The most important data you need to allocate your marketing budget optimally is how well each campaign will perform at different spending levels. If you extrapolate from past performance, you’re ignoring diminishing returns, seasonality, and other factors that may affect future performance. You’re basically driving in while looking in the rearview mirror.
Ad platforms forecasts are incomplete
Google and Meta provide forecasts for how your campaigns will perform at different levels of spend. These visualizations are helpful but incomplete. For one, they are only available as charts in the UI, so it’s hard to build them into a model. But more importantly, neither platform offers forecasts for all of the campaigns.
Of course, to allocate resources accurately across your entire program, you also need to combine the forecasts from individual ad platforms.
Marin AI + ad platform forecasts = 🔥🔥🔥
To provide comprehensive coverage, Marin combines the publisher's forecasts with our proprietary models to simulate future results for each campaign at different spending levels. Our models understand the impressions share and/or audience reach of each campaign to account for campaigns that are at or nearing their maximum potential spend.
We automatically identify day-of-week, day-of-month, and day-of-year patterns in your campaign volumes and conversion rates. Our advanced forecasting AI analyzes the impact of events from your Marketing Calendar and incorporates future events into the simulation.
Simulations and Algorithms
The output of our algorithms is a simulation for each campaign that shows the change in spend and conversions or conversion value as the campaign target is increased or decreased. This process is repeated for each day in the forecast period. In this chart, the vertical line at 0 represents the campaign's current performance. Campaigns with great sensitivity to changes will have steeper curves.
The next step to generating the forecast for your entire Strategy is to find the optimal allocation to each campaign. To simplify a complex process, we find the best use of each incremental dollar of spend until we have achieved your target. This results in a new recommended campaign target and budget ready to be sent to the ad platforms.
Our goal is to give marketers as much control as possible so we offer a range of rules that can constrain the generated recommendations. The most common of these is to limit the daily change in an attempt to avoid triggering learning mode.
When the optimal allocation is different than the constrained outcome, we show both on the chart, with the solid dot representing the constrained outcome and the dotted line representing the unconstrained. Both values are available for review in the campaigns grid.
Before and After
The impact of the optimal allocation is then presented in our “before and after” charts. The left side of these charts represents the “status quo” or what we forecast your results will be with no changes. The right side is the results we forecast using the Marin recommendations.
Once you are comfortable with the recommendations, you can set the Strategy to push changes to the publisher. Marin will then be continually monitoring performance and adjusting the targets and budgets to hit your goals.
Forecasting Overrides
You know your business best and sometimes you are going to want to "put your finger on the scale" and adjust the forecast. Ascend supports forecast overrides to do exactly that. You can specific the dates and the percent modifier. These can be set at any level from Strategy to Client to Customer.
Explore more content
case study
QUODD Boosts Conversions by 500% in Just One Month with Marin Ascend
Background
QUODD is a leading provider of real-time market data and end-of-day pricing solutions, serving a diverse client base across the fintech, wealth management, investment management, and retirement sectors. Known for delivering fingertip access to comprehensive financial data with unmatched quality and speed, QUODD's clients rely on them for mission-critical information across equities, options, bonds, futures, and more.
Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) harness the power of machine learning to optimize your ads, but take away some of the control you get with Expanded Text Ads (ETAs). Learn how to make the most of RSAs, ahead of the June2022 phase-out of ETAs.
If you’re still using Google’s Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) then time is running out – ETAs are being phased out in mid-2022. The good news is that Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) are expected to deliver better results and can make life easier. But there are some important trade-offs that every marketer needs to understand.
Download our eBook for tips and tricks on the migration and how to operate in an RSA-only world.
What to do if your Google Ads campaigns aren't hitting their spend targets
Even the most experienced PPC marketers sometimes struggle to spend their whole budget. This could be due to a myriad of factors, and even well-optimized campaigns encounter this problem. Here are some reasons your campaigns may not be spending as much as you’d like and how to remedy them.
1. Quality Score is too low
A low quality score will lead to low ad rank, which will prevent your ad from serving as frequently as possible. You can check your score by adding the ‘Quality Score’ column to your Google Ads report. The score can range from 1-10, and a score of 8-10 is considered very good. If your score is below 8, there’s room for improvement.
To improve your Quality Score, start by increasing ad relevance. The easiest way to do so is by including your target keywords in your ad copy. Try to incorporate several target keywords into your headlines and descriptions.
It’s also helpful to include those same keywords in your landing page copy. The quality and relevancy of your landing page can significantly impact your score, so be sure that your ad messaging is aligned with what is on your landing page.
Your landing page's user experience also impacts quality score, so an LP audit could be a great next step. Key factors to consider are page load time and the strength of the call to action on your landing page.
Your call to action should be aligned with the copy in your ad. A common mistake is to send ads for specific products or categories to a generic page. If you are running an ad for women’s boots, for example, your ad should send searchers to a ‘women’s boots’ filtered landing page rather than a generic landing page that features all the shoes you sell.
Expanding keyword targeting will allow the algorithm to serve your ads to more people. Start by looking at your search query report. This will give you an idea of what people are looking for, and you can incorporate relevant search terms as keywords.
