The Budgeting tools in Marin provide both a budget Pace tool and a budget Plan tool to help you plan and optimize your monthly budgets. The Pace tool allows you to forecast your publisher spend for the current month, while the Plan 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 Strategies and enabling the Forecasting toggle.
Please note that in this article, we'll be talking about Budget Optimization. For information on Strategy forecasting for non-budget related metrics, check out our Strategy Forecasting article.
Here's why this feature can be very handy as an advertiser:
The Pace tool 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 Pace tool by following the instructions below.
From your Pace 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.
The Pace tool 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 Plan 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 Plan tool is only compatible with Search Strategies targeting a Financial Goal. It is not compatible with Awareness Targeting Strategies.
You can access the Plan tool by following the instructions below.
Exploring spend target scenarios via Plan triggers a Spend Reallocation algorithm that takes as input Strategy forecasting data points, target KPI and monthly spend goal defined in the drop-down menu of the Plan sub-tab to determine the optimal Strategies to allocate new spend to. The reallocation is then translated to new Strategy targets i.e. ROI, CPA, Margin. These new targets can be viewed in the Strategy grid reported under Recommended Target.
Note: Once you set your Strategy to Preview mode, it can take up to 24 hours for the Plan tool to populate with data. If the platform is unable to generate a forecast for a particular Strategy, then the Strategy will be omitted from the grid and will be represented as a static component in the overall Plan simulations.
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 Plan 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 Strategy targets. Campaign budgets are not changed.
The reallocation will only apply to Strategies set to Traffic mode when Apply Recommendations is clicked.
Changing Strategy constraints will disable Apply Recommendations until the next spend reallocation engine cycle, which runs every morning at 9:30am local time.
