Ad performance report: how to track your paid ads in bulk

Buying paid ads from Google Ads, Bing Ads, or social media platforms is all well and good, but those efforts — and the related expenses — have to amount to something. What’s the point of bringing your ad to a responsive audience only to lose your hard-earned clicks to a bad performing ad?

Your solution to this problem is the bulk ad performance checker, powered by Supermetrics. This simple and effective tool helps online marketing agencies track and review their paid ads to quickly identify and fix any performance issues.

This article will tell what issues a bad performing ad can cause for your clients and how you can easily fix those issues with the bulk ad performance checker tool by Turko Marketing. You will learn about what each tab of this template is for and how to work with the information provided by the template.

The value of the bulk performance ad checker for agencies and consultants

Experienced marketing managers know very well how quickly ad campaigns can go from well-performing to stale. Keeping track of every single ad is time-consuming at best — and impossible at worst. Yet, as painful as this process is, it’s a critical part of successful marketing campaign management. After all, each ad that fails to direct the audience to its intended target incurs a significant cost, both in terms of money spent and client reputation. A campaign spending money for no significant end result is definitely not a good outcome for any brand.

By automatically reviewing all your ad campaigns and sorting the ads that are performing well and the ads that aren’t, the bulk ad performance checker quickly and easily signals campaign performance issues. No need to painstakingly keep track of every single ad, no more doubt, and no more wasted clicks. Instead, you get all the data you need in an instant so you can spend your valuable time and energy on fixing the problems rather than finding them.

The best part? This tool is based on Google Sheets and is powered by Supermetrics. There’s no need to install a special program or learn a brand new UI. The tool is a pleasure to work with, and you can collaborate in a Google spreadsheet report with several teammates at the same time.

Understanding how well your budgets are spent (the “by platform” tab)

This overview tab gives you a quick preview of all your problematic ads sorted by color and the advertising platform (Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads). This helps you quickly identify the type of issues your ad campaigns are facing, so you can focus your attention where it’s needed. 

The bulk ad performance checker gets all the ad data from your campaigns for your different accounts. You’ll find a breakdown of performance per metrics on all tabs, including the overview tab. This lets you know where the issues are mostly minor and where they’re more severe. Not all ad campaigns are born equal.

How it works

The tool basically calculates the cost of all the ads within the date range (default: last 30 days) that had at least 1 impression, divided by the total cost for that same period. Each ad impression that has a quality score of 10-7 can be considered “good”, 6-5 can be considered “average” and 0-4 can be considered “poor”.

How to use it

If we look at the screenshot above, we can say for example that 38.3% of my total budget on Facebook (all accounts combined) has been spent on “underperforming ads” (ads that are marked as “below average”). The overview tab contains general data only. By looking at the other tabs we can then pinpoint which account and which ad are driving these results.

Once you’re ready to see more detailed information, check out the “by account” tab.

A granular look per account (the “by account” tab)

The account tab sorts ad performance by campaign. This, again, helps you focus your attention on the most critical matters. It’s also useful to keep a record of which clients are most prone to issues of URL breakage, and which error types affect them the most. For instance, if one of your accounts is regularly subject to poorly performing ads, it might be worth contacting your client in order to review the strategy or test new creatives.

How it works

Same as on the overview tab, we calculate the cost of all the ads within the date range (default: last 30 days) that had at least 1 impression, divided by the total cost for that same period for each paid media account. Each ad impression that has a quality score of 10-7 can be considered “good”, 6-5 can be considered “average” and 0-4 can be considered “poor”. 

How to use it

If we look at the screenshot above, we can say for example that 64% of my total budget on Google for the second account has been spent on “underperforming ads” (ads that are marked as “below average”). This will allow us to narrow down the issue for this specific account later on.

Once you’re ready to see more detailed information, check out the “by campaign” tab.

Identifying each underperforming ad (the “by campaign” tab)

The bread and butter of the bulk ad performance checker is the “by campaign” tab, which lists every single metric on its own line. This is where you’ll find exactly how well each ad is performing and why. This highly precise view is best used to find and fix poorly performing ad campaigns.

This tab is split into three sections, one for each of the ad platforms the tool covers Google Ads (columns A to O), Bing Ads (columns Q to AC) and Facebook Ads (columns AE to AQ). Each section contains platform-specific metrics that help provide insight into how each campaign is performing. This way, you’ll always see the information you need to easily navigate through all your campaigns on the ad networks themselves. Whatever the source of the problem is, you can quickly see it and then fix it on your end, if possible.

How it works

Same as on the “by platform” and the “by account” tab, we calculate the cost of all the ads within the date range (default: last 30 days) that had at least 1 impression, ordered by COST DESC. Each ad impression that has a quality score of 10-7 can be considered “good”, 6-5 can be considered “average” and 0-4 can be considered “poor”.

How to use it

With the use of Google Sheet filters, you can narrow down to the problematic ads by clicking on the “by campaign” tab and by following these steps:

1. Scroll horizontally until you see the stats for the media platform:
   • Google Ads (columns A to O)
   • Bing Ads (columns Q to AC) 
   • Facebook Ads (columns AE to AQ)
2. Click on the “filter arrow“ next to the “account” column and select the problematic account (from tab “by account”). Click “OK”
   
3. You should now have all ads for this specific account. Now select the “quality score” column (identified with the yellow text), and select only the scores below 5.
   

The colored columns (numbered 0-10) next to the “quality score” column (also numbered 0-10) are there to tell you why the quality score is bad. Facebook, for example, gives us information about the “engagement score” as well as the “conversion score”. This information gives a good hint on why the score is low and indicates what should be corrected moving forward. 

In conclusion

An ad campaign is successful when the audience sees what your client has to show and engages with it. Clicks are already hard enough to get. When your ads fail to perform, it stings. That’s why online marketing managers and agencies have to keep an eye on ad campaign performance, but this process eats up valuable time.

In this guide, we learned why the bulk ad performance checker is a valuable tool for ad agencies and marketing consultants. We explored how to use the overview tab to quickly identify issues, the account tab to better keep track of each customer’s problems, and the campaign tab to identify and fix individual problems.

Armed with this new knowledge, you’re now ready to make your ad campaigns more efficient. Forget the days of impressions lost on the cusp of success. You’ve bought targeted ads already — now, you can make sure they reach their audience. 

How to get this template

Getting the bulk ad performance checker template and using it with Supermetrics is very easy. Follow the steps below to get started:

1. Install the Supermetrics add-on for Google Sheets (skip this if you’ve installed the add-on);
2. Launch the Supermetrics sidebar (Add-ons menu → Supermetrics → Launch sidebar);
3. Go to Add-ons menu → Supermetrics → Template gallery;
4. Find the template and click on “add template”

After you get your copy of the template with your data pulled into the spreadsheet with Supermetrics, open the “Read me” tab to proceed with further instructions.

About the author

Remi Turcotte is an online marketing entrepreneur and the owner of Turko Marketing, a digital marketing agency based in Montreal that fuels the online growth of SMBs, agencies, and corporations alike. He takes pride in improving brands in just a few months’ time through proven practices and innovative use of tools. Find this Supermetrics guest writer on LinkedIn.