All Things Client Reporting 

I know it is not the most interesting of subjects, but let’s talk reports. Not just any, but a client report. In this article, I will do my best to introduce you to the world of reporting for Amazon PPC advertising. As an agency doing Amazon PPC services, we have to justify our fees by doing the job we agreed to do (I know, I know, unreasonable, eh). But more importantly, I have to show the client the state of their much-loved Amazon Account after my team and I have had our sticky paws on it for the last month.  

The questions I hope to answer in this article are:

• Why you need to consider the audience and why some get this wrong 

• The difference between a client report and an internal detailed data report 

• Understanding the difference between data and information 

• An example of a client report 

• Automation and how to make great reports without expensive tools and hours spent on each client report 

The Audience 

The client or the company trusting you with their PPC is usually not a PPC specialist. Therefore, throwing a huge amount of data at them in the report like Cost Per Click, Attribution, Bids, Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keywords is not the way to explain what a great job you’ve done. They rarely understand that stuff, and they only really want to be told in terms they can understand, i.e., what it means for their business.   

When we audit accounts for potential new clients, we sometimes get sent reports that the clients have received from other agencies or freelancers. Some of these reports are just list after list of campaigns and keywords with various metrics like CPC, bids, and budgets. It means nothing to the client, and it’s of as much use to them as a chocolate teapot. We may enjoy talking about the details, but you can be sure the client does not. 

The client needs information to make informed business decisions, which may also include firing you if you have done a poor job.     

Amazon has a vast amount of data in its reports. I counted 24 different reports currently in my Campaign Manager interface without considering date ranges or brand metric reports. Please remember that most things in these reports are data. It needs your highly trained PPC brain to make sense of and give the client what that means for them and their business.    

OK, so let’s give you a few ideas.

The Anatomy of a Report 

I am not saying I am right with this layout. I just want to suggest what to include and how to present this information. Our own reports are a work in progress, and every few months, I add a new chart or change the way we show the data. All you need to remember is who is looking at this report, and after reading it, will they utter “these guys are doing an amazing job” or “what does that mean for my business?” Our reports are comprehensive but high level. You will not find a campaign or ad group anywhere in our client reports!   

Client Report Page 1—The Summary of the Account  

Here you want to show the “big 3” high-level numbers: Sales, Traffic/Conversion, and PPC Metrics. Our reports show the trend based on last month (the small red or green percentages). We aim to display trends and the main account numbers at a high level.  

The chart shows the last four months, and the bottom right shows the top-selling products.  

Client Report Page 2—Sales 

We show the detailed sales information for the year and how PPC makes up those sales on the next page. This gives the client a clear breakdown of revenue growth and the PPC to organic split. A client will want to know if sales are growing. But also if they’re growing at the expense of organic sales.   

Client Report Page 3—Overall Traffic and Conversion 

Conversion is probably the most important number for a seller. If you did not know, Unit Session Percentage (USP) is NOT the conversion. Danny McMillan and Dr. Ellis Whitehead did an excellent podcast episode on this subject and how to calculate a more accurate conversion rate.  

We amend the USP data to create a revised conversion rate and show this overall conversion rate for the brand and traffic per day.  

Client Report Page 4—Organic and PPC Conversions 

We then show on page four the organic conversion and PPC conversion rates. Is PPC improving conversion or hurting it?  

Client Report Page 5—Average Order Value (AOV) and Marketing Cost (TACoS) 

Here we provide the AOV of all products in their brand. Remember, you can only do three things to increase sales: increase traffic, increase conversion, or increase AOV. I know that oversimplifies things, but that is all it comes down to. To increase AOV, you sell more expensive items, put prices up, or sell more than one item in each order.  

Client Report Page 6—PPC Summary 

Here we provide a little more detail about PPC but again, remember the audience. It’s not about showing as many numbers as possible. Here we summarize the main numbers broken by Ad Type. The percentages of spend and revenue are good ones that most clients appreciate. Here we aim to show that we are using all ad types, how hard we are working on them, which ones are delivering, and which ad types should be ashamed of themselves. 

