Closed-Loop Reporting: What are its Benefits?

Nowadays, online marketing is an integral part of a business growth strategy, and one of the most reliable ways of demonstrating the work’s value of online marketing is through closed-loop reporting. Speaking of closed-loop reporting, it’s a strategy that helps showcase the value of your work to organizations, clients, and even direct bosses. The ultimate goal is to boost your marketing.

But what is closed-loop reporting, and how can it help you to advance your business? Well, here’s what you need to know.

What is closed-loop reporting?

Closed-loop reporting involves the organization and presentation of data to showcase how paid marketing aids in the growth of a business. As a marketer, closed-loop reporting helps you gain access, and connect discrete data sources like conversion data and multiple ad networks. This way, you would easily draw meaningful insight, and take action.

With closed-loop reporting, you can easily challenge the traditional method of monitoring the effectiveness of paid marketing like the lead or traffic volume. In the long run, you get to dive deep into questions bordering deeper-funnel metrics like

• What ROI is generated from X ad campaign/network?
• How many pipeline/new customers were generated from it?
• How do you know what worked and what did not?

With this approach, there would be transparency when it comes to measuring the return on advertising spend. This way, everyone on the team gets to know how ad dollar translates to business growth. Furthermore, you get to replace vanity metrics with meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like customer lifetime value or revenue.

Marketers using closed-loop reporting can easily pinpoint the best-performing channels, networks, and ads. And if there is an increase in the budget, it would be justified using measurable results that boost the bottom line.

“What’s the value of closed-loop reporting?” is one of the most frequently asked questions out there. In the next section, you’d discover the value of closed-loop reporting.

What’s the value of closed-loop reporting?

If you’re like most people, you’ve probably wondered what the value of closed-loop reporting is. Well, closed-loop reporting is arguably the most powerful tool for marketers. With the tool, marketers get to report and focus on both top-of-the-funnel lead generation and their role in the generation of the business pipeline.

What are the Benefits of Closed-Loop Reporting?

Speaking of the benefits of closed-loop reporting, one of the things that come to mind is that closed-loop reporting helps show how ad dollars translate into business value — and that’s what is expected from paid marketers. As a marketer, closed-loop reporting is one of the most reliable ways of measuring your impact. If you’re still in doubt, here are 7 reasons why closed-loop reporting is the best fit for your PPC team.

1. It helps in deciphering the best-performing campaigns and networks. Before diving into campaign optimization, it would be best to pinpoint the most cost-effective advertising campaigns and networks. This way, you would focus your budget and time on what’s working.
2. It helps in tracking customer journey metrics from the beginning up to the point of purchase. With closed-loop reporting, marketers can pretty much track things like clicks, purchases, and lead quality. It helps track metrics that have direct ties to the business revenue.
3. It gives a bird’s-eye view of the marketing spend. This way, you get to lower your cost per acquisition. If you don’t have a good understanding of what the data presented in the report is, then such a report is pretty much useless. However, such a situation can be eliminated using closed-loop reporting. With closed-loop reporting, your marketing data is presented in an easy-to-understand, logical way. Furthermore, there is a high-level detail so you can easily optimize your cost per customer acquisition across various channels.
4. It helps in the effective allocation of the marketing budget. Your marketing budget allocation has an impact on your company’s growth trajectory. It also brings clarity to the ROI of every channel. This way, you’d take any form of guesswork out of your paid marketing spend planning.
5. Reports of meaningful metrics foster more trustworthiness and credibility among PPC teams. With closed-loop reporting, you get to easily create a culture of transparency across various departments.
6. Since there’s data on how sales and leads are generated from each marketing campaign, marketers get to have an easy way of sharing their work results with anyone within the organization.
7. It helps in setting better goals by showcasing the data and trends. Access to granular marketing is a sure way of uncovering trends and optimization opportunities. It also helps in drawing insights from past performance. This will, in turn, help in setting better goals.
8. It helps marketers gain access to insight needed for maximizing their return on investment. Not only that, they get to justify their ad spend to clients and senior management. Moving on, closed-loop reporting offers a sure way of creating PPC reports for investors, senior-level marketing executives, and CMOs. By merely explaining the dollars in/dollars out ratio of your marketing campaign, it offers an avenue to request an increase in budget.

