In the world of pay-per-click advertising, the (often) multi-million dollar questions you’re always trying to answer are: What should I be spending on different parts of my programs? What will I get in return? How should I assign these budgets to each campaign?

Answering these questions can be challenging. Often, this involves looking at historical data and summarizing the volume available for various scenarios -- building mathematical models of volume versus efficiency. Such models can be used to predict future performance (or forecast, if you will), providing the marketers with suggestions on where to allocate budgets. The more accurate the forecasts, the better the budget decisions. This requires more investment in complex mathematical models, which creates additional maintenance and work as new data points come in the form of the latest performance metrics.

We want to make that process easier, so we developed MarinOne Bid Strategy Forecasts to arm search marketers with the information to make better budget decisions. The tool also leads to valuable time savings, as marketers no longer have to build their own models using historical data. With access to years of historical data, including customer downstream realized revenue, Marin’s forecasting engine can predict publisher metrics, such as click and cost and data-warehouse tracked revenue data, while taking into account any seasonality specific to your business. These complex calculations a

What do the What-if Charts display? The chart summarizes the relationship between publisher cost and revenue or conversions within a bid strategy, thereby displaying the tradeoffs between volume and efficiency. Volume is how much you’re willing to spend, and efficiency is your KPI -- CPA, ROAS, budget. A bid strategy is a collection of campaigns that share the same business objective, such as hitting an efficiency goal. Campaigns in a bid strategy are already highly optimized given they’re leveraging MarinOne Bidding, and targeting a higher volume will likely result in sacrificing efficiency. Similarly, targeting a higher efficiency will result in loss in volume. Using the chart, I can ask that very question “What-if?” and get an immediate response from the chart gods.

Depending on the type of business, the answer may be different. A lot of in-house SEM teams have strict goals to never underperform from an efficiency standpoint. Lead gen performance marketers having relationships with lead buyers can ensure they can hit their monthly lead quota by targeting spend that will satisfy the monthly conversion volume. E-commerce advertisers will get directives on allocated budgets that change month to month. Using the What-if analysis, they can forecast projected revenue and efficiency (ROAS) for spend targets.

MarinOne Bid Strategy forecasts are available to all Marin customers today. Check it out in your account or contact a sales representative for more details.