Playing Favorites … Which PPC Platform Has The Best Reporting Features?

I spent a good part of the weekend creating and looking at PPC reports. I am hip deep (easy to happen with my [not so] grand stature) evaluating the existing PPC accounts of new clients. I want an overview of how their campaigns are setup and organized. I’m looking at:

• How many campaigns with each PPC engine?
• How many adgroups with each campaign?
• How many keywords are associated with each adgroup?
• Which page are they using for their landing page?
• Are URLs defined at the keyword level?
• What kind of keyword matching are they using?

When I get the foundation down, I’m going to start looking deeper at Keyword bids, CTR, Conversion Rate, and Cost/Conversion. I want to pull all this information into one workbook so I can take a look at everything all in one place. It’s simple enough to open data from the .csv with Excel, but it’s a matter of getting the report to include all the information I want before I export to the .csv.

I spent a long time playing with the different reporting options with each of the engines. Essentially I was using the keyword performance reports, they come the closest to giving me everything I need. Google’s AdWords Reporting Center is by far my favorite. I like that I can choose which columns display or not. If the same feature exists in Yahoo! SearchMarketing I didn’t find it. MSN adCenter gives me a little more control, but I still like Google AdWords best.

Yahoo! SearchMarketing and MSN adCenter are harder to work with. I couldn’t find where I can get the URL to display with the keyword, the adgroup or the campaign. Another feature I like from Google AdWords (and MSN adCenter as well), is that you can export directly to a .csv file. I don’t like having to export the Yahoo! SearchMarketing to a .zip and then have to unzip. Why can’t I just open the file?

We were asked which is our favorite PPC engine, and AdWords beat the pants off everybody. I’m curious to find out what BUILT IN reporting tool is favored. What is your favorite reporting tool – and why? I like the flexibility of AdWords reports.