Background
Reach PLC is a British newspaper, magazine, and digital publisher that produces and distributes content to audiences across the UK and Ireland. They are one of Britain’s largest newspaper groups, publishing 240 regional papers and eight national newspapers, in addition to running multi-platform digital sites for desktop, mobile, and mobile apps. Listed on the London Stock Exchange, it is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index.
Reach PLC offers digital marketing services to SMB advertisers across the UK. They oversee a vast volume of campaigns that often have a short lifespan. On average, the Reach campaign management teams might have 100+ campaigns live at any given time, across multiple ad accounts and publishers.
The custom pacing dashboard that Marin built for us has saved us so much time! On top of that, we’re now able to spot campaigns that are over or under pacing more quickly so we can pivot and adjust budgets more efficiently than ever. We never would have been able to do that without Marin’s help.
Challenge
With such a large number of campaigns running at once, with varying budgets, objectives, and start and end dates, the Reach team needed a solution to support the spend pacing of their campaigns and improve their ability to manage campaigns at scale. Managing so many campaigns manually was both challenging and time intensive.
Solution
Marin Software collaborated with the Reach PLC teams to build and develop a bespoke Campaign Pacing Dashboarding & Alerts solution that allowed the teams to easily and efficiently understand when and where campaigns were under- or overpacing.
The dashboard was set up on Google Sheets and populated with data from a MarinOne web query report. With Marin, users can build a recurring report and turn it into a web query simply by copying the report’s static URL and dropping it into Microsoft Excel or any other reporting dashboard like Google Sheets. The user can then use the web query as a living source for the most up-to-date performance data, without ever needing to log into Marin, all while benefiting from Marin’s in-depth reporting and analysis tools.
Every morning, the data dynamically updates inside the Google Sheets document and replaces the previous day’s data to accurately reflect the evolving spend against set budgets and dates. The pacing calculations paired nicely with Excel formulas to automate short pacing indicators and messages (e.g. “Underpacing”, “On track”, “Overpacing”).
Results
The custom budget pacing dashboard solution created by Marin reduced the amount of time campaign managers were spending on budget pacing by more than 50%, in addition to streamlining and simplifying the process. Reach has been able to use their time savings to focus on improving performance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
