How Client Success Teams Can Strengthen Customer Relationships with a Shape ADI
Many digital advertising agencies employ both PPC advertisers and client success teams to provide exceptional marketing services to their customers. PPC advertisers handle the daily ins-and-outs of PPC including campaign management, strategy development, reporting, and more. While a PPC advertiser may speak with the client about campaigns regularly, the client success team member is typically responsible for handling the higher-level customer relationship including more frequent contacts.
Together these teams work to ensure that the client understands how their advertising campaigns are performing and how PPC fits into their larger marketing mix, along with ensuring overall client satisfaction. It’s essential these two teams work together to present a unified picture of how the client’s marketing initiatives are doing. If the PPC advertiser and client success manager are telling two different stories based on two different interpretations of PPC data, this can lead to client mistrust and confusion.
Creating client-facing PPC reports that are shared between the PPC team, the client success team, and the client is just one way to improve overall client retention and happiness. Shape Advertising Data Infrastucture (ADI) makes creating informative client-facing dashboards easy. Each client’s current and historical cross-channel spend is aggregated, stored, and made accessible via tools such as Google Data Studio, Google Sheets, and many other popular BI and client reporting tools. Since data is refreshed daily, PPC teams and client success teams can eliminate the time they used to spend manually aggregating reports and get back to focusing on the client and their performance.
What is an Advertising Data Infrastructure (ADI)?
The Shape ADI automatically unifies all of a company’s PPC advertising data in one place. Shape’s one-stop Advertising Data Infrastructure aggregates PPC data across all major ad networks via a two-way API. Spend and performance metrics are stored in a fully-managed warehouse and data can be easily pushed to other third-party tools via public connectors.
Within hours of activating a Shape ADI (which takes 7 steps and less than 15 minutes), your company has access to historical and current PPC data across seven ad networks. Data is typically backfilled for 30 days, although it can be backfilled further depending on your PPC and client success teams’ needs and processes.
Implementing a Shape ADI makes keeping clients up to date on their PPC campaign performance simple and automatic.
How Does ADI Reduce Workload for Client Success Teams?
1. Eliminates Recurring Manual Reporting
When companies hire agencies, they trust that their marketing and advertising dollars are being allocated as strategically and intelligently as possible. But, that doesn’t mean they trust blindly. Client success and digital advertising teams work together at regular intervals to assemble reporting that highlights how PPC campaigns are performing, how those campaigns are doing compared to other channels, and if there are any new channels/strategies the client should try. Client-facing reports may include: a single KPI spreadsheet, a complex manual slide deck, or an automated cross-channel dashboard. Unfortunately, when agency teams manually assemble and analyze data for client performance reports, it leaves room for human data entry errors or conflicting analyses. It’s also incredibly time consuming when scaled across tens to hundreds of clients.
When it comes to campaign reporting, the Shape ADI makes aggregating, analyzing, and sending PPC reports to clients simple. PPC data from seven ad networks can be sent to Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, or other third-party reporting and business intelligence tools in seconds. Once an agency has templatized their PPC performance reports and linked their live client data from the ADI, sending reports out to clients is as simple as sharing a link once. Since PPC data is automatically refreshed daily, every time a client opens up their Data Studio report template (for example), the data will be updated. Solutions such as Data Studio even allow reports to be embedded which means you can build out slide decks to refresh automatically with PPC data.
2. Makes Ad Hoc Analyses Fast
Along with recurring reporting, which typically occurs monthly or quarterly, clients may often ask one-off questions about their PPC performance. These questions or concerns are often best solved by ad hoc analyses. This enables the client’s digital advertising and client success team members to address the question fast (rather than speaking to it in the next cycle’s report). Unfortunately, since clients rarely have the same questions, ad hoc analyses cannot be templatized. And, when a client’s question requires cross-platform data aggregation or complex analysis (or you have multiple clients asking questions all at once) this type of reporting becomes overwhelming and impossible to scale.
One of the key benefits of the Shape ADI is that all of your cross-platform data is aggregated and stored in a dedicated BigQuery PPC Data Warehouse. Client success or PPC team members who know SQL can write queries in BigQuery to generate ad hoc analyses across multiple ad networks in seconds. Since most clients don’t typically appreciate a .csv data dump, after you’ve run an analysis, BigQuery can push the data from your query into Google Data Studio or Sheets with a few simple clicks.
3. Combine PPC Data into Reporting Solutions to Tell Unified Marketing Stories
Many agencies run PPC campaigns along with other services for their clients. These services may include search engine optimization, email marketing, content marketing, social media management, and more. When companies are running integrated marketing strategies across multiple channels, it’s useful for the client to understand what impact channels are having on each other's metrics. For example, a new customer may start by making an organic website click, followed by a remarketing campaign click, an email newsletter sign up, and finally make a purchase after a click on a search ad. The client and the agency be more deliberate planning strategies when they are able to connect advertising and marketing data together to understand the customers’ full marketing journeys.
Along with a fully-managed data warehouse and connectors to popular reporting and BI tools, the Shape ADI also offers a two-way, cross-channel API. Instead of building costly integrations with each PPC ad network, engineering teams can integrate a single PPC API (with seven ad networks worth of data) into an agency dashboard solution or customer relationship management software. Thus far, a popular use case for the Shape ADI is using the API to import PPC data into other attribution or agency analytics software. This allows agencies to connect and view the impact of PPC campaigns’ on the client’s greater marketing strategy.
Improve Your Client Success Team’s Reporting Workflows with Shape’s ADI
Have all your company’s PPC data at your fingertips with Shape’s Advertising Data Infrastructure. Give your teams access to robust cross-channel PPC data, a two-way API, and a powerful data warehouse.
Not sold yet? We’ve made campaign-level warehousing and API access free. See the Shape ADI in action today with your company’s live data when you spin up one of our free client-facing performance reports.
Interested to learn more about what companies like yours have already built with a Shape ADI? Don’t hesitate to schedule a free consultation with our team today before diving in.