Industry:
B2B
Location:
London, England, UK
http://www.reachplc.com
  • Reach PLC worked directly with their Marin account team to build a bespoke budget pacing solution that populates with data automatically and identifies areas of over or under spending.
  • The new dashboard solution allows campaign managers to spend 50% less time on budget pacing, freeing up time to focus on other pressing needs.

Background

Reach PLC is a British newspaper, magazine, and digital publisher that produces and distributes content to audiences across the UK and Ireland. They are one of Britain’s largest newspaper groups, publishing 240 regional papers and eight national newspapers, in addition to running multi-platform digital sites for desktop, mobile, and mobile apps. Listed on the London Stock Exchange, it is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index.

Reach PLC offers digital marketing services to SMB advertisers across the UK. They oversee a vast volume of campaigns that often have a short lifespan. On average, the Reach campaign management teams might have 100+ campaigns live at any given time, across multiple ad accounts and publishers.

The custom pacing dashboard that Marin built for us has saved us so much time! On top of that, we’re now able to spot campaigns that are over or under pacing more quickly so we can pivot and adjust budgets more efficiently than ever. We never would have been able to do that without Marin’s help.

Matt Basham
Head of Digital Marketing Services at Reach PLC

Challenge

With such a large number of campaigns running at once, with varying budgets, objectives, and start and end dates, the Reach team needed a solution to support the spend pacing of their campaigns and improve their ability to manage campaigns at scale. Managing so many campaigns manually was both challenging and time intensive.

Solution

Marin Software collaborated with the Reach PLC teams to build and develop a bespoke Campaign Pacing Dashboarding & Alerts solution that allowed the teams to easily and efficiently understand when and where campaigns were under- or overpacing.

The dashboard was set up on Google Sheets and populated with data from a MarinOne web query report. With Marin, users can build a recurring report and turn it into a web query simply by copying the report’s static URL and dropping it into Microsoft Excel or any other reporting dashboard like Google Sheets. The user can then use the web query as a living source for the most up-to-date performance data, without ever needing to log into Marin, all while benefiting from Marin’s in-depth reporting and analysis tools.

Every morning, the data dynamically updates inside the Google Sheets document and replaces the previous day’s data to accurately reflect the evolving spend against set budgets and dates. The pacing calculations paired nicely with Excel formulas to automate short pacing indicators and messages (e.g. “Underpacing”, “On track”, “Overpacing”).

Results

The custom budget pacing dashboard solution created by Marin reduced the amount of time campaign managers were spending on budget pacing by more than 50%, in addition to streamlining and simplifying the process. Reach has been able to use their time savings to focus on improving performance.