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.
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.
Budget Variance Analysis
Metric | How to Use It |
---|---|
Monthly plan vs actual variance | Compare planned spend against actual spend for the current month to identify over/underspending early |
Deviation between YTD planned and actual | Calculate the difference between Year-To-Date planned and actual spend to understand if you're on track for annual targets |
Remaining budget to move | Identify unspent budget to move dollars around between channels and initiatives while staying within total approved budget |