If you’re an Agency looking to provide better reporting back to your clients, CampaignTracker is a really good fit. In the past couple of weeks I’ve fielded calls from several of our Agency clients asking about customization of the PPC Reporting – especially when it comes to branding.
This is actually quite easy to do, but since it’s basically un-documented, I thought it might be helpful to write a quick Blog on the topic.
CampaignTracker’s PPC Reporting is Excel-based. The report suite is generated directly into an Excel-file and includes a rich set of Charting and Tabular Reports. Naturally, the branding in the reports is SEMphonic – here, for example, is the Table of Contents Worksheet:
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Most of the individual worksheets aren’t branded:
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But Agencies often like to have their branding on every worksheet.
This is really quite simple to do with CampaignTracker. The secret is knowing about the blank_report.xls file. This file (stored hidden and protected) in your CampaignTracker directory is the basic template into which CampaignTracker writes its reports. Once a report is written into the template, it’s "Saved" using the name you requested. But every report starts with this template.
So you can customize your report set by changing the template. In particular, you can feel free to switch out the Semphonic branding and put your Agency branding instead. You can also change Font Sizes, Colors, Hidden Columns, Frozen Panes and View settings.
You can even change the styles in which number and headers are displayed. The Styles are saved in this workbook and are all prefixed with SEM (SEMHeader being an example). By changing the Style settings, you automatically change every Header in the report.
There are a few things you can’t change when editing the Report (and you should always make a backup first in case you mess things up). In particular, you shouldn’t change the order or number of worksheets (you can add at the end) or the starting data row number.
By changing the blank_report.xls spreadsheet you have a surprising amount of flexibility in making CampaignTracker reports yours. Does that bother us? Not really. The goal of CampaignTracker is to be as powerful a tool for you as possible – and for most Agencies, that includes the ability to seamlessly present their brand to the customer!
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