You’re finalizing a monthly PPC report, excited to show improvements you’ve seen in the account. You highlight an A/B test that yielded an improvement in CPA, along with a new Meta campaign that is driving marketing qualified leads.

Yet when you present the report to leadership, you still get questions like, “How are these actions helping us grow revenue?”

Knowing your audience is a fundamental principle of marketing, and it applies equally so when creating marketing reports. A report geared to a marketing director who is more in the weeds of individual campaigns will look different from a report geared to a C-level executive.

When creating a report that will be viewed by senior leadership, consider what they are held accountable for. A CFO may answer to shareholders or VC firms, but ultimately, their main concern is increasing revenue. If a report doesn’t clearly answer the question of profitability from an investment in PPC, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

In this article, we’ll consider the metrics your CFO actually cares about when reviewing reporting on paid media campaigns.

A Note On Tracking

Before kicking off any ad campaigns or reporting, make sure that you’ve set up proper conversion tracking on your website to measure key actions in ad and analytics platforms. If you’re not confident in your data measurement approach, you can’t trust the numbers you put in your reports.

Agree On Shared Goals

Before building your first report, you should talk to key stakeholders about what internal revenue goals are and where PPC fits as part of those. For instance, a business may have set an annual goal to grow revenue by 10% or to increase the customer base by 20%.

When considering the metrics you include and how you talk about them, think about how measurement relates to the shared business goals. For instance, you may be able to show not only that Meta had a 10% increase in conversions but that it was the largest contributing channel to the previous month’s growth goal.

It may also be helpful to include a section in your reporting where you highlight overall goals, such as a graph showing total new accounts or revenue vs. planned.

CPA, But Consider The Conversion

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is a foundational metric for PPC campaigns. However, one common question faced when presenting performance and including this measure is: “What is a conversion?”

Microconversions, such as form fills and asset downloads, can be helpful for optimization in the right instances, but particularly for higher-level executives, you need to be very clear about what you’re reporting on when sharing a cost tied to a conversion action.

Ideally, CPA in this case should be tied as closely as possible to a customer. While, particularly for long lifecycle businesses, it may not be viable to report on actual customers signed in a monthly PPC report, you may be able to report on sales qualified leads.

In turn, if you have proper CRM tracking to monitor leads through the lifecycle of initial contact to customer, you can include CPAs for customer acquisition over a longer period. For instance, if your average time to final sale is 90 days, show a view of the past 90 days, including total cost and CPAs broken down by marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, and final sales.

Further reading: Why Do Budgets Overspend Even With A Target ROAS or CPA? – Ask A PPC

Customer Acquisition Cost

This leads to a more comprehensive metric: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), which represents total sales/marketing expenses divided by the number of customers obtained in the same period.

CAC can be shown as an overall metric, as well as attributed at the channel level if your CRM has the ability to measure customers by the source they came from. You should report on trends over time, which will show both how particular mixes of campaigns and channels are performing, as well as pointing to seasonal trends.

Return On Ad Spend

ROAS may be easier to attribute in some types of accounts than others (for instance, ecommerce vs. B2B products with long sales cycles), but can help point to return on investment from PPC campaigns. If revenue values are being properly measured, ROAS can help to answer the question, “How much did we make from this campaign?”

Of course, be ready to provide context and answer questions about how ROAS is being calculated for your brand. For instance, ad platform numbers may or may not include added costs such as shipping and taxes.

As with CPA and CAC, you should report on ROAS at a blended (cross-account and cross-campaign) level, as well as more granularly, where it makes sense to call out specific efforts.

Lifetime Value

Gaining new customers is great, but what if a customer buys one cheap product and never purchases from your brand again? Or if they pay for a one-month subscription but then cancel?

Incorporating LTV into reporting allows you to see not only which channels and campaigns are driving the most customers but which are contributing to the most valuable ones.

For an ecommerce business, you may look at data for how much revenue is generated from items any one person has purchased over time. For a SaaS business, you may look at the total subscription cost over time. For an industrial equipment supplier, you may look at both how much revenue has come from product purchases and if a customer uses your business for ongoing servicing.

Incremental Growth

When testing a new channel, campaign type, or offer, a key justification for funding is proof that it can drive new revenue that would not otherwise have come from existing efforts. Showing new customer counts and revenue amounts that are incremental to your testing efforts will help in maintaining funding for the future.

Relying solely on in-platform tracking can be tricky here, as a new Google campaign may readily take credit for conversions that are also being tracked in and influenced by Meta. While ad platforms are adding their own methodologies for tracking incremental attribution, these are ultimately still siloed at the platform level.

Using a Media Mix Modeling (MMM) tool here can provide a broader view of how adding to or subtracting from your paid media portfolio is impacting revenue. You can also run incrementality tests either by isolating campaigns to specific geographies and comparing against similar regions, or by comparing two periods of time. Looking at the results at the end of the test can show if a new initiative helped to lift customer and revenue growth.

When presenting on incremental performance, be transparent about the testing methodology, but explain concepts in a way that keeps in mind your leadership team’s level of technical knowledge. Lead with results, and include more technical documentation in an appendix.

Anticipate The Why

When including the above measures that are relevant to your client or stakeholder, think proactively about what questions will come from the data. If conversions are down, you’ll likely be asked why that is the case.

You’ll build rapport with executives reviewing the report if you can be transparent about negative performance, but also be able to provide a reasonable explanation why that is the case. For instance, you might compare seasonal performance to last year at the same time and note that business generally dips. Or a technical issue with a form on the website may have interfered with the ability of prospects to contact you.

Ideally, include brief bullet points in the report addressing these potential concerns up front, and be prepared to talk through deeper explanations if asked.

Start Building Better Reports

Think through the metrics surfaced in this article, along with tactics for presenting them to your CFO and other executives. Now think through how you’ve previously been reporting and any pain points you might have had in reaching shared understanding of performance.

Build on a foundation of solid tracking to highlight the numbers that will resonate the most with the individuals accountable for the purse strings. Be open to hearing out questions you’re asked and additional data that stakeholders might request, and continue to tweak your reports to meet your stakeholders where they are.

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