If you are currently spending money on Adwords campaigns, chances are you are also spending a lot of time analyzing your KPIs to improve your spending efficiencies. While there are a number of third party tools that can automate your Adwords reporting, if you’re like most marketing analysts and managers, you usually export your Adwords data into a spreadsheet, sort through the data, and ultimately customize that data to build your own reports. In this article, we cover some of the ways marketers and advertisers are automating Adwords reports by using either with a third party tool or building their own spreadsheet templates so that their Adwords reports are always up-to-date. For additional value, we’ll also explain how to have your Adwords campaign spreadsheet report trigger intelligent reactions whenever one of your key performance indicators (KPIs) changes.

If you are already familiar with your KPIs and just want to get started with our Google Analytics and Adwords automated spreadsheet report template, you can get it from the button below:

Spreadsheet Template Marketplace

Current Adwords tools to manage your campaigns

First things first, AdWords is a great tool but it does require constant analysis and maintenance so that your scripts and rules continue to build revenue for you. This means that ideally, you should be checking it every day (and night) a campaign is running, even on weekends. If there was a tool out there that could know your individual campaign goals and give you an automatic Adwords campaign reporting solution, you would hold on to it with your life.

From my experience, the majority of the tools in today’s market provide great graphics and imagery while they rearrange sections already found within Adwords platform by using filters in order to provide their customers with perceived value so that customers will continue to pay their monthly fees. The problem with these tools is that they don’t typically address your own business and your goals. Consequently, users will try them and end up going back to spreadsheets like the one you see below

This brings me to my next point:

There is no one size fits all. Adwords success will depend on your business and its goals

Are you using Adwords for brand awareness, leads, inbound sales, conversions, AB testing? If so, have you set up your own funnels to track that reporting? Are you comparing Adwords campaigns with Bing Ads? Thinking about this and setting your Adwords to report on your goals is critical to your success.

Once you have decided your purpose/goals for your campaigns, how are you tracking it? If you’re like the thousands of marketers we speak to on a daily basis, you will most likely start use spreadsheet reports to track your results on a daily/weekly/monthly basis because third party tools are too limiting with what the programmer envisioned you would need.

How to Automate Adwords Reports –

Here are some of the well known tools that you could use to automate your reports:

• Google Adwords Scripts (difficulty; medium)- Google provides a way for you to automate your Adwords reporting using scripts (https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/). Unfortunately, they require familiarity with JavaScript, meaning, a lot of marketers would need to talk to a programmer or will face a difficult challenge to integrate these features. This has been the case with thousands of marketers that rely on spreadsheets to get their reports.
• Other third party reporting tools (difficulty; easy to hard)– I grouped these together because they simply provide a new way to view your data but it’s ultimately replicating Adwords functionality. The problem with these platforms is that customization is difficult, campaign reactions are either limited or non-existent, and most of the time, users end up spending money to try them and reverting to spreadsheets for their reports.
  1. Megalytic
  2. Raventools
  3. BIME Analytics
  4. NextAnalytics
  5. SunnyReports
• Every other dashboard solution that is hooked into Google AdWords

If you have already tried some of these, or don’t want to go through the pain and cost of learning about another tool, Factivate does allow you to automate your Adwords reporting within a few clicks in order to end up with a spreadsheet that is always up to date (like the one below).

How to Automate Adwords Rules –

Think about the number of times you will have to go to the Adwords campaign page to look at your remaining budget, learn about your bounce rates, CPC, campaign cost, conversions, and any other KPIs that might be relevant to your campaign. Now multiply it by the number of campaigns you run simultaneously. Keeping track of how you should react to any specific campaign, in real-time, should be a full time job in order to avoid any unnecessary waste in either time or money. To fix this, Google has given us the ability to create automated rules per campaign. If you’ve never done so, here’s a link to help you learn more about it (https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497710?hl=en). You more likely have a number of these rules already in place. But what happens if you want:

• Your Adwords campaign to send you an SMS when your bounce rates are high for only one campaign?
• Your Adwords campaign to email your team when your conversions exceed your goal to instruct them to increase their budget right away or miss out on momentum?
• Your individual KPIs to tell you when something is below or above a certain threshold

How to Automate Adword Campaigns Reactions inside Spreadsheets

Since most marketers or advertisers do their reports on spreadsheets, these reactions usually take place too late or never at all. It’s important to note, however, that if you had the ability to add triggers to your spreadsheets so that whenever a cell changed, the spreadsheet would inform you, you could add incredible value to your campaigns. Consequently, a split second decision to increase budget, for example, because Campaign 2 is doing better than Campaign 1, could be the difference between a successful campaign and a mediocre one. For one of our clients, the lack of triggers cost them more than $25,000 in sales alone. To fix this, we wrote an article explaining how to add these reactions to spreadsheet cells whenever a cell changes value here: “How to have your spreadsheet automatically send out an email when a cell changes”

 Is there a tool that helps me track my individual campaign goals, automating my Adwords campaigns, while giving me real-time reactions to my KPIs then?

If you are in marketing or advertising, and are seeking a way to automate your Google Analytics or Adwords spreadsheet reporting, we have provided you with a template that will let you do this with just a few clicks. To gain access to Factivate’s Google Analytics and Adwords template, as seen in the screenshots above, simply sign up for Factivate’s Beta program using the button below:

Spreadsheet Template Marketplace

About Factivate:

Factivate is a software company part of the Google for Entrepreneurs community in Durham, NC. Factivate provides business users with a cloud-based data analytics platform that can sync with different online tools to create automated, real-time spreadsheet reports and web dashboards with just-in-time business reactions. The result of our intelligent spreadsheet is accurate data analysis that drives better business decisions while reducing manual spreadsheet report time and errors by a factor of 150+ hours/employee/year. Factivate requires no learning curve or programming knowledge. In sharp contrast to the complex and expensive business intelligence tools on the market today, if you know spreadsheets, then you know 95% of what you need to use Factivate–we’ve got the rest covered.