That’s all for the benefits of closed-loop reporting. Moving on, you’ve got to know how to implement closed-loop reporting.

How To Implement Closed-Loop Reporting?

There are five different phases when it comes to implementing closed-loop reporting.

1. Focus on the first touch:

Closed-loop reporting helps you pinpoint sources that drive quality leads. This way, you get to focus on such traffic sources, engage with the leads, and begin the process of appropriately moving the leads through your sales funnel. The attribution model is called first-touch, and the original revenue-generating source that births the ROI is credited. If you’re just starting with closed-loop reporting, then you’ve got to start with this attribution model.

2. Plan and Analyze for Success:

If you want to record substantial success in your organization, then you’ve got to implement your plan properly. Some elements of plans up for analysis include key issues, objectives, and team motivation. During the planning stage, you’ve got to set measurable objectives and provide a reliable system for the implementation of the project. Also, you should have a reliable way of monitoring your objectives.

If you’ve got a way of identifying your project objectives, then you’ve got to follow it up by coming up with ways to analyze the key success factors. Analyzing the key success factors helps you pinpoint the issues you may encounter in your quest to achieve your business objectives.

Furthermore, you’ve got to establish and maintain clear objectives for all team members. On top of that, there has to be a clear focus from each team member when it comes to the implementation of your plan.

As a general rule of thumb, there have to be regular checkpoints at each phase of the plan. This way, there would be a reliable way of monitoring and analyzing the progress made on the project.

3. Understand the Audience:

Closed-loop marketing doesn’t just end with reporting. Yes, reporting is a vital piece, but that’s not all there is to it. Closed-loop marketing also helps in gaining insight into the behaviors and actions of your audience. This way, you get to know their buying behavioral pattern, and also identify how they interact with your content. What topics generate the most results? Well, closed-loop marketing helps you answer questions like this.

That’s not all…

Closed-loop marketing helps you identify the linear attributions that help drive the most leads down your sales funnel. Some businesses rarely revisit their buyer persona. Well, that comes with a price — and one of which is a huge waste of resources and opportunities. With closed-loop marketing, you get to identify changes in your customer behavior. By merely looking at your lead history, you’d pretty much identify pain points and uncover challenges your customers may be facing.

These challenges and pain points can be traced by studying their behavior — what content are they consuming, what are the most downloaded white papers, and which new marketing channels are underutilized? Answers to these questions are a sure way of building effective content for your audience.

Finally, closed-loop marketing helps you pinpoint the exact steps your target audience follows on their way to becoming loyal paying customers. This way, you get to identify areas to improve on when it comes to lead nurturing.

4. Identify your goals:

Without an iota of doubt, goal setting is a vital piece of the puzzle. Without goals, there’s no way of measuring success. When the right infrastructures are put in place, you get to come up with reliable metrics that help you track your goals.

If you’re up for it, you could set up goals to help you track lead-to-customer conversion rate and visitor-to-lead conversion without losing sweat. It also gives you a clue about what’s working, and what’s not. In the long run, you get to identify the right offer to promote after every blog post, and whether your emails are generating the desired result.

Closed-loop marketing generates all these reports and more — and you could take it up from there to adjust your goals (if necessary). All in all, it’s a reliable way of comparing your results and making the necessary adjustments that would boost your conversion rates.

5. Wisely spend the marketing budget:

Your marketing budget is limited, and it can handle everything. But the question is — what area of the business should you focus on, and what area should be left behind? Well, closed-loop marketing is there to help.

