What is a media buyer report?
A media buyer report is a document that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Ads, DSPs) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., CTR, CPC, conversions), enabling media buyers and agencies to monitor campaign and channel performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Media buyer reports are typically created using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a media buyer report?
An actionable media buyer report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive media buyer reports
Executive reports for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show media buying's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Media ROI analysis: by channel, using attribution (MMM, lift analysis, multi-touch) for large budgets (≈100k/mo).
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from media-acquired customers
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by customer cohort (sign-up period, acquisition channel)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Media buyer manager reports
Manager reports have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, funnel stage, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall campaign, product, client, or region reporting across channels
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for channel and tactic mapping
- Audience and placement research
Operational Media Buyer Reports
Operational reports for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- PPC: budget pacing, engagement, creative performance, CPA
- Programmatic: bid strategies, impression share, viewability
- Social: ad metrics, audience growth, engaging content
- Video: completion rates, view-through rates, engagement
Operational media buyer reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a media buyer report?
To build a media buyer report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are Google Ads and Meta Ads for PPC performance, DSPs for programmatic data, CRM or E-commerce for sales and conversion data, and YouTube or TikTok for video metrics.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of media buyer report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like PPC monitoring, budget pacing, funnels, and creative performance.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your media buying reporting use cases, such as PPC monitoring, budget pacing, funnels, and creative performance.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., Clicks, spend, Impressions, ROAS, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, campaign name, ad image, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your media buyer reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your media buyer reports:
Share
Share your media buyer reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a media buyer report?
Media buyer reports should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of media buying campaigns towards business goals. They include:
Media buying funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the media buyer perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, ad placements
- Engagement metrics: clicks, interactions, video plays, Sessions, average time
- Conversion metrics: custom conversions, leads, purchases, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your media outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: CPM (Cost per Mille)
- Engagement: CPC (Cost per Click)
- Conversion: CPA (Cost per Acquisition), CPP (Cost per Purchase)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Visibility: Frequency
- Engagement: CTR, engagement rate
- Conversion: Conversion rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your media buying performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: ad spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these media buying KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: paid, social, Facebook Ads vs Google Ads
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: funnel stage, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword
