Forecasting by monthly run rate: Do it the right way
To start, download a day-of-week report in AdWords for a timeframe that makes sense for your account. Accounts with low volume or accounts that can fluctuate dramatically day to day may want to look farther back. If spend is pretty consistent week over week, you can get away with a shorter lookback. Or, if you have made significant changes in the last two weeks, you may just want to look at the last week’s data. The biggest thing is to make sure the lookback period is a multiple of 7.
Once that is pulled, you need to determine what your reference spend will be for each day of the week. If you pulled one week of data, you don’t need to change spend numbers. Otherwise, you will want to just divide spend by # of weeks included in the report.
Once this table is created, you need to take a second report that has the current month’s numbers through yesterday. In Excel, fill down the date column to include the rest of the month. Add another column titled Day of Week, and fill its cells with the formula =TEXT(<datecell>, “ddd”). From there you need only to a quick vLookup to fill in day of week averages for the remainder of the month.
Why bother splitting things out by day of week? A common mistake I see is toward the end of the month, an account is on a fixed budget and overspending. An easy assumption to make is that each day will spend equally, ignoring that weekends might spend less. This leads to overcompensating and perhaps reducing spend during the workweek by too much, creating underspend for the entire month.
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