This is the subhead for the blog post
SEMs all know the importance of weekly reports — and we know that the nuances of performance changes and layered metrics aren’t so easily depicted. Pivot tables work, but they’re clunky; graphs look good, but they’re not always practical. Until now.
There are a number of ways to produce better-looking reports that do not sacrifice the flexibility to dig into the metrics. I have attached a completely free tool that is going to show how to create a graph that will dynamically show the values you want it to while not compromising presentation. It uses a pretty simple trick that leverages nestled vlookups to generate the desired information.
All you need to do is download this Dynamic Graph and save it as a template. Then go to AdWords and download a report with these columns. After that, just copy and paste your date in the report, and voila: you have a ready-made report that you can send out, play around with, and use to paint that pretty picture for that weekly status meeting.
Enjoy!
Folks can also try a reporting service we built called Reportly for easy, emailed trend reporting. In place of graphs, there are just simple tables of the most important conversion or revenue metric, with period-over-period changes (absolute and percentage). This is really simple reporting – just a trend snapshot, designed for users who want to just quickly glance at results first thing in the morning, before they are even at their computer. And the email body contains the data – no silliness with having to click on a link.
It’s also kind of useful to have these reports as a reference for delays in last-click-to-conversion. You can certainly use Search Funnel for this data, but you can also have real-world data to reference, which can help.
Anyone who uses Reportly (totally free, no strings, we’ll never charge you, ever), please let us know any feedback.