Budget pacing may seem like old news. Bid strategies are a fundamental part of any digital marketer’s playbook, making sure campaign budgets are effectively spent in full. What is not fundamental though, is how those marketers complete their pacing processes across social media platforms without missing real-time optimization opportunities. Social media pacing typically focuses on flat budget tracking. It lacks sophistication in allocating that budget throughout the flight period, without connecting campaign goals to campaign spend. Enter, Connex®.
Connex is Rise’s proprietary, cross-channel media optimization platform. Our Connex team has been hard at work building a solution for this social media spending problem with a dynamic path to better budget management…Paid Social Pacing.
Paid Social Pacing is a new Connex tool that enables marketers to evolve beyond flat-pacing and spreadsheets in three key areas:
Connex Paid Social Pacing allows marketers to follow social spend AND performance benchmarking in real-time across all major social media platforms. Connex constantly refreshes the data dashboard to show how specific flights or campaigns are pacing by Spend and by Goals for the current day or the dates of your choice. The Connex Paid Social Pacing dashboard updates by continuously pulling and displaying the most recent cost and performance data as marketers’ optimizations make live impacts throughout the day.
EXAMPLE: Connex Paid Social Pacing shows me that we are pacing cold on three social media campaigns so far this week. I also see that Snapchat’s overall CPA is above goal and significantly better than the CPA of Instagram’s remarketing tactics. We decide to reallocate dollars into Snapchat to even out pacing and determine economies of scale.
Within the tool, marketers also have the flexibility to choose a unique flight KPI for specific budgets. For example, you can gage the ROAS of sales–focused flights and Cost per Reach of awareness-focused flights from the same screen. When marketers can track their flight KPIs alongside their spend, it paves the way for smarter, more impactful optimizations.
Connex Paid Social Pacing equips marketers with a number of advanced methods for social spend planning and forecasting. The system takes a series of inputs and historical analyses into account to provide detailed updates and recommendations. For example, Connex can automatically anticipate higher spend on days of the week with greater historical demand.
The power of this intelligence-based forecasting within Connex is all contingent on the prompts. The more precisely we can define goals, the more precisely Connex can dynamically forecast and pace across all social media platforms. The Rise team works with our clients to gather all of the necessary input-ready data (budgets, flight dates, upcoming promo dates, historical data, etc.), so each account can take full advantage of what Connex has to offer.
Once you know the overall spend and performance status, you can dig into more granular insights and find the why behind the numbers. This makes it easier for marketers to discover effective areas to allocate more budget or areas that are deviating from the goal or spend plan.
EXAMPLE: My brand launched promotional ads across Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest. Connex Paid Social Pacing shows me that our largest campaign is pacing cold and below the forecasted goal. I click on that campaign and see that it is doing well on TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest, but Meta needs attention. Using the audience view, I can see that one of the third-party (3P) audiences is not succeeding on Meta, although it is performing well on the other social platforms. We decide to pause the low-value 3P audience on Meta and shift the remaining dollars to higher-value tactics.
We now know that Connex Paid Social Pacing provides real-time visibility into cross-platform spending, performance pacing, and forecasting. Our team could hit refresh every 15 minutes to make sure no changes fall through the cracks, with some bathroom breaks and time to sleep baked in. OR, we can use Connex Alerts! Connex Alerts proactively provide a series of benefits for marketers to take advantage of while pacing across social media, including:
- Notify marketers of time-sensitive opportunities and risks
- Capitalize on intra-day optimizations
- Receive instant awareness via email, Slack, or SMS
Similar to Paid Social Pacing, setting up your customized Connex Alerts also depends on your inputs. Your Rise team can recommend which Connex Alerts to use based on your audience and goals. The team and technology provide the flexibility to customize what and when you would like to be notified, at any level of granularity you’d prefer. Plus, with a wide variety of Connex Alerts built and available, if no one receives any pacing alerts for the day, then no news is good news!
EXAMPLE: It is the Tuesday of Cyber Week. Last year, traffic started picking up in the second half of the week as Black Friday approached. Connex Paid Social Pacing shows me that we are on track so far this week. On Tuesday afternoon, I receive a Connex Alert notifying me and my team that TikTok traffic is spiking and needs immediate attention. We shift spend to TikTok and launch an ad set early that was initially planned to go live on Wednesday.
We’re here to help: Contact us today to meet your newest intelligence-based tool, Connex!
