A paid media report is a document that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., CTR, CPC, conversions), enabling teams and agencies to monitor campaign and channel performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Paid media 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.
An actionable paid media report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive reports for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show paid media's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
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:
Operational reports for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
Operational paid media reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
To build a paid media 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:
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are Google Ads and Meta Ads for PPC performance, GA4 for web analytics, CRM or E-commerce for sales and email data, and LinkedIn Ads for B2B campaigns.
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 from dozens of paid media 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, GA4 events, 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 paid media reporting use cases, such as PPC monitoring, budget pacing, funnels, and creative performance.
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:
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
To make your paid media reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your paid media reports:
Share your paid media reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
Paid media reports should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—,efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of paid media campaigns towards business goals. They include:
Paid media funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the marketer perspective), regardless of the channel:
Efficiency KPIs compare your paid media outputs to the cost, including:
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your paid media performance:
To analyze these paid media KPIs, segment them by:
