🍂 Use Recast to make changes in-period

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.

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This guide also applies if you are performing as planned but want to further improve your budget. Simply skip to the Identify Opportunities to Improve section

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.

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You can add a goal in the Goals tab of the Recast dashboard. All you need is a KPI goal for the period and a budget.

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.

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This requires that you run a forecast of your plan at the start of your plan period.

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.

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You can download your current budget from your goal by clicking ‘Edit’ on the goal page and then ‘Download’ under your budget.

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 Last week snapshot 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 level deep dive page.

1. If you noticed any channel that is not performing as expected, you can go to the channel performance tab for that 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.

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Highlight a section of the graph to zoom in on a particular timeframe.

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.

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Metrics regarding seasonality are useful to have handy internally to contextualize what you are seeing in Recast.

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.

Marginal ROI

The marginal ROI graph shows the channels where it is most efficient to spend the next dollar.

1. Navigate to the Weekly snapshot and scroll to Marketing Effectiveness graph.
2. Look at the legend to find the MROI bar.
3. Compare MROIs between channels to find where it is most effective to spend your next dollar.

Note that these graphs are purely based on historical data. They are not projections of future performance as the marginal ROI is calculated at the current spend level, not the spend levels you may use in the future. The Automatic Recommendations and Optimizer are better tools for future planning.

Automatic recommendations

If you have a goal set up for your budget, Recast provides automatic recommendations for how you can improve performance towards your goal. These recommendations update each week as the model learns more about how your budget is actually performing in period.

1. Scroll down to the bottom of the Goals page.
2. Find the Spend Recommendations (the green and red) chart. This tells you which channels the model recommends increasing spend in and which channels the model recommends decreasing spend.

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Note that the recommendations keep your daily spend constant throughout the budget period.

The graph next to this chart shows you the suggested change between your current lagging budget and the optimized budget.

Re-run the Optimizer

The optimizer is a powerful tool to combine all of Recast’s knowledge to gain recommendations for how to improve your plan. If you have certain levers or constraints when making in-period changes, you can use the optimizer for more control over your budget update.

Set your target for the rest of the plan period:

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This is if you are optimizing towards Total Outcome. If you are optimizing towards profit or efficiency. Set the same contribution margin or efficiency target as your original plan.

Find your Target Objective:

You want to set the optimizer target as the difference between the in-period realized outcome and your goal. To do this you will need to also account for the future effect of your paid marketing.

1. Run the period summary for the beginning of your plan period to the current model date
2. Find the Future Effect of your ‘All Channel’ spend
3. Add this to the outcome so far from your goal. If you don’t have a goal set up add this to your ‘All Channels’ Total Effect + In period realized Baseline Outcome (find the baseline realized during the period using the Intercept Summary report). This is your in-period Earned Blended Outcome.
4. Subtract your in-period Earned Blended Outcome from your goal amount.
5. This value will be the Total Outcome you enter in the Optimizer.

Click into each of our guides to learn how to use the optimizer for each use case:

Determine how much you will have to increase your spend to hit your goal

Determine how to flight your spend differently to improve your outcome

Add spend on top of your current budget

Subtract spend from your current budget

Once your optimizer has finished running, see how the expected outcome compares to the current forecast of your current plan.

1. To compare the in-period effects of both the optimized budget and the current plan, first download the optimized budget from the optimizer.
2. Then navigate to the forecaster and select your planning timeframe and use the ‘upload a budget’ option to upload your optimized budget.
3. Run the forecast
4. Using the forecast comparisons tool, select the forecast of current plan and the optimized plan.

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If you don’t have a forecast of your current plan download the budget from your goal and run it through the forecaster.

5. Compare the outcome of each budget. Look at the Spend comparison graph. Look for any key differences between the budgets to identify which channels drive the difference. These are the channels that Recast recommends spending differently into to improve your plan.

It could be worth investigating into changes at the channel level to pinpoint specific strategies or creatives that contributed to the change in the expected performance of your channel since the beginning of the period.

Re-measure your progress

Once you have pinpointed how to improve your expected outcome in period, it is time to execute the change. Gain the necessary internal stakeholder approval, and progress to execute the change.

1. Go to the Goals tab and click ‘Add Goal’.
   1. Enter the name of your goal. It can be helpful to use the same name as your previous goal and add a version number so you can later compare versions. eg. Q1 2025 v2
   2. Enter the same period start date and the end date as your original plan.
   3. Enter your goal for the period.
2. Upload your optimized budget into the Goals tool and save your new goal.
3. Compare the probability of hitting your goal in the optimized goal and the original goal.

You can now use the updated version of your goal to track the progress of your new budget.

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Edit the name of your initial goal to indicate that the budget has now been deprecated.

Throughout the period, you can come back to this optimized goal and repeat the process to ensure you stay on track toward your desired goal. Use the deprecated goal to compare improvements from your new plan over the initial one.