions, the cost per conversion would be £200/10 = £20 per conversion. You don’t want your cost per conversion to go over your conversion value or you’ll be losing money.

Examples of successful reports

Pacific Crest Group, an accounting and HR company in California, published a report called Applying Key Performance Indicators to Build Your Business in 2012. In it, they described a case study where they used a financial KPI report to quadruple the profits of one of their clients.

They did this by identifying the root causes of the client’s cashflow problems. It was discovered that the ratio of revenue-to-staffing was imbalanced which helped them to create a KPI they could report on. The KPI report they produced then gave detailed information that helped the client to improve their operations and increase cash flow.

The smarter way to make a KPI report with Adzooma

You know what a KPI is, why KPI reports are important to your campaigns, what kind of KPI reports you can make, and how one helped to increase a company’s profits by 400%.

Now here’s why Adzooma is the smarter choice for KPI trend reporting.

As part of Adzooma’s reporting tool, the KPI trend report highlights 6 key areas for analysis:

• Cost
• CTR
• Conversion rate
• Average cost
• ROAS
• Cost per conversion

You can track how each KPI is trending and view them at different periods (last 7 days, last week, last 30 days, and last month).

Where Adzooma’s KPI trend reports excel compared to other PPC software are in their simplicity. You don’t have to spend hours trying to configure different metrics and realise you don’t like it. You get straight to the point with 6 fundamental trends, visualised with a line graph.

You can run the report at any time with a click of a button. It marries the quickness of a KPI dashboard with deeper analysis of a report.

Alongside the KPI trend reports, you also get 4 others to dig even deeper into your campaign performance, whether you have accounts with Google Ads, Facebook or Microsoft Advertising. And don’t worry – you can run reports for all of them thanks to our multi-account management.

Fancy trying Adzooma out? Start your free trial today.

Top performance relies on KPI analysis

It’s clear how invaluable KPI trends can be when you track them. By creating meaningful reports, they take a life of their own and help to identify successes and improvements.

No matter what your KPIs are, it’s important to set goals for your PPC campaign otherwise your spending money for no clear reason. That’s why the information you get should be presented in a way that represents your long-term strategy and engages the reader, whether they’re colleagues, clients, or CEOs.

And once you have the right KPI data, the performance will keep on rising.