Founder

Paid Search Budget and Goal Pacing Challenges at Large Organizations

At Rise, we believe that three of the most crucial questions any paid search manager should be able to answer are:

  • What are your goals?
  • What is your budget?
  • How are you performing against your goals and budget?
 

These questions are truly the foundation of any paid search program; and if you cannot answer them, you are most likely misallocating a large portion of your media dollars. Despite how crucial these questions are, it is very common for us to come across large organizations that cannot answer them easily.

Why is it so hard to answer these questions?
 
There are several reasons why brands struggle to answer these questions about their search budget and goal performance. Primarily, large organizations are handcuffed by too many silos among a larger number of business units and they lack existing systems to help manage this.

The more business units a brand has makes it harder to answer these questions because it creates a challenge for the CMOs and VPs of Search. We’ve found it’s because these organizations have search marketing programs for multiple business units and they’re lacking unit or division-level data to make informed investment decisions. This becomes even more complicated with sub-units or sub-divisions.
 
In paid search specifically, there are some operational challenges that prevent large brands from having the necessary insights across many divisions.

  • Multiple Accounts: Different business units oftentimes have different search accounts and it is impossible to consolidate this information into one view within the native search platforms.
  • Rollup Views: In addition to the challenge of aggregating a roll-up performance view across accounts, native search interfaces are not designed to view different data roll-ups within an account.
  • Multiple Budgets and Goals: A very limited number of search technologies are designed to allow for multiple budgets and goals across multiple business units.
  • Identifying Problem Areas: The more business units in a brand, the more difficult it is to identify which business units are behind or ahead on spend—as well as behind on goals.
  • Pacing Spend: Performance and demand vary for almost all accounts intraday and within each week and month. Being able to ensure that you are allocating the right budget per day per business unit is very difficult. This is especially important given that paid search is driven by auctions, making it difficult to control for fluctuations in performance and spend level based on day of week and holidays.


The Solution
 
One of the main reasons that paid search teams struggle to answer these questions is that the out-of-the-box search technology solutions do not put an emphasis towards answering these questions—especially for companies with multiple business units.
 
Given the lack of options available and the importance of solving this for many of our clients, we built this functionality in Connex®. Connex is able to do the following:

  • Measure unlimited business units each with unique goals/budgets
  • Pace performance for each business unit for both spend and goals

Real time pacing in Connex
 
  • Quickly filter to identify business units that are either over-spending or underspending, as well as departments that are behind goal (Connex supports Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Amazon for search and PLA campaigns)

Real time pacing in Connex
 
  • Support different goal types for each business unit (CPL vs ROAS, for example)
  • Adjust pacing for different performance for day-of-week and holidays
 

Because of our focus on helping brands with multiple business units, and the technology we built with Connex, our clients can feel confident that they always have visibility into pacing against their spend and progress to goals, no matter how many there may be. And, if programs are not on track, our team will surface this information immediately using our Connex technology.
 
Contact Rise today to learn more about how we can help solve search challenges for large businesses.

01/23/2019 at 09:57