Investments

The Budget Optimization Engine

Introduction

Investment is a sub module and an optimization parameter that falls under the Improve module. Improve is also called the In-Flight Module and applies to all the live campaigns and not just the once that were activated using Consumr.ai platform. Anyone who has worked on digital media campaigns, would know that campaign planning only gets you headed in the right direction, but to arrive at your precise target, you sure need course correction. In other words, planning is like looking at your map in your cell phone without switching your GPS to high accuracy. It will get you around your destination but not drop you at the doorstep. When you switch the accuracy to High, you will reach the exact location. Improve is like setting your GPS to the highest level of accuracy.

Overall, Improve touches upon 3 most critical dimensions of optimization.

Investments: Budget Optimization

Targeting: Targeting Optimization

Creative: Copy and Visual Ads Optimization

In this manual, we will mainly be focusing on Investments. The concept of budget optimization that falls under the Investment section is to ensure that your most valuable adsets are sufficiently fuelled based on the performance you get. Since the marketing landscape is constantly moving, you can’t optimize your budgets just once, but regularly. Investments will be a quicker way to keep a check on your account.

How to get to Improve - Investments?

As mentioned above, even though ‘Improve’ is a part of In-flight stage that comes after Pre-Flight, the module applies to all the Meta campaigns that are live so far and hence placed on the home screen, to let you get directly into the live campaigns.

On the home page you have the Omnibox that you use to get insights. Alternatively, right below you have the option to “Switch to Browse Mode”

Click it and you will see 3 tabs up top of the screen.

The second one is ‘Improve’. Click it to enter the In-flight mode.

Getting to the campaigns

In the improve section, the first bar is where you select the options.

As you can see, there are 3 drop downs to the left. First is to select a platform. As mentioned earlier, currently Inflight/Improve mode is only available for Meta Ecosystem.

Second is Account. All the accounts that are linked to the Organization you are in, will show up here. Ensure that you have the right Organization selected.

The third dropdown is Objective. The data that populated in Investments will be based on the objective you select. This is not a filter. The Budget optimization feature of Investments picks up the data depending on the objective you choose.

And lastly on the right side of the bar, you can see the date selection. Ideally Improve considers 14 days of data by default, however you can increase the date range manually and consumr.ai will redo the calculations with relevant data. Remember, that this feature works on a complex set of algorithms and would need statistically significant data to perform. For example, if your campaign is live for 14 days but you have just 1 action (action is an output as per the objective of the campaign), then the tool will not be able to give you an output. You will have to either increase the period or change the objective to something higher up in the funnel. Alternatively, if you have 500 actions in 3 days, Improve’s Investment module will still give you an output. We recommend that the campaign should be live atleast for 7 days so that abnormal events can be eradicated by the spread of data.

Investments - From Campaign to Adset Level

In the above image you can see that there are 3 tabs that helps toggle between Investments and Audience Resonance. Overview is still a work in progress and will focus on account level insights. Investments helps optimize budgets between campaigns and/or between adsets, while Audience resonance works with in adsets and between Ads (a.k.a creatives). Hence, you will see that Investments is an entry point, though you don’t have to optimize budgets always.

Investments at Campaign Level

To start optimizing your budgets, you can start by clicking on the ‘Investments’ tab. Right up on top of the tab, you will see two sub tabs, that shows the hierarchy. This means that you can optimize your budgets both at Campaign and Adset level. At the campaign level, you will be able to see all the campaigns across all objectives by default. However, you will not be able to optimizer budgets across Objectives. You will be required to select 2 or more campaigns across which you want to optimize budget. Should you only want to optimize budgets for one campaign, you will need at least 2 or more adset in it with at least 10 or more actions.

If you click on the campaign name of any one campaign, it will directly take you to the adset sub tab and show you the names of the adsets in the selected campaign. You won’t be required to click on the Optimize Budget button at the bottom. However, if you want to optimize budgets of adsets across more than 2 or more campaigns, you will need to click on the check box in the campaign sub tab and hit the Recommend Budget Tabs.

Budget recommendations ideally happens at the adset level that also reflects at the campaign level. Hence, when you click the ‘Recommend Budgets’ button, ‘Investments’ module will calculate the budgets and take you directly to the Adset sub tab. We will learn more about it in the sections below.

Show Retargeting Campaigns

Statistically speaking it is always a good idea to normalize data before you can process it. In layman terms, you have got to compare apple to an apple, else the comparison will lead to biased or skewed results. This applies to our budget optimization algorithm. In most if not all the cases, if you get your retargeting segments right it will always outperform other campaigns. To get the retargeting audiences right, you will need to pick them out from calculated and analyzed target segments, remove the noises, and intelligently communicate with these audiences, that they eventually land up as a part of the retargeting segments.

How do we get there is a story that consumr.ai helps you write and will be explained over a series of our instruction manuals (including this), blogs, videos, and a lot more. But for now, let’s get back to the Investment module. If your retargeting campaigns are performing way better than the rest (and rightly so), it is wise to remove them out of the equation before you calculate the performance. The check box gives you an option to:

1) Add retargeting campaigns to the rest of the campaigns.

