How an Ad Agency Increased Its Client Base by 300% using ReportGarden

PPC Pundit is a Digital Marketing Agency that specializes in providing PPC services to an impressive client list, across domains like health, education, real estate and finance. With an experienced team of account managers, this agency delivers results with amazing consistency. PPC Pundit majorly depended on standalone platforms and excel sheets to run each aspect of its marketing activities. However, the lack of automation made it difficult to scale their operations and they finally turned to ReportGarden’s Agency Management Platform to fuel their growth ambitions.

“ Vasu Paidi is the founder of PPCPundit, a specialised online marketing agency in Hyderabad. He is an expert in internet marketing, web analytics and credited for driving millions of visitors to various web properties. Vasu has an experience of managing more than USD10M online marketing budget. He holds a masters degree in Economics from BITS-Pilani. While away from work, movies & fitness communities keeps him busy. He is 2012 Fellow in the Startup Leadership Program Hyderabad chapter.“

Vasu, founder of PPC Pundit, strongly believes that personalized client communication and data transparency needs to be at the core of an Ad Agency. On the downside, manual reporting and frequent data requests from clients, left his account managers with virtually no bandwidth. The digital marketing space was also getting increasingly competitive and Vasu had to find a way to scale his operations without compromising on personalization.

PPC Pundit finally chose ReportGarden to help them automate their workflow, optimize core deliverables and ultimately help them scale their operations. Since partnering with ReportGarden an year ago, PPC Pundit has not only saved thousands of man hours but also tripled its number of business clients.

“Most importantly, serving small businesses became hassle free. SMB management usually takes a lot of time but do not generate as much revenue per time spent. With automation tools like ReportGarden, the SMB account management can be preconfigured by scheduling daily/weekly/monthly reports using custom templates.”, says Vasu.

Tackling the issues of scalability and automation.

Vasu founded PPC Pundit in 2012 after he spotted an opportunity to provide digital marketing services to the booming offline businesses in India. As a seasoned marketer, he knew that customization and good client service could be a game changer in this sector. He believed that transparency is the key to trust building in India and regularly engaged his clients with insightful reports, trying to understand their businesses better to deliver more sales and revenue.

Vasu’s intuition was spot on. Regular reporting and client interaction worked wonderfully well.  PPC Pundit quickly grew into a team of efficient account managers and was fast acquiring clients. In the beginning, Vasu and his team monitored all the accounts regularly, providing their clients with insightful business insights. This approach worked well in the early days of the company, at a very small scale. But, quickly, demand outgrew their team and manual workflow was severely restricting their scale of operations.

While his clients enjoyed the personalized services , the company’s account managers weren’t so lucky. The company relied heavily on excel sheets to monitor, manage and report account performance, creating inconsistencies in available data and eating away hours of their valuable time. Ultimately taking focus away from their core value proposition.

“It was clear that we needed a scalable automation solution that was both easy to manage and at the same time helped us maintain the customization.”, says Vasu. In addition, they also needed a tool that would enable them to monitor hundreds of accounts across various channels, in order to prioritize their work.

“ReportGarden seemed much easier to use and I felt assured that its features were developed specifically to suit the workflow of an ad agency. Their reporting tool was also a big plus , much better than any other reporting tools I’ve tried.”

          Vasu
        CEO, PPC Pundit

Vasu realized that more than just an automation solution, PPC Pundit needed a complete management solution that was custom built for ad agencies. A platform that was fine tuned to facilitate the workflow of an ad agency. What they we doing with campaign optimization, and reporting was exceptional and he wanted to leverage its potential. He explains, “No-one else offered this level of customization, this data, this quality. I knew that if we engaged the right management platform, we could scale our business really fast.”

He evaluated other products, including Raven Tools, before he decided on the ReportGarden Agency Management Platform.“Software like Raven Tools work fine on their own, but we needed a more unified approach that would allow our team to monitor and manage campaigns from start to finish. A platform that really understands my workflow.”

The ReportGarden Agency Management Platform was a perfect fit for PPC Pundit.

A case for an Agency Management Tool.

PPC Pundit began implementing the ReportGarden Agency Management Platform in June  2014. To begin with, Vasu and his team at PPC Pundit started with the Report Automation Tool provided by ReportGarden. Vasu says, “Client Reporting is the biggest drain on our resources! We understand that this is the most crucial client communication after onboarding but compiling numbers from different platforms to present the right insights, keeps my account managers busy for almost a week/month!”

ReportGarden provides standard reporting templates which can be easily modified to create customized reports for clients. The ‘Drag and drop’ editor makes customization simple and quick. The platform being pretty easy and intuitive, the PPC Pundit team started generating reports almost instantly. Then, with the click of a button, PPC Pundit put an end to manual reporting once and for all. With the ‘Schedule Reports’ feature, based on the customized template, ‘White labelled Reports’ will be generated and mailed automatically to all the clients.