I had a client who kept increasing their campaign budget and loosening their CPA target, but spend stayed flat. We found that they were simply not bidding on enough high-volume search terms.
The process of manually combing through search terms reports to find new target keywords was tedious and kept getting put on the back burner, so they decided to automate it with Marin. The client gave us the criteria for what they would want added: keywords with at least ten conversions over the past 30 days and a cost per conversion of $30 or less. We applied those settings in Marin, and the platform now scans their search query report each week and adds any search terms that fit their criteria as keywords. Since implementing this solution, spend has increased considerably, and CPA is still on target. If that sounds interesting, you can learn more about Marin’s customizable automations here.
Also, consider match type expansion. If you are just targeting exact match keywords, add some broad match variations to get your ad in front of more people. This will also help with keyword research by generating new terms in your search query report.
Another way to conduct keyword research is to make a list of topics relevant to what you are advertising and then list the terms you think your target audience would search for to find information on those topics. You can also research competitors and see what kind of verbiage they are using on their websites and ads to get more keyword ideas. Google Ads Keyword Planner is also a great tool that you can use to discover more keywords and find out how popular they are.
3. Bids are too low
If your bids are too low, your ads will not be served. Increasing bids can also result in a higher average position on the page, which will increase click-through rate.
For manual bidding, I’d start by increasing bids by 10-20%, then continue to make weekly increases in small increments until you reach your desired level of spend. If you are bidding to a CPA or a ROAS target, consider a less competitive target.
You could also switch to a maximize clicks strategy in Google or a target impression share strategy in Marin to rapidly increase traffic. These strategies will try to spend your full daily budget as efficiently as possible and will likely spend more than tCPA or tROAS since they aren’t restricted by an efficiency goal.
Implementing dayparting is another way to increase bids. You can strategically increase bids only during certain times and days of the week when you typically see better performance.
Also, people often forget about device modifiers. Removing any negative modifiers you have in place should increase spend.
4. Geo-targeting is too narrow
Increasing location targeting can expand the reach of your ads to more potential customers. It may not make sense for every business, but it is worth testing for many. Some potential customers may be making relevant searches, but they are not within the campaign's target area. You can also consider reallocating some of your budget to other campaigns with more broad targeting.
5. Your budgets are spread too thin
You may have more campaigns than you need, and the campaigns you do have may not be built out enough. Consider consolidating campaigns that share similar themes and goals. When you consolidate campaigns, use top-performing assets for the ads and add some new assets and copy to test out what works best. When you consolidate similar ads into one campaign with one budget, Google’s algorithm will be able to distribute that budget across more search terms, leading to higher overall spend.
You can also try shared campaign budgets. With shared budgets, the campaigns getting the most traffic will have room to spend as much of your budget as they need. This way, you don’t have to worry about allocating a daily budget to each campaign.
6. You don’t have time to focus on budget allocation
If you manage a lot of campaigns, it can be difficult to keep track of all those budgets. It’s also challenging to keep up with market trends and understand which campaigns have potential to spend more. That’s why we created Marin Ascend, an AI-powered tool that automates the process of reviewing daily budgets and distributing spend across campaigns. It predicts each campaign’s future performance to determine where your money should be allocated. Just set one monthly spend target for a group of campaigns and Marin will take it from there.
I had a client who had one budget for a group of campaigns and wasn’t sure how to split it up. I showed them Marin Ascend and explained that it would decide how to distribute budget based on past performance and forecasted future performance. We were even able to review the forecasted results before enabling the tool, and since the predictions looked great, my client decided to give it a go. Ascend then shifted their budget between campaigns throughout the month based on its AI-powered daily performance forecasts. After using Ascend for a month, my client finally hit their monthly spend target, and overall cost per conversion decreased by 76%!
If you are only using one or two campaign types, it may be time to expand. Different campaign types will help your ads connect with people in different places. It is best practice to run search campaigns alongside additional campaign types. For example, you can run a search campaign and a PMax campaign that target the same topic. The PMax campaign will reach people across more areas of the web, which will build brand recognition and result in more clicks or searches later on. You could also test a video, display, or Dynamic Search (DSA) campaign. Running new types of campaigns can be an effective way to spend your remaining budget and is a good way to test if those campaign types work well for your business.
8. You need to try other publishers
If after trying out these solutions you still are unable to spend your budget, it may be time to expand to other publishers. Marin makes it easy to copy campaigns from Google to Microsoft if you’re looking to expand to Bing. You can manage campaigns from all your publishers directly in Marin to keep track of budgets and performance in one place. You can even have shared budgets across different publishers.
I had a client who wasn’t able to spend their monthly budget, but they were achieving over 90% impression share on Google. I suggested that they expand their paid search ads to Microsoft. Thanks to Marin's Copy Tool, this was a simple process for their team. They copied a few of their top-performing Google campaigns to Microsoft and immediately spend started to increase.
Marin Ascend enabled their Google and Microsoft campaigns to share one budget so that they never missed an opportunity to spend. The tool’s optimization suite made it easy for them to manage an additional publisher by setting up automations in Marin that optimized campaigns in each publisher simultaneously. Interested in learning more? Click here to schedule time with a member of my team.
