Creating and Automating Pacing Reports
Pacing is the bread and butter of any performance marketer. Making the best use of your budgets to reach and exceed your performance goals is a big part of performance marketing.
A pacing report lets you slice and dice the data to find opportunities for growth and pockets of efficiency. Clarisights is built with marketers in mind, which makes building a pacing report much easier and gives you the tools to make smarter decisions.
Essential elements of a pacing report
To track your budgets and pacing in Clarisights, you need:
Total Ad Spend
Actual KPIs (for example Conversions, CPA, Revenue, RoAS)
Spend Budgets and KPI Targets data
Questions a pacing report should answer
Daily questions a good pacing report should answer:
What portion of our current monthly spend budget have we exhausted?
How much of our current monthly revenue or 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 or revenue targets for the current month?
Which Geos are not going to exhaust their budgets at the current pace?
Which Sub-Channels are going to exceed their revenue attainment at the current pace?
It should also analyse data at the different granularities budgets may be set on, like Marketing Channel, Sub Channel, Geo, LOB and Product Category.
Questions a pacing report can answer when looking back at historical performance:
How much did we miss our ROAS target by in the previous quarter?
In 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?
Clarisights lets marketers answer follow-up questions in the same workspace where they spot performance trends or insights, with minimal effort.
For example, you may see that you're pacing behind on your spend and revenue targets for a specific Marketing Channel and Geo, and want to know if historical performance suggests headroom to scale spend further. You can quickly break down the performance and compare historical time periods to find out.
Pacing metrics you can copy
Copy these metrics into your workspace and replace the variables with your organisation's own custom metrics.
Custom Metric Name | Expression | Description | Compatible with |
Spend Pacing % |
| The current percentage of budget exhausted. Used with projections, shows whether spend will exceed or fall short of the budget in the selected timeframe. | This Month, This Quarter, This Year |
% Budget Remaining |
| The current percentage of budget remaining. Used with projections, shows what percentage will be left over at the end of the selected timeframe. | This Month, This Quarter, This Year |
Req. Daily Spend (Monthly Target) |
| The daily spend required to reach the spend target for the month. Use with the timeframe “This Month”. | This Month |
Revenue Pacing % |
| The current percentage of target revenue attained. Used with projections, shows whether revenue will exceed or fall short of the target in the selected timeframe. | This Month, This Quarter, This Year |
Conversions Pacing % |
| The current percentage of target conversions acquired. Used with projections, shows whether conversions will exceed or fall short of the target in the selected timeframe. | This Month, This Quarter, This Year |
Spend Diff % |
| The percentage by which the spend target was missed or exceeded in the selected timeframe. | Any Completed Monthly Period |
CPA Diff % |
| The percentage by which the CPA target was missed or exceeded in the selected timeframe. | Any Completed Monthly Period |
ROAS Diff % |
| The percentage by which the ROAS target was missed or exceeded in the selected timeframe. | Any Completed Monthly Period |
Tip: Clarisights supports simple projection metrics that estimate where a metric is likely to be at the end of the current week, month, quarter and year. It takes the average of the last ‘x’ days of the actual metric value and projects it to the end of the period. Reach out to your CSM to enable projection metrics for key KPIs in your workspace.
Seamless Integration of Pacing Insights
You don't need to keep pacing insights in a separate report. For a more holistic view, duplicate widgets or tabs from the pacing report into your own reports and adjust them as needed.