2) Remove all other campaigns and only calculate budgets amongst retargeting campaigns.

3) Get budget recommendations without retargeting campaigns.

By doing this you can consciously choose to include or exclude campaigns with high bias and the get budget recommendations.

Understanding the data table at Campaign level

The data table at campaign level is very straight forward and has headers that are known to any entry level digital marketer. However, we will still explain these in a sentence each. If you would like to more, you can google about it.

Campaigns: The names of the campaigns based on the objectives selected in the drop down above the tabs.

Impressions: The count of time your ads across this campaign(s) was shown to the audiences. This is different from reach.

Clicks: The count of times audiences clicked on the link on your ads across the campaign(s).

Spend: The total amount spent by all the ads across the campaign(s).

CPA: Also called Cost per Action is just an average of cost per conversion based on the objective of the campaign. Spend divided by Actions.

Actions: Number of times the objective was achieved by ads across the campaign(s).

Investments at Adset Level

As explained above the ideal budget reallocation happens at the adset level which then translates at campaign level. Select more than one campaign or click directly on the link of one campaign you will come to the adset sub tab. If you choose the former option, you will be required to click on Recommend Budget button at the campaign level. If later, then recommend budget button can be clicked at the adset level itself. However, you must remember the rule of 10 actions and more than 2 adsets, whether you select one campaign or more.

Understanding the data table at adset level

Campaign: The names of the campaigns based on the objectives selected in the drop down above the tabs.

Adsets: The names of the adsets that belong to the selected campaigns.

Current Budget: The current budget that are assigned on the media platform at the time of budget recommendation.

Recommended Budget: The budget that ‘Investments’ module recommends based on the performance of each adset in relation to the other. This budget will not be applied in the media platform till you don’t hit the ‘Apply Recommendations’ button below the adset table.

Delta: This is the difference of money before an after. The amounts will be in positives and negatives. If you add this column up, you should get a Zero value. This is because Budget optimization does not exceed budget allocation beyond or below the current budget assigned.

Impressions: The count of time your ads across this Adset(s) was shown to the audiences. This is different from reach.

Clicks: The count of times audiences clicked on the link on your ads across the adset(s).

Spend: The total amount spent by all the ads across the adset(s).

CPA: Also called Cost per Action is just an average of cost per conversion based on the objective of the campaign. Spend divided by Actions.

Actions: Number of times the objective was achieved by ads across the adset(s).

How does it work?

We have tried to simplify this in the product interface, but the Investment module is comprising of a series of complex algorithms that work in tandem and as per situation to give you the best reallocation of budgets, with in the given constraint of overall campaign budgets, whether it is daily or lifetime. In this section, we will cover the logical explanation of how this module works.

Date Range Selection

When you hit ‘Recommend budgets’ consumr.ai pulls up the current data for the past 14 days (by default). You can select a smaller date range or a longer time, however you need to remember that the wider the date range, the law of averages catches up and it might normalize the sudden yet significant shifts in the data. Though the intelligent algorithms of consumr.ai employs the factor of recency to the data, which means that it gives more preference to the data recent data and the reduces the importance given to older data. Yet, adding more days to the mix will dilute the weightage and give less power to the days that matters the most. Similarly, reducing the date range to lesser days than 7 days will make the algorithm more sensitive and concentrated. For example, if you take 3 days data and one of the 3 days shows incredibly high actions as compared to the last 60 days, the algorithm may assign very high budgets that may not be spent or if it does, it may not give you the desired out.

You need to be extremely careful about the times when you reduce the dates to short periods, but that does not mean that you cannot do it at all. For example, there is a seasonality that is approaching for your business, and you are in your 3rd day. The data will show a sudden shift. Though consumr.ai’s recency algorithm will pick it up, you can have the option of how aggressively you want the budgets to be assigned and hence you can reduce the dates to 7 days or less, to ensure that the algorithm becomes more concentrated and sensitive. However, you should do it at your own risk and know that ProfitWheel does not advocate it.

Factors it considers in reassigning budgets

The investment module of consumr.ai considers draws factors using the recency logic and draws its confidence from datasets built on metrics: Actions, Frequency, Budget utilization, RoAS and CPA

Conclusion

In conclusion, ‘Investments’ module is a part of the Improve function and focuses on budget optimization. It is an extremely sensitive and aware algorithm that shuffles budgets amongst campaigns and adsets from the same objectives based on their performances over a period.

It is a potent way to ensure that your campaigns adapt to the changing landscape of meta platforms (so far). This module is not self-initiated and hence you will be required to run it at regular frequencies. Through our customer success team may sometimes advise you to execute this module at a standard frequency, it is only done to get you in a habit. As you become a regular at using this platform, you will understand that executing this module depends on the actions and spends for each campaign. For example, if your actions and spends are consistent, then you can standardize the frequency of using this module. However, in case when the campaign spends are erratic (which will be the case usually), you may want to understand the significance of variances and then choose when to apply changes recommended by the Investments module. This means, you can use it daily, but only apply recommendations when you see a significant change recommendation.