Intro
Agencies that manage clients with many locations often struggle to manage budgets at scale. It’s crucial to spend exactly what the client expects across dozens, or even hundreds of locations – often working across just as many publisher accounts. Marin has solved this process by automatically monitoring campaign spending and making AI-powered, real-time budget adjustments to hit the target spend. The result is less work, better results, and no missed opportunities.
Background
One of our customers is a digital advertising and marketing agency that delivers highly targeted campaigns custom-tailored to their partner’s needs and goals. For their client, a senior living facility company, their goal was to generate leads for people looking for senior care.
The client operates dozens of communities – each with its own target budget for lead generation campaigns. The agency’s job is to maximize leads for the allocated budget and any unspent budget represents missed opportunities. Before using Marin, the agency team would have to monitor budgets manually, a time-consuming and error-prone process. In the month before enabling Marin’s automatic pacing, only 50% of folders were within 10% of the target budget.
Results
The agency looked to Marin to simplify this process and ensure they hit the target budgets set by the client. They mapped the campaigns for each location to a Strategy in Marin and set the monthly budget for each Strategy.
Throughout the month, Marin monitored actual spending and the forecast for the remaining days and automatically made daily adjustments to ensure each Strategy hit its target. At the end of the month, 83% of the Strategies were within 5% of their target – up from 50% in the previous month. 94% of the strategies were within 10% of their target – up from 79% previously. Because they were not leaving budget on the table, the client increased revenue by 20% in the first month, and an additional 10% in the second.
The agency was able to monitor the real-time status of each location at a glance with the Pacing Dashboard, giving the team peace of mind and saving hours of work checking the performance of campaigns. Marketers can automatically pause campaigns if they hit their target budgets prematurely, preventing credits from accidental overspending.
Next Steps
While campaign budgets automatically reset at the end of the month, advertisers also have the option to roll over any unspent budget to the following month to maximize their results. The agency has been thrilled with their results and is working to roll this out across all of their clients. If you’re looking to automate the management of budgets at scale, reach out to Marin today.
Is this how you budget?
If you’re a PPC marketer, your budget allocation process probably looks like this:
Management gives you an overall budget to spend on paid media each quarter. You’ve created budget ‘categories’ like brand, non-brand, remarketing, local, display, etc, and every quarter, you review performance for each category over the past few quarters, analyze which categories have the potential to spend more or need less, and distribute the budget across those categories, then across the campaigns within those categories.
This process takes a few workdays to complete. Then, throughout the quarter, you occasionally check in on those categories and campaigns to adjust the budgets slightly. At best, you are driving by looking in the rear-view mirror. And after all that work, your paid media campaigns still don’t even hit your spend goals, let alone their full potential.
There's a better way...
It’s frustrating. And in the age of AI, there’s a better way. Most marketers could get more conversions out of their current budget if they began automating with a budget allocation AI.
The customer journey is more dynamic and fluid than ever due to new search options and evolving ad types – not to mention evolving user behaviors and expectations. Things are changing fast. Over 50% of Gen Z say TikTok is their go-to search engine. So, how can marketers keep up with these shifts in traffic between channels? As market share shifts by category and vertical from search to social and back again – setting static, manual monthly budgets for each of your marketing channels means you cannot capitalize on unpredictable consumer trends.
If social traffic spikes or inventory runs out, your current optimization models can react in real-time, but only WITHIN their respective platforms. For example, a social ad outperforms expectations and drives more customers to convert than search or e-commerce. But your social and search budgets are static - meaning Meta can optimize your newly successful ad until it caps out your set monthly budget. With AI monitoring performance and predicting future opportunities, the budget can be automatically moved from Search to Social to ensure your next dollar goes where the opportunity is greatest, in line with your cross-channel marketing goals.
Real-world results
Alumni Ventures, a Marin client, wanted to optimize their paid social budget allocation across Meta and LinkedIn campaigns. They found that although the audiences they targeted on both Meta and LinkedIn were similar, there was no consistency in how each channel performed across networks. Some audiences strongly outperformed on LinkedIn and others on Meta, making it difficult for them to optimize spend by audience. Allocating budgets by alumni audience and channel over a defined period was tricky and time-consuming. They needed a more adaptive approach that could automatically adjust for both spend pacing and channel performance trends.
By deploying AI-powered dynamic budget allocation, as Marin Ascend offered, cross-channel changes can be accounted for in near real-time without waiting for a team member to analyze, strategize, and deploy a budget adjustment manually. By the time this manual work is completed - the budget could already be moved to your most successful campaign asset before you’ve been able to traffic the changes. And if the opportunity proves to be fleeting? The budget is moved back to where it will most impact achieving your account-wide monthly targets
I’m not trying to tell you that your paid media performance is bad… you’re an experienced professional, and I’m sure you know what you’re doing. But why not multiply your expertise and time with a powerful AI companion that can take hours of not-so-fun work off your plate so you can focus on the strategic stuff you actually find interesting? And as a bonus, this AI companion can help you find at least 10% more conversions within your current budget.
Enter Marin
We spent the last few years building Marin Ascend, the budget allocation system that my 23-year-old Account Coordinator self dreamed of. All those budget distribution steps I mentioned above? Ascend can do them better and faster and take advantage of every opportunity to shift budget to top-performing campaigns. So, what makes Ascend so much better than manual budget management?
- Access to more signals: Our AI uses proprietary forecasting models and a tried and true algorithm to determine where you should spend your next dollar.
- An understanding of the full picture: Our platform automatically pulls data from all your advertising platforms and your source of truth for conversion and revenue data. It unifies all that data to get a cohesive picture of your entire paid media program before making decisions.
- Unified reporting: Our pacing dashboards allow you to monitor performance vs. plan in real-time across all accounts and publishers.
- Daily updates: Ascend will reallocate spend every day if it finds better opportunities. Human budgeting decisions are less frequent, more time-consuming, and strategically fallible. AI is consistent.
- Unified bid and budget management: Ascend can manage your budgets and bidding targets in unison. This way, you’ll avoid having targets that are too loose with budgets that are too low, which can lead campaigns to run out of budget in the middle of the day. The last thing you want is for your ads to stop running during those precious evening hours, and Ascend ensures that doesn’t happen.
Validate your Allocation
If you’re not using AI to manage your budgets, you’re leaving money on the table. But don’t take our word for it – we’ll prove it by giving you a free Media Mix Audit.
With the audit, you’ll get a report that outlines exactly how much money you’ll save and how much more revenue you’ll get with our AI-powered budget allocation tool. Our system will use publisher and proprietary forecasting models to understand each campaign’s potential and showcase the results you’d get with Ascend.
Maybe you’re not ready for AI to take over yet, and I get it. The robots scare me, too. Regardless, there’s no way grabbing this free audit is a bad idea. Click here to request yours today.
