What’s the Best Way to Set Up a Campaign Report?
Sending reports to your client is very important to track your campaign progress. Here’s what to include in it.
Video transcript:
David: Your first question is about reporting.
Lidija: Yes. So, how do you go about reporting campaigns? I did go through the process, not quite to the end, but I’ve seen these two reports, the troubleshooting and the basic report for clients. I haven’t seen campaigns. Now I’m considering doing UTM codes and also presenting that in a report for a client. So, what would you think would be best practices?
David: Yes. Good question. It’s a great question. And I did something very similar to another client this week. This client was paying some other website to add them to their email newsletter. And I wanted the client to see that that was a waste of money. So, I added it to their monthly report because the money they’re spending could be much better used in a bunch of other places. And I wanted them to see that. So, first of all, I recommend reporting to clients no more than once a month. And I think a month’s worth of data is enough data to make a decision. The troubleshooting report is for you to catch a problem. I would never share that with a client because it might cause more problems or confusion. So, send the monthly report to the client. So, here’s what I would do if I needed to report a UTM code.
Tricia: I set that up recently. A report in Looker.
David: Yeah. So, with the Looker Studio report, you have the first page, which is an overview of all things. The second page is only for organic search. Okay, you can copy that page. And then, in the settings, you can say, don’t limit this data to organic search. I’d like you to limit it to the campaign variable that you set in UTM code. And so, then you’ll need to change the name of that page from SEO to whatever the campaign is. You might want to remove some comments or change some pages on there. But then, for every data point, you’ll have to select the data point, then go into the settings and change what’s called the filter. And you can create your own filter, based on whatever dimensions you add, and your own source medium filter because if you’re using UTM codes, you’ve set the source medium. You can set my campaign, but you can control that. And then, you just need to apply that filter to each chart on the page that you want to reflect that filter. And so, then, you’d have the ability to have one page, which is everything, which would include the UTM codes with everything. The second page would be organic search. The third page would be the one you customized. But you have to create a filter and then apply that filter to every data point on that page. And what the nice thing is, the date on the top of the page is consistent throughout the report, so when you change that, it will apply to all three pages. Right. But that would be the easiest way to do it. There are a couple of things to worry about with the Looker Studio. Sometimes there’s a delay. If you will change something and it’ll look like it all broke.
Tricia: Yes.
David: If you see all your data points broken, just take your hands off the keyboard and take a breath. It’s okay. And then refresh your page. And sometimes, it’ll fix it.
Tricia: I almost pulled my purple hair out because of that.
David: It freaked me out a few times. Second, you can control Z, everybody’s favorite friend, whenever you undo something, and it’ll apply that. But you can customize the report however you see fit. That’s just the report I suggest, and I send it to my clients. But I have a different report for paid search, which looks very different than those other reports because, to me, paid searches work a lot differently. Does that help you set up the campaign report?
Lidija: That helps.