“If only I knew that report automation could be so simple, I would have adopted it long back! Why was I even waiting for all these years!”, says Vasu.

With reporting in autopilot mode, PPC Pundit could now focus on their Core Value Proposition,  which is, optimizing campaigns and providing valuable business insights to clients. Activities which add real value to their business. This ability to auto-generate and schedule unlimited reports, provides the team with the scale of operations, they’ve always wanted.

“The first thing I want my account managers to do every morning is, check out the dashboard and identify what’s working and what needs to be improved. This way, the data decides the work priorities. Negative trends, however small are identified and corrected immediately.”

          Vasu
        CEO, PPC Pundit

“Two things. One, this freed our resources, so we could now cater to more clients. Two, we could now add more value to our clients, provide them better services.”, says Vasu.

After achieving good results with report automation, the next step for PPC Pundit was to leverage the ‘Client Portal’ feature of ReportGarden to completely cut down the time spent on client data requests. This feature enables clients to access customized dashboards with live campaign data.

As Vasu explains, “One of our clients runs a dating portal and needs to be sent data multiple times a day, this is again a drain on our resources. A White Labelled Client Portal with a custom domain, providing live campaign data in the form of customizable dashboard is something I’ve always wanted. This feature not only saves me time but also builds enormous trust with the clients. “

Further, Vasu introduced the ‘Account Health’ tool to his team, struggling with excel sheets to keep track of the various account performance metrics. This amazing tool from ReportGarden helps account managers monitor all the accounts simultaneously, on a single dashboard. Apart from presenting live performance data, this tool also highlights and alerts the account managers about the accounts and metrics that needs their attention. Vasu and his team could now strategize, deploy, and evaluate marketing campaigns from a single dashboard. “This is exactly what Account Managers ought to do, engage with live data and optimize campaigns rather than waste time on excel reporting!”, he explains.

Vasu says, “The first thing I want my account managers to do every morning is, check out the dashboard and identify what’s working and what needs to be improved. This way, the data decides the work priorities. Negative trends, however small are identified and corrected immediately.”

ReportGarden’s Automation, Monitoring, Reporting and White Labeling tools have helped Vasu automate the workflow of his agency and achieve great results in the process. As they cut down on manual activities, their capability to service new clients increased. Vasu notes, “We’ve been watching the graphs go up to the right. That gives me the reassurance that the activity we’ve been doing is cumulative, it builds on its own. The morale of my team is now at an all time high!”

Today, with the introduction of CRM functionalities in ReportGarden, PPC Pundit has migrated its entire client communication onto the platform. Now every interaction with the client or a prospective client is informed by ReportGarden’s CRM.

Strong results and a promising future.

PPC Pundit’s marketing effort is now better organized and streamlined. Vasu says, “All the activities related to campaign management, monitoring, reporting and communication are now driven through the ReportGarden Agency Management Platform. It just makes the operations so much easier and you can see the effect of what you are doing at every stage.”

The results that the company has achieved are certainly impressive. It has tripled its number of clients since partnering with ReportGarden and its visibility in the marketplace has increased dramatically. PPC Pundit has successfully automated it’s reporting activity, cutting down the time spent on reporting to zero (from 40 hours/week). The number of client requests for campaign performance data has come by 80%. Regular and consistent reporting has lead to increase in customer trust and consequently Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).  All of this was achieved without compromising on the quality of the service provided.

By the end of this financial year, PPC Pundit plans to expand into a full scale ad agency servicing international clients .This involves competing with big agencies that are generating millions in revenue, so naturally it has set itself ambitious targets for growth. As it expands, the automation and workflow management capabilities of the ReportGarden will be key to the company’s expansion plans.

“My team was a bit sceptical when I chose ReportGarden over older players like Raven Tools.  More than tools, what I needed was a Comprehensive Management Platform designed specifically for Ad Agencies. I had a very strong intuition that this would work.”

          Vasu
        CEO, PPC Pundit

Today, he is happy that his decision paid off. By partnering with ReportGarden, PPC Pundit has met all its expansion targets without significantly expanding its manpower. The company is now making the most of its unique capabilities, providing valuable business insights to clients and devising better campaigns. With no more operational bottlenecks, PPC Pundit is scaling up pretty fast. Vasu concludes, “We’re really happy and as we grow, I know that we will be using ReportGarden even more. Quite simply, it’s a tailor made platform for Ad Agencies.”

PPC Pundit had an extremely successful 2014. They closed the year with several global customers including IC Markets. Now, with the support from ReportGarden and a reliable management platform , 2015 is set to be an even bigger year for them.