Client Report Page 7—Product Summary 

Finally, we show a brief breakdown of the products, including Total Revenue, Total Advertising Revenue, and what percentage each product makes up of the total. We have very detailed reports for internal use, but this is usually sufficient for most client reports unless the client wants to get into the details. 

Automation of Reports 

Many good reporting tools are available, but they often cost, and customization can be limited. We use Google Data Studio, a great tool for taking the data you download from Amazon into Google Sheets and creating great-looking reports. The only downside is that it has to be Google Sheets, and I prefer Excel. There is a Microsoft alternative (Powerbi.microsoft.com) which we may investigate.  

The setup work is quite high, but the long-term benefits are significant.   

Source Reports 

All the data we use comes from the seven reports from Amazon: 

• The business sales report – for gross sales, units, orders, and unit session percentage 

• Sponsored Products – Advertised sales report – to get all SP ads sales from the products that were advertised 

• SP – Purchased sales report – for Halo sales (I wrote an article about Halo sales previously as to why you need to look at purchased sales reports) 

• Sponsored Brands – Campaign report for sales and orders from this ad type (hopefully soon there will be advertised and purchased sales report for this ad type) 

• SB Video – Campaign report for sales and orders from this ad type  

• Sponsored Display – Advertised sales report – to get all SD ads sales from the products that were advertised 

• SD – Purchased sales report – for SD Halo sales  

Google Sheet

You download the reports to a Google Sheet, and then the one-off time-consuming bit is required to create the report input. Most PPC specialists have a good knowledge of spreadsheets as we spend more time with our heads in a spreadsheet than we do anything else. I do not have the space here to explain how to create the reports. But we have one output worksheet and then seven input worksheets.  

Each month, we then download the seven reports, append them to the input worksheets with the correct month that they belong to, and the output worksheet automatically gets updated with the latest data.  

Data Studio 

Data Studio uses ‘Data Sources’ to define the input format and type. You define the data format in the Data Studio (currency, dates, numbers, text, etc.). This again only has to be done once. 

Finally, you create the report output screens, as I have shown above using the data sources input fields, and you have a nicely formatted report with great-looking charts and graphs. 

Monthly Report 

Once you have the spreadsheet and the data source set up and you’ve created the client report, you are all set to go. It’s quite a bit of work, but only a one-off process. We have a template that we copy from if we have a new client. 

Each month, creating a monthly client report takes 5 minutes. Download the seven reports, cut and paste the data into the Google Sheet and then update the date range in the upper right corner in the report, and you are done. 

The report takes 5-10 minutes to create each month, which is seven report downloads and then a cut and paste into the Google Sheet. The Data Studio updates itself once it has new data.  

The power of the Data Studio is: 

• You can give clients direct access to the report  

• Also, you can create PDF copies of the report to email 

• You or the client can change the dates on the report at any time and get the data for that date range (providing the data is physically in the underlying Google Sheet) 

• All of the monthly client reports (once the hard work of setup has been done) can be outsourced to a VA or any team member to create 

• It’s free! 

Other Methods of Client Reporting 

The world of data reporting is well established. Many tools have ‘integrations’ to Google Ads, Google Analytics, Shopify, and other marketplaces and advertising platforms. They can automatically import the data directly, and they have pre-defined report templates you can use. Just type Amazon report integrations, and you’ll see a good selection of them. 

Several of these now have Amazon integrations, although if you plan to go this route, do check that the integration is for Advertising and not just MWS data. There is, of course, a cost to these tools. So you need to factor in the costs into your business overheads.       

Conclusion

I hope you have made it this far in the article. Reporting is not the most exciting subject, but a good client report can show what a great job you’re doing. It can add value to the client by clearly explaining your great PPC work’s impact on their business.   

About the author

Mark Greening is the Founder of Orange Rocket, a PPC agency helping brands maximize their advertising on and off Amazon. He has many years of experience in the Amazon marketplace, having scaled and sold a brand himself and working with many leading brands to scale their advertising with Orange Rocket. Mark is also the Co-founder of Profitizer.app, a software tool helping eCommerce sellers better understand their profit and loss across multiple platforms and marketplaces.