Skai Budget Manager: In today’s Friday Feature Focus, we examine one of Skai’s most innovative features to help you maximize your investment with machine learning across your Search, Social, and Ecommerce campaigns.
Do you ever find yourself wondering any of the following?
- Where should I invest my next dollar?
- Am I going to hit my revenue goals?
- Will I be able to spend the budget?
- How should I allocate my budget across publishers, objectives, audiences, product categories, and geographies?
At its core, marketing is truly an exercise in resource management and how to spend the budget in the best way to drive the most optimal return-on-investment (ROI).
Skai Budget Manager: Powered by Machine Learning
Skai Budget Manager helps marketers to forecast, optimize and monitor Search, Social, and Ecommerce budgets with ease. Powered by machine learning, this technology automatically adjusts spend to achieve your business goals, with continuous feedback on expected results, so you can stay ahead of trends and the competition.
“We want to make campaign management easy and efficient,” says Moran Shimron, Skai’s Director of Product Management. “Budget Manager helps marketers control their pacing and accurately forecast their campaigns. It also provides what if? analysis to find the sweet spot between spend and ROI. After all, at some point, as you add more budget, every campaign will eventually hit a point of diminishing returns. Knowing how and where to invest your dollars is not easy without the aid of technology to calculate the data.”
Within the platform, Skai clients can group their campaigns into portfolios. Generally, the best use of portfolios is to group campaigns with similar business objectives and goals. For example, if you have a product line or business unit that has multiple campaigns across publishers, by grouping them into a single portfolio, they can be managed and optimized together as a single initiative.
Simply drop a portfolio into Skai Budget Manager and define your KPIs to get started.
Skai Budget Manager Features
Forecast. Ever wonder how a change in your budget might impact your key performance indicators (KPIs)? Maybe your boss or your client wants to drive more results and is willing to add incremental dollars to some of the campaigns? Using Skai Budget Manager, you can quickly use the interactive graph to see how budget changes might influence your metrics.
Easy optimization. Simply set the budget and KPIs for your portfolios and Skai Budget Manager will pace your campaigns accordingly. It will move budget between the campaigns of a portfolio automatically in order to hit your goals.
Seasonality. In some cases, you know that specific days within a flight should have a heavier or lighter spend than simply spending the budget evenly every day. For example, if there’s a big promotion or holiday coming up, you can set those days to spend a bit more and even be a little bit more lenient on your ROI goals so that you don’t miss additional revenue. Use historical, year-over-year spend levels to help guide your decisions.
“Budget Manager is the magic crystal ball of marketing. This was the feature I was begging for when I was a practitioner,” says Desirea Calvillo, Skai’s Senior Product Marketing Manager of Search. “Marketers don’t always have the time to crunch the numbers on every question. Often, they wonder what will happen if they change the budget of a campaign, but because they’re not sure, they simply leave it alone and move on to the next task. Budget Manager not only can help to answer these questions, but it can also optimize in the background so marketers can focus on more strategic initiatives.”
Skai Budget Manager FAQs
Q. Can this feature be used across channels?
As of now, portfolios can only be created at the channel level, but you can group campaigns across publishers for the same channel such as Search, Social, or Ecommerce.
Q. Can I plan budgets in advance?
Yes, you can. You can plan up to 31 days in advance and continue to replan leading up to the flight.
Q. What are clients saying?
“Skai’s flexible optimization, cross-engine budget management, and automated campaign mirroring were critical to achieving the scale we needed for our regional expansion. We not only saved significant amounts of time, but we hit our revenue targets as well,” says Heiko Eckert, Director of Online Marketing at STYLEBOP.com.
Interested in learning more about Skai Budget Manager?
Skai clients, please reach out to your rep to learn more about this feature.
For non-Skai clients, sign up for a demo to see this feature and everything else Skai has to offer across Search, Social, and Ecommerce advertising.