Marketing

Marketing Budget & Spend: Projecting Marketing Performance using the Daasity BSD tools

Marketing Budget & Spend

Daasity’s forecasting for marketing often involves two sheets: Marketing Budget and Marketing Spend. This can be confusing by name – essentially:

• Marketing Budget sheet is typically for your targets (what you plan to spend and the results you hope for).

• Marketing Spend sheet is for any manual entry of actual spend that isn’t captured via integration.

Let’s break it down:

Marketing Budget (Plan)

In the BSD, the Marketing Budget tab is where you input your intended marketing plan by vendor/channel . Columns usually include: Date (or period), Vendor, Store, Target Spend, Target CPA, Target ROAS, etc. . You use this to say, for example, “In July, I plan to spend $20,000 on Facebook Ads with a target CPA of $10 and target ROAS of 4.0.”

• Like the revenue plan, you can often specify daily or monthly entries (Budget Period daily vs month) . If daily, you might have a row for each day per vendor; if monthly, one row per month per vendor.

• Vendor refers to the marketing platform or channel (e.g., Facebook, Google, Email, etc.). The sheet might have a dropdown of known vendors. If a vendor isn’t listed, you might need to add it in a Config tab or ask support to update the allowed values .

• Target metrics: Target Spend is required (the budgeted amount) . Target CPA (cost per acquisition) and Target ROAS (return on ad spend) can be optional, but filling them is useful if you have specific efficiency goals . If you don’t use ROAS or CPA for a particular channel, you can leave those blank or at 0.

• Store: If your spend is attributable to a particular store or region, you can note it (optional) . Many times, marketing is just “global” or tied to your main store.

• Don’t add columns; keep within template. Also ensure you don’t double-count (each vendor per period likely should have one row, unless you intentionally split by store).

Marketing Spend (Actuals, entered manually)

The Marketing Spend tab in BSD is slightly different – it’s used to input actual marketing spend data for channels where Daasity isn’t pulling the data automatically. For major ad platforms (Facebook, Google, etc.), Daasity integrates via API, so actual spend comes in on its own. You wouldn’t need to manually input those – in fact, the instructions say not to add vendors that are already pulling via API . However, if you have, say, an influencer campaign budget or a smaller ad network that Daasity doesn’t connect to, you could log that spend here to incorporate it into total marketing analytics.

• Columns in Marketing Spend sheet might include: Channel, Vendor, Spend, Currency, Start Date, End Date, Store . Essentially, you can log an amount of spend over a time period for a vendor.

• Example: Suppose you do a podcast ad for $5,000 in March. If there’s no integration, you could put Vendor “Podcast Ads”, Channel “Audio” (if you define one), Spend = 5000, Start Date = 2024-03-01, End Date = 2024-03-31, Store = “US”. This tells Daasity: add $5k spend for that vendor in March’s actuals.

• The Start/End date fields allow for flexibility if the spend is for a range (e.g., a month or a specific week). If it’s a one-day spend, you might just put the same Start and End date.

• Why separate from Marketing Budget? Think of Budget as the plan/target, and Spend as supplemental actuals. For integrated channels, actuals come from the API. For others, you’re supplying actuals here so that when you look at total spend, it’s complete. It also allows plan vs actual at a granular channel level: you could plan $X for “Other” channels and then fill what was spent.

• Ensure that for any row in Marketing Spend, the Vendor and Channel are spelled exactly as used in the data model (consistency helps it aggregate properly). Also, as noted, don’t include Facebook, Google, etc., here because those would double-count (since API brings them in). Only use for ones not integrated or if you need to override/adjust something.

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Related Dashboards & Explores

After filling these sheets, the data flows in and can be found in:

• Daily Marketing Plan vs Actual Explore – an explore that shows marketing metrics (spend, CAC, ROAS) comparing plan vs actual . For instance, it uses your Revenue Plan (for planned new customers, sessions) and your Marketing Budget (for planned spend) versus actual spend from integrations and actual new customers.

• Dashboards like Marketing Flash vs Plan – showing if you’re overspending or underspending relative to plan, and if results (like new customers or revenue) are hitting targets.

• The Marketing Dashboard and others also incorporate some of this. The BSD Spend data ensures that the total marketing spend number includes everything (so if you manually added “Podcast $5k”, your total marketing spend on the Marketing dashboard will reflect that alongside Facebook etc.) .