Automate Actuals Tracking

How to track the marketing spend and how to automate it? Tools, setup and useful practices to make the tracking more efficient.

While finance teams track overall spending, keep your own marketing actuals tracking to enable quick decisions and maintain control over your marketing budget.

You shouldn't be copy-pasting every line monthly on your own. This section covers how to make the tracking process efficient and less manual.

Finance teams typically provide monthly totals with a one-month delay and without detailed breakdowns. Your own tracking system lets you compare numbers and maintain full budget control.

Automate These Two Areas

1. Real-Time Media Platform Data

Connect your paid advertising accounts directly to marketing budget tools:

  • Google Ads actuals
  • LinkedIn campaign spend
  • Meta advertising costs

Use tools like Etropo (for holistic automated actuals tracking) or Splitmetrics (just to pull costs from your media tools) for automated media tracking.

2. Team notifications to update actuals

Set up automated notifications for team members who own specific line items to update actual spend or remind about submitting invoices to your accounting team.

Use Slack notifications to automatically remind team members about their assigned line items that need updates. It's also a feature supported by Etropo.

Budget Variance Analysis

MetricHow to Use It
Monthly plan vs actual varianceCompare planned spend against actual spend for the current month to identify over/underspending early
Deviation between YTD planned and actualCalculate the difference between Year-To-Date planned and actual spend to understand if you're on track for annual targets
Remaining budget to moveIdentify unspent budget to move dollars around between channels and initiatives while staying within total approved budget
Don't let finance processes slow down your campaign decisions. Use real-time data to determine if you should pause or continue marketing initiatives.