☝️ Topic #1 In Your Reporting Calls Is…

❓ "CTR!"…please..just…no 🤦

❓ "Recent campaign changes!"… nope, they’re paying for results not tinkering

❓ "Oh! I’ve got it…ROAS!" I like where your heads at, but not quite

**Pro tip: See Mike Ryan 's The ROAS pathology

As an aside, this gentleman is incredibly underrated, IMO, and absolutely brilliant.

After thousands of hours of reporting across countless industries and business strategies, I highly recommend using a macro to micro reporting approach.

Products are being advertised within a market, that market is impacted by macroeconomic trends, you must factor these into your findings on some level.

Google Ads doesn’t work in a vacuum, so you must also factor in the impacts of external events occurring outside of your ads account.

By starting with the macro, our aim is to enrich our ads data with additional context and meaning.

Here are some examples...

🌐 Macroeconomics: What has the market been like and where is it likely to go?

• One of my favorites is the Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), which provides an indication of future developments of households’ consumption and saving, based upon answers regarding their expected financial situation, their sentiment about the general economic situation, unemployment and capability of savings.
• Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) which is an indicator of the economic health of the manufacturing sector.
• Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Producer Price Index (PPI) which measure price changes in a range of goods and services. Rising inflation can hurt consumer spending.
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is a measure of the total value of goods and services produced in a country over a specific period of time.
• Stock and stock futures markets, bond and mortgage interest rates, and the yield curve.
• Foreign exchange rates.
• Unemployment Rate and Jobs Report which are key measures of employment that also affect stocks.

🍁 Seasonality: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen a business underestimate the impact (or reality) of seasonality or holidays within their ads performance. This is especially important for businesses with multiple product types or departments (e.g. home decor, supplements) and B2B SAAS providers.

📦 Inventory: Another one that is easy to miss, particularly for retail businesses with deep product catalogs. For example, best sellers within a particular category can go out of stock for short or long periods of time and have large impacts on campaign performance.

📈 Search Trends: Google Trends, Google’s Keyword Planner, as well as search term reports within Google Ads (and other paid search networks) are excellent tools to help indicate, account for, and diagnose changes in performance data.

🥊 Competition: Has a competitor started bidding more aggressively on your branded search terms? Have CPCs started to rise alongside a significant increase in search volume for a particular product? These can be clues as to changes in the ad auction landscape. For stores that carry relatively well-known brands, don’t forget to check Google Merchant Center’s “Best Sellers” tool to monitor the popularity rank changes of a product or category over time. 

🎁 Pricing & Promotions: A very common mistake I often see is people using date comparison windows that include a major promotional period and a non-promotional period. It seems obvious, but this is crucial to factor into your performance analysis and reporting - and easy to miss when comparing longer date ranges to one another.

🎯 Goal Changes: Let’s be honest, some businesses, for better or for worse, change their business goals very often and have short memories. It’s incredibly important to remind them and hold them accountable to some of these strategic changes and factor these in when reporting on campaign performance. As an overly simplistic example, if the primary goal this past January was to maximize net sales of new customers, but then in February the goal was shifted to maximizing efficiency and getting CAC (cost-per-acquired-customer) below a certain threshold, you absolutely must take this pivot into account in March when reviewing month-over-month performance changes.

📢 Other Marketing & Website Changes: This one is a bit self-explanatory, but if you're not discussing the impact and attribution touchpoints of other marketing channels or the potential effect of changes made to the site, you're not seeing the full picture and impacts of your advertising.

The bottom-line: Discuss the macro before getting into the micro. It will color your data with context and meaning. It will inspire ideation. It will help provide potential reasonings to major fluctuations in performance - both positive and negative.

💬 What topics do you like to begin with in your reporting calls or emails?

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