🍂 Use Recast to make changes in-period

You planned your budget for the period and are set up to execute. A few weeks in, you notice your budget is not performing as intended. This guide can help you get back on track using Recast.

You can use Recast to:

1. Determine the gap between your current and planned performance.

2. Identify drivers of the gap.

3. Identify opportunities to improve.

4. Re-measure your progress towards your outcome.

Set up

When you have a budget planned for the upcoming period, create a goal to track the progress of your budget. During your weekly reviews, plan to check on the performance of your budget against your goal.

Identify the gap

When you notice you're not progressing as planned, start by evaluating the gap between your goal and how you are currently forecasted to perform. Understanding the size of this gap helps you determine how large of a big swing is needed to close it and get back on track.

Using Goals

1. Once you have a goal set up, you can navigate to the Goals tab and you should see the probability that you will reach your goal.

If this is very low, you know that you will need to make a big swing to reach your set goal for the period.

2. See how much your current performance is lagging behind goal by using the central ‘forecast’ from the Goals page.

3. Look at the ‘projected’ value in the second row of the ‘Details’ table. This shows your forecasted KPI outcome at the end of your plan period.

The main graph on the Goals page visualizes your budget’s forecasted performance compared with how your budget is actually performing in-period.

Using the Forecaster

If you want to track progress over multiple KPIs, you can also use our Forecast Comparisons tool to compare the original forecast of your plan with the updated forecast. This allows you to see what has changed between your original expectations for your budget and the current outcome.

1. Upload your budget into the forecaster using the “upload a file” option, select the same end date as your original plan and run the forecast.

2. When the forecast is complete navigate back to the forecasts homepage and select the checkboxes to the left of each forecast you would like to compare.

3. Once you run the forecast comparison between your original plan and the new forecast, at the top of the page you will see the performance comparison table.

4. Compare the difference between your goal performance and your current actual performance using this table.

The second graph is less relevant to this use case because we are forecasting the same budget.

Identify the drivers

Next, identify the factors causing your budget to perform unexpectedly. Some questions you can ask to investigate are:

Is baseline performance down?

1. Go to the Baseline page in the insights dashboard.

2. Look at the summary plot. Here you can see how your KPI is doing separate from the effects of your marketing.

If your baseline performance is down, this could be impacting your blended ROI/CPA numbers.

Is a particular channel’s performance down?

1. To start your investigation, go to the Overview homepage. Here you will see the weekly change to your overall performance at the top.

2. To find which channels might be contributing to your performance lag, scroll down to the marketing effectiveness chart. This shows you the ROI and MROI of each channel in the 7 days prior to your model refresh.

3. See if you can identify any channels where the ROI is less than what you would expect.

You can continue your investigation in the channel pages.

1. If you noticed any channel that is not performing as expected, you can go to the channel page particular channel. Here you will see the selected channel’s ROI over time.

2. Zoom in on the timeframe of your plan to look for changes to the channels ROI.

Open

Is there an unexpected change in seasonal patterns?

If your business is seasonal, there might be a period during the year when you find that your marketing seems more effective than usual as demand is high. For any reason (eg. it is a particularly gloomy summer so people are not buying as much sunscreen) if a seasonal effect is not as strong on a given year, it might seem like your marketing is less effective than expected.

Did any external factors like competition, changes in price etc. drive the lag?

Factors outside of your marketing sphere might also be affecting your marketing effectiveness. For example, did you recently increase the price of your product? Maybe your market is smaller than estimated at the new price point.

If you have context metrics configured in Recast, you can measure how exogenous changes affect marketing effectiveness.

1. Navigate to the context metrics over time graph. Here you can see historical changes in your context metrics.

2. If you scroll down to the effect over time graph you can see changes to your marketing effectiveness over time.

3. See if you can notice coinciding changes to your context metric and your marketing effectiveness.

This might be an indicator that changes in your context metric is driving the lag in your performance.

Identify your opportunities to improve

‘At-a-glance’ recommendations

If you want to quickly look at the historical performance of each of your channels, you can use the Share of effect and Share of spend graph along with the marginal ROI graph.

Over and under performing channels

You can use the graph to see which of your channels have been outperforming relative to the proportion of that channel in your mix.

1. Navigate to the Weekly snapshot and scroll to the bottom of the page.

2. Here you will see the Share of effect and share of spend graph. The channels that are over performing have a higher share of effect than share of spend. The channels that are underperforming have a higher share of spend than share of effect.