What does the typical workday look like for a PPC specialist? It’s filled with important tasks:
- Setting up and managing PPC campaigns
- Digging out from an avalanche of email
- Monitoring campaign performance
- Analyzing and reporting on campaign results
- Creating content for future campaigns
- Self-education — reading blogs, listening to podcasts, taking courses
Five of these six tasks can be automated or optimized with technologies, changing the way PPC specialists work. In particular, reporting is one of the most time-consuming tasks for PPC specialists and is a poor use of their time and talent.
Today, we’re going to look at all the reasons you should start automating your PPC reporting.
Why a PPC specialist shouldn’t build reports manually
The cost of human mistakes is too high for any company
No manual report can be saved from the risk of human error. Manual reporting isn’t that bad if you work with three or four campaigns in a few ad services. It’s definitely hard when you set up your first report. But with each iteration, you get the deceitful feeling that reporting is easy. That is, until your campaigns begin to grow exponentially or a new currency appears in your calculations.
A human mistake in a report for a small campaign may lead to a poor decision for the next campaign, which may lead to an insignificant budget drain or other expenses. But what if such a mistake happens in reports for 1,000 campaigns with monumental budgets?
One mistake in an analytics report cancels out all your data quality. Also, business and marketing decisions based on such reports will lead to lost revenue, additional costs, or even reputational damage and fines.
Automating reports eliminates the potential for human error and guarantees predictability.
The cost of manual work is rising
The salaries of marketing specialists aren’t decreasing. Every manager knows that a PPC specialist is responsible for generating leads. That’s the main function they’re paid for. Every routine and repetitive task that’s not connected with this function should be simplified and minimized in terms of time spent to bring more profit for the company.
For example, say a РРС specialist manually creates a report on ad campaign costs each week. This process takes around six hours, so it costs $300 a week, or $1200 a month. Wouldn’t it be great to save this time and spend it digging deeper into profitable tasks and running new PPC experiments?
Automating reports is a great way to create time for PPC specialists to do things that directly affect the company’s bottom line.
Motivational issues
Now we arrive at the question of motivation. The main (and the most profitable) part of a PPC specialist’s work is connected with campaigns and lead generation. Every PPC marketer understands that they’re paid for the leads and revenue they bring in, not for the reports they make.
And if you ask PPC specialists in large or medium-sized companies whether manual reporting is stressful, they’ll likely answer yes.
If you want to keep your PPC specialists motivated and alleviate some stress, simplify and decrease the number of meaningless tasks. Give your specialists some fresh air and possibilities to learn, experiment, and try out new tools. As a result, you’ll get happy, inspired, and organized coworkers who are more efficient and productive.
Automating reports will save nerves and time that your PPC specialists would otherwise waste on manual reporting.
Automating routine tasks is common practice
The market demands that companies react quickly to technological innovations and new approaches. It weeds out businesses that think over changes for too long.
Automation came to marketing and analytics at least 10 years ago, and now it’s in full bloom. Augmented analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, and robotization are finding their way into every marketing task. It’s high time for companies to take the first step with reporting automation.
Choose the best report automation tool for your PPC specialists and other marketers. It will bring only positive changes to your workflow.
About the author, Margaret Kashuba: Margaret has a decade of experience in digital marketing, rising from a promoter to the marketing director of OWOX BI.
She’s an expert in marketing strategy, marketing analytics, and team building (including remote teams), and believes that the future lies in data-driven marketing.