Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

For reporting to the executive team, I'd keep it very simple. Total impressions. Total clicks. Total cost. Conversions. Average cost per conversion. If your conversion is not literally a sale (with dollar value), then you need to somehow monetize the conversion. What is a conversion worth?

They do NOT need to know about your landing path tests, how many keywords you are using, which are generating the most clicks, which offers are working best, etc.

Just tell them what you're spending and what you're getting in return. Over and out.

One possible enhancement: If you have a long history, you can show the data over time (i.e. as a time-series) and note/explain any significant blips (good or bad) and long-term trends. Just be sure you can explain them before you show them. There's no sense raising questions you can't answer.

It depends on what "conversion" is, how well you write the Adwords copy, and especially how well your landing path is designed. The actual number can range from a fraction of 1% all the way up to 30% or more.

In my opinion, the single most important determinant of conversion rate is the landing path. Getting the click is relatively easy; it's just money. It's the landing path that does the heavy lifting and motivates conversion (or not).

And don't forget message matching ... the keyword, the ad, and the landing path copy all need to be consistent.

And the offer itself will affect conversion. Strong offers = higher conversion.

Put all those factors together, and you have a fairly complex optimization challenge. But if you compute the dollar value of getting it right, you can afford a lot of time and effort directed toward the process.

As for quality score, it's important but I wouldn't fixate on it. If you do everything else right, you'll have a good quality score. And if you don't, you won't. Direct your efforts to "doing everything else right." (Another reason to spend a lot of time and attention on the landing path.)

Mgoodman always has stellar advice. From experience I recently offered a PPC ROI report to the owners of the company I am doing PPC management for and I came in thinking I was preaching to the choir but to my dismay I just opened a can of worms by giving them too many technical details like A/B testing,negative key phrases and landing page conversions which I had to explain to them at length.
Most execs are really only interested in the bottom line so for this instance simple CPC/keyword/reach and ROI report would suffice IMO. At the end of the day I would just have been fine telling them for this budget for this region on these keywords on these dates you converted xx leads xx sales. The problem with hindsight is it is always 20/20 lol. Good luck on your PPC campaigns.