Creating and Automating Pacing Reports
Pacing is the bread and butter for any performance marketer. Ensuring that you make the best use of your budgets to reach and exceed your performance goals is a big part of performance marketing.
A pacing report is crucial as it enables you to slice and dice the data to extract insight into opportunities for growth and pockets of efficiency. Building a pacing report with Clarisights is a lot easier since it’s built with marketers in mind. It's all about giving you the tools to make smarter decisions.
To easily track your budgets & pacing in Clarisights, there are a few things that you’ll use. Essential Elements of a Pacing Report:
Total Ad Spend
Actual KPIs (eg: Conversions, CPA, Revenue, RoAS, etc)
Spend Budgets and KPI Targets data
Some questions that a good pacing report should answer on a daily basis:
What portion of our current monthly spend budget have we exhausted?
How much of our current monthly revenue / conversion target have we attained?
Are we on track to exhaust our spend budgets for the current month?
Are we on track to attain our conversion / revenue targets for the current month?
Which Geos are not going to exhaust their budgets at current pace?
Which Sub-Channels are going to exceed their revenue attainment at the current pace?
It should also be able to analyse data at different granularities that budgets may be set on like Marketing Channel, Sub Channel, Geo, LOB, Product Category, etc.
Other questions that a pacing report can answer when looking back at historical performance:
How much did we miss our ROAS target by in the previous quarter?
Which Marketing Channels did we exceed budgets by more than 5% in the previous month?
How have we cumulatively tracked in the first half of the year, did we make up for Q1 in Q2?
Which Geos have been exceeding CPA targets in the last 6 months?
The beauty of the Clarisights platform lies in its ability to allow marketers to answer follow-up questions in the same workspace where they observe certain performance trends or insights, all with minimal effort on your part.
For example, if you see that you’re pacing behind on your spend and revenue targets for a specific Marketing channel and Geo, and would like to find out if there’s any indication of headroom to scale spends further based on the historical performance. You can quickly breakdown the performance and compare historical time periods to find this insight.
Here is a list of metrics that you can copy into your workspace to use today. Simply replace the variables with those pertinent to your organisation’s custom metrics!
Custom Metric Name | Expression | Description | Compatible with |
Spend Pacing % |
| Shows the current percentage of budget exhausted and whether the spends will exceed / subceed the budgets in the selected timeframe if used with projections. | This Month, This Quarter, This Year |
% Budget Remaining |
| Shows the current percentage of budget remaining and what percent will be leftover in the end of the selected timeframe if used with projections. | This Month, This Quarter, This Year |
Req. Daily Spend (Monthly Target) |
| Shows the required daily spend to reach spend targets for the Month. To be used with timeframe “This Month” | This Month |
Revenue Pacing % |
| Shows the current percentage of target revenue attained and whether the revenue attainment will exceed / subceed the targets in the selected timeframe if used with projections. | This Month, This Quarter, This Year |
Conversions Pacing % |
| Shows the current percentage of target conversions acquired and whether the acquisition will exceed / subceed the targets in the selected timeframe if used with projections. | This Month, This Quarter, This Year |
Spend Diff % |
| Shows the percentage by which spend target was missed or exceeded in the selected timeframe | Any Completed Monthly Period |
CPA Diff % |
| Shows the percentage by which CPA target was missed or exceeded in the selected timeframe | Any Completed Monthly Period |
ROAS Diff % |
| Shows the percentage by which ROAS target was missed or exceeded in the selected timeframe | Any Completed Monthly Period |
Pro Tip 💡 Clarisights supports creation of simple projection metrics to calculate where a metric is likely to be at the end of the current week, month, quarter and year. It does this by taking the average of last ‘x’ days of the actual metric value and projects that to the end of the time period. Reach out to your CSM to enable projection metrics for Key KPIs in your workspace.
Seamless Integration of Pacing Insights
For a more holistic view, you don't need to confine pacing insights to a separate report. You can effortlessly duplicate widgets or tabs from the pacing report and integrate them into your personalized reports, making adjustments as required.