How can we help you?
How can we help you?
The Budgeting tools in Marin provide both Budget Pacing and Budget What-If simulations to help you plan and optimize your monthly budgets. Pacing allows you to forecast your publisher spend for the current month, while the What-If tool summarizes various spend targets and the corresponding KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for the current month.
You can find these features by navigating to the Optimization tab in the left-hand navigation, clicking on Bid Strategies and enabling the Forecasting toggle.
Please note that in this article, we'll be talking about Budget Optimization. For information on Bid Strategy forecasting for non-budget related metrics, check out our Bid Strategy Forecasting article.
Here's why this feature can be very handy as an advertiser:
Budget Pacing allows you to view projected, actual, and cumulative advertising spend for the current month, the current week, and the current quarter, including partial same-day spend and forecasting for the remainder of the day. You can also view projected spend for the next month and the next quarter.
You can access the Budget Pacing Dashboard by following the instructions below.
From your Pacing Dashboard, You can even export the forecast chart to one of your cross-client, cross-channel MarinOne dashboards if you wish. To do this, simply save it as a Saved View, then add it to a dashboard. For more information about dashboards, check out our dedicated article.
To access the Budget Pacing Dashboard, navigate to the Home tab, click on the Budget sub-tab, and then you can toggle between the Pacing Dashboard and the Budget What-If tab.
The budget pacing forecasts first calculates the base prediction using a recency-weighted 90 day look-back window. For even more precision, the feature also takes into account known temporal effects such as day of week, day of month, month of year and day of year seasonality. This require at least 3 data points for each seasonal effect. If a significant effect is found, it is filtered out of the data before the next check, to avoid double counting.
This also takes into account the Bid Strategy goals and trafficking settings. Predictions are based on the assumption that all Preview Bid Strategies are also set to Traffic mode, while Bid Strategies that are Off are considered static. Any Bid Strategies on Preview mode will typically see forecasts that don't match the current performance.
This ensures budget-sensitive users to get accurate insights on expected spend for the current month. In order to explore and adjust monthly spend targets, users switch to the Budget What-if sub-tab, which we'll talk about in the next section.
The Pacing Dashboard forecast first calculates the base prediction using a recency-weighted 90 day look-back window. For even more precision, the feature also takes into account known temporal effects such as day of week, day of month, month of year and day of year seasonality. This requires at least 3 data points for each seasonal effect. If a significant effect is found, it is filtered out of the data before the next check, to avoid double counting.
The Budget What-If tool allows you to visualize the allowable spend targets for the current month while also providing clarity on secondary metrics or KPIs, such as clicks, conversions, or gross profit.
Please note: The Budget What-If tool is only compatible with Search Bid Strategies targeting a Financial Goal. It is not compatible with Shopping or Awareness Targeting Bid Strategies.
You can access the Budget What-If Dashboard by following the instructions below.
To access the Budget What-If tab, navigate to the Home tab, click on the Budget sub-tab, and then you can toggle between the Pacing Dashboard and the Budget What-If tab.
Note: If you do not currently have access to the Budget What-If tab, please reach out to a platform representative to have it enabled.
The chart x-axis represents the monthly spend target range, the y-axis the secondary KPI. The chart is interactive allowing user to see the current spend, which can be toggled via the slider, which updates the spend target on the chart and bar charts showing current and recommended metrics. Clicking Apply Recommendations will result in Marin Bidding targeting the new spend goal.
Exploring spend target scenarios via What-if triggers a Spend Reallocation algorithm that takes as input Bid Strategy forecasting data points, target KPI and monthly spend goal defined in the drop-down menu of the What-If sub-tab to determine the optimal Bid Strategies to allocate new spend to. The reallocation is then translated to new Bid Strategy targets i.e. ROI, CPA, Margin. These new targets can be viewed in the Bid Strategy grid reported under Recommended Target.
Note: Once you set your Bid Strategy to Preview mode, it can take up to 24 hours for the Budget What-If tool to populate with data. If the platform is unable to generate a forecast for a particular Bid Strategy, then the Bid Strategy will be omitted from the grid and will be represented as a static component in the overall What-If simulations.
Note: This section is specific to Marin Search.
In addition to pacing and what-if charts, the Budget sub-tab also offers a customizable Folder SmartGrid, reporting on current month-to-date data. This provides full visibility in folders responsible for driving spend.
Moreover, folders are the building blocks for What-if budget reallocation. The What-if folder SmartGrid reports two additional columns Target and Recommended Target: the target column shows the current goal, while the recommended target shows reallocation engine recommendations, if available. Movement of the slider will also update the most Recommended Target column in addition to the What-if charts.
The platform's Budget Optimization feature allows you to select from a variety of calendar cycles, including: current week, current month, current quarter, and many more. By choosing a different date range, you'll gain a better understanding of how well your pacing is working. You can then adjust your goals based on the data provided by the platform's What-if simulations.
The platform also supports the retail 4-5-4 calendar, although you'll need to speak to your platform representative to have this enabled for your account. When using 4-5-4, selecting the current month will reflect the 4 or 5 week of the 4-5-4 calendar month. Similarly, when selecting the current quarter, the selected date range will include the 13 weeks of the current 4-5-4 quarter. Learn more about the 4-5-4 calendar here (external link).
Spend reallocation modifies Bid Strategy targets. Campaign budgets are not changed.
The reallocation will only apply to Bid Strategies set to Traffic mode when Apply Recommendations is clicked.
Changing Bid Strategy constraints will disable Apply Recommendations until the next spend reallocation engine cycle, which runs every morning at 9:30am local time.