What’s the first thing you do after signing a client? Most agencies kick things off with an audit.An audit often involves manually exploring your clients’ previous ad campaigns and attempting to put together some insights based on intuition. You’re looking for trends, overall return on spend — any useful insights to bring into a kickoff meeting. If you can’t automate anything, it takes hours to do.But at the same time, it’s not something you want to skip. Understanding what a company has done — and to what extent it worked, if at all — will help you demonstrate flaws in their current strategy and how you’ll fix them.But if you build this template (instructions and screenshots included below), you can audit new clients in 20 min or less. By the end, you’ll have a client-ready report you can bring to wow clients with detailed insights during onboarding. So, here are some detailed instructions for a template in ReportGarden that anyone can use to do the same.TL;DR? Skip to the sections you want below:
- Facebook Ad Performance Overview
- Monthly Performance
- Demographic Reach
- Gender Targeting
- Placement and Device Performance
- Facebook Campaign Performance
- Country Performance and Regional Performance
- Ads by ROAS
- Cover Pages
Note that this template uses Facebook Ads as an example, but you can select the data source of your choice.Want to try the social media audit template yourself? Start your 7-day ReportGarden free trial.
Facebook Ad Performance Overview
This part of the template is for a quick glance at overall performance. Clients take a look at averages and totals that summarize results obtained for money spent. You can add your logo and the client’s logo to the report, if you’d like.
To set up that report, open up a new template and then begin filling in data. Here’s what the general view looks like (note that this example is with style set to “Chic” for the performance overview). You can pick any dual color combination that suits your fancy.
Using the options on the right-hand side of the tool, make the following selections:
For the ‘Facebook Ads Account,’ select an account that has fairly average data to double check parameters as you build the template. Make sure you choose a date range that will populate the graphs, charts, and tables with data. Once it’s complete, you can use the template to generate a report for any Facebook Ads account.
Monthly Performance
The next snapshot shows month over month performance. Report Garden comes with a drag and drop menu on the left for template elements like charts, graphs, and tables.
Here’s what Month Over Month Performance looks like once it’s published in the report.
In this example, note that there is only month to display — February — because the campaign only ran for one month. For ongoing campaigns, the monthly trends are easy to see on the graph.If you want to copy this page of the template, here are the parameters you will need:
Demographic Reach
The next part of the template shows which demographics are responding to the prospect’s ads. Displaying this information helps you show prospects which age ranges are the best to target with social media ads.
Notice that the charts have fewer categories than the tables: That’s not by accident. Including all the information you want to present in the chart would make it impossible to read. Instead, choose the information you believe is most important to feature on the chart, while including additional categories in the table.In this case, you can use the options on the right-hand side to select the categories you want to display, as before. Note that under the ‘Advanced’ tab, you’ll want to have data sorted by dimension.
Gender Targeting
Another category you can include is gender targeting, i.e., which genders are responding to the content in your ads.
Here’s what it looks like for the chart (on the left) and the table (on the right):
Placement and Device Performance
In this part of the report, you can show prospects which devices are being used to consume their content so that they can adjust strategy accordingly.
For the campaign in our example, you can see that ads were viewed primarily by people on a smartphone.Using the advanced tab, you can choose the number of rows shown based on which device types have significant data. If you only have four device types that have any noteworthy results, there’s no reason to show data for ten different device types. Other settings are selected as noted previously.For the table, you can use the advanced tab to sort results by whichever data point is most relevant. In this case, we sorted by spend and segmented by impression device. Toggling “Total Row” off will make the table more readable.
Facebook Campaign Performance
If you want to break down performance by campaign, you can include that as well. If a company has been running multiple campaigns (not uncommon), it will help you answer the question of which campaigns did better and why.
You can use the advanced tab to sort data by metrics like Purchase Conversion Value or Spend.
Country Performance and Regional Performance
Geographical data can be broken down by state, as well as by country if relevant. Here’s what it looks like if you break down performance by country.
If your client runs campaigns internationally, this graphic is an excellent way to break down a category like spend, ROAS, or purchases in a visual way. Here’s what the settings look like for the map — the table is formatted as before.
For the Regional Performance report, which areas you choose depends on where your client was running ads. The example below includes a mix of states in the U.S., plus a few international locations. It’s not easy to view on a map unless they’re close together, so this information is presented in a chart and table.
Here’s what the settings looked like for the chart:
And here’s a look at some selections for pulling together the table, which can be sorted by your metric of choice.
Ads by ROAS
This section is a client favorite. Here, you can break down performance ad by ad. Clients are able to see the text and image (or video) used along with how it performed. Many times, prospects and clients alike are surprised by which ads are performing better than others. Seeing it laid out in this format makes it easier for them to understand what’s happening and what they need to do next.
The most important thing to do here is to set your dimension to ‘Ads’ so that they will display properly.
You can play with the “Measure” and “Ad Format” selections until you find something that works best for your clientele.
Choosing a Cover Page
There are a number of premade graphics you can use for a clean, modern appearance for the report’s cover page.
A Note on Campaigns & Filtering
While this article is primarily designed to help you pull together a comprehensive social media audit template, you can use the design for reporting on any social media campaign.ReportGarden comes with the option of including any cross-section of information relevant for your client. You can include all campaigns, one campaign, specific ad sets, or another preferred group.
To set your preferences, use the ‘filter’ button on the advanced settings tab. Next, filter data by campaign (scroll to select which campaign(s) you want to include or exclude), or use ‘campaign name’ to type in a keyword and grab any ads with that keyword included in the campaign name. This feature is especially popular when agencies look back at holiday campaigns such as Christmas promotions and Black Friday deals.
Final Thoughts
If you provide detailed analytics and metrics to your clients, this template will help you capture that information in an easily digestible manner. The ability to share clean, understandable data in a professional fashion is just one part of an overarching strategy that will help you win high-impact clients on a regular basis.And remember: you don’t just have to use this for auditing new clients. You can keep returning it to it again and again after you’ve taken over their campaigns. And once you’ve made the template, you can use it for any client. Reporting couldn’t be easier than that.Want to try the social media audit template yourself? Start your 7-day ReportGarden free trial.
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