What is a trafficker report?
A trafficker report is a tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., ad servers, DSPs, SSPs) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., impressions, fill rate, eCPM), enabling teams and agencies to monitor ad inventory and campaign performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Trafficker reports are typically built 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 trafficker report?
An actionable trafficker report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive trafficker reports
Executive reports for CTOs, CEOs, and clients show the bottom-line impact of ad operations. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Ad revenue analysis: by channel, using attribution for large budgets.
- Inventory analysis: fill rate, eCPM, and revenue by ad unit
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and revenue by advertiser cohort
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Trafficker manager reports
Manager reports have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, 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
- Ad placement and audience research
Operational Trafficker Reports
Operational reports for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Ad serving: budget pacing, engagement, creative performance, CPA
- Programmatic: bid metrics, win rates, engaging creatives
- Direct sales: delivery, fill rate, conversion rates
- Inventory management: ad unit performance, impressions, clicks, errors
Operational trafficker 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 trafficker report?
To build a trafficker 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 ad servers and DSPs for ad performance, SSPs for inventory data, and CRM or E-commerce for sales data.
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 trafficker report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like ad inventory monitoring, budget pacing, 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 trafficker reporting use cases, such as ad inventory monitoring, budget pacing, 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. Impressions, spend, Clicks, eCPM, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, campaign name, ad unit, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your trafficker reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your trafficker reports:
Share
Share your trafficker reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a trafficker report?
Trafficker reports should include a mix of inventory, engagement, conversion, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of ad operations towards business goals. They include:
Inventory KPIs measure the ad serving process, regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, fill rate, ad requests
- Engagement metrics: clicks, CTR, video completions
- Conversion metrics: conversions, leads, purchases
Efficiency KPIs compare your ad outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: eCPM (Effective 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 ad performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: ad spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these trafficker KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: programmatic, direct, ad server vs DSP
- 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
