Paid media planning and forecasting
Working across multiple markets, languages and platforms provides numerous media choices. From geotargeting to audience selection and channel comparison, a clear and pragmatic evaluation of the media opportunity is a pre-requisite to ensure campaign success. This evaluation should align with broader business goals, your specific digital marketing imperatives, and the practicalities of market conditions (media know-how, customer insight, competitor awareness). Overall, our paid media planning and forecasting process will provide a clearly defined approach to media selection, metrics and outcomes.
We use all available data from previous campaigns and public platforms to plan and forecast. For example, for paid search, we would review:
History – we utilise historical data from the account to help factor in seasonality and provide insight on how performance alters with additional budget, increased competition, etc.
Impression Share (Budget/Ad Rank) – Google provides impression share data on what opportunity an account has missed due to ‘budget and ad rank.’ We would use this data to forecast an uplift in performance if we anticipated changes to budget and ad rank.
Category – we split our forecast out by category (brand, competition, generic, others). We understand each category performs differently in line with market forces and budget and can modify our forecast for each category.
Keyword Planner Tool – This tool can provide insight into possible CPCs for new keywords. If we were to launch ads on these new keywords, we could factor them into our forecasting.
Incremental CPA – As the cost curve shows an increase in spending would typically lead to additional sales, but at a higher incremental CPA. We factor this in when we sense-check our forecasts at the point of completion.
Experience – We never share sensitive client data between accounts, but the PPC team share trends and best practices. This approach helps us to ensure our forecasting process is always improving & helps provide more accurate forecasts.
With all forecasts, we include certain assumptions. We then track our actual performance vs our forecasted projection to gain an understanding of the actual variance. Future forecasts incorporate these learnings to enable continuous improvement. We will also:
- Utilise the support of our platform support teams (Google, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.) to establish keyword volumes, CPCs, and general category opportunity.
- Utilise complementary evaluation tools such as Searchmetrics, AdGooroo, etc. to gain a better understanding of competitor behaviour and landscape opportunity
- Draw upon past learnings and insight from existing and past Oban campaigns within the same category