Closed-loop marketing helps you identify the channels that are generating the most results for your brand. This way, you get to channel your creative energy and marketing resources to improve on what’s already working. This will, in turn, lead to more business growth.

Furthermore, closed-loop marketing helps you eliminate weak links, and you get to develop valuable content that would help grow your business in the long run.

When it comes to PPC marketing, time and budget are of the essence. To generate the most results, you’ve got to keep a close eye on your campaigns. This way, you’d not waste resources on things that are not working.

Granted, tracking your campaign performance is of the essence. After all, it’s arguably the best way to keep a close eye on it. The problem is — tracking campaign performance is not easy. There are factors you’ve got to consider. Such factors include device targeting, location targeting, and keyword performance. And if you desire ROI, then you’ve got to consider metrics like conversions, cost per click, clicks, and other relevant metrics.

Moving on, monitoring campaigns requires an efficient tool, and such a tool should help you keep a close eye on all sides of your campaign. This way, you get to draw relevant insight about your campaign from time to time — and it’s a sure way to avoid wastage of budget and time. Speaking of tools to help you monitor your campaign effectively, then the PPC Signal tool is your best shot.

Using the tool, you get to fully comprehend your goals, and target audience.

That’s not all…

It helps in the efficient analysis of your marketing campaign data.

Aside from offering signals, the tool shows you vital filters like device targeting, location targeting, metrics, and more.

Here’s what the PPC Signal dashboard looks like.

At first look of the dashboard you will see plenty of signals. One signal you will find in green which is showing that something unusual has happened but it is not affecting the campaigns badly. Whereas the red signals are showing that these need immediate attention to take some actions so that campaign can bring back to right path.

Have you ever wondered what if you have 100s of campaigns with 100s of keywords? Do you think you can give these campaigns enough time to run effectively? Of course you can’t let your campaigns run blindly and will not allow anyone to waste your client’s budget.

If you are into this situation then PPC Signal is a best choice to use for your Google Ads campaigns data analysis. You will get timely signal, you will be able to implement strategies on right time and eventually you will have a high ROI to satisfy your customers.

As PPC Signal is designed and developed based on high end AI algorithms, therefore you can consider that this reporting will take you to another level. You no more rely on your guts and intuitions, based on the historical data and state of the art analysis, this tool give you results on top of all.

FAQs:

What is closed-loop attribution?

As a marketer, you’ve got to have a reliable method for crediting marketing campaigns and channels for their influence on revenue and closed sales — and such method is called closed-loop attribution. With marketing attribution, marketers get to easily report their success and optimize their marketing strategies.

What are closed-loop analytics?

Data generated by the sales team and used by the company’s marketing team is called closed-loop analytics. Such data helps the marketing team to identify their lead source, and if such leads are converted into loyal customers. Aside from these, closed-loop analytics also helps marketers to identify their customer’s primary motivation.

What’s the value of closed-loop reporting?

Closed-loop reporting helps in demystifying the impact of paid marketing. It provides a bird’s-eye view when it comes to marketing spending. In the long run, it helps in lowering your cost per acquisition.

What is closed-loop reporting in marketing?

With closed-loop reporting, the sales and marketing teams get to share data among themselves. This way, they get to make more informed decisions that would help the business in the long run.

Wrap Up:

A thorough understanding of your buyer’s journey and customer’s pain points is a reliable way of creating valuable content that would meet their needs. Speaking of the buyer’s journey, closed-loop reporting will get you started.

Closed-loop reporting is a sure way of knowing all there is to know about your customer’s journey. This will, in turn, help you create relevant content that is of immense value to the customer.

With closed-loop reporting, you get to come up with better marketing campaigns and maximize your return on investment.

However, generating better results requires work — and keeping a close eye on your campaign is a vital piece of the puzzle. If you want to keep a close eye on your campaign, then you’ve got to consider the PPC Signal tool.

Now you’ve got a good grasp of what closed-loop reporting is, how would you use it to improve your marketing?