How to Use the Manage Page

Overview

The Manage Page in Planful for Marketing serves as a comprehensive hub where you can create, edit, and monitor the three essential components that form your Marketing Plan:

Goals and Success Metrics

In this section, you can define your marketing objectives and set measurable success metrics. These goals help guide your marketing efforts and provide clear targets to measure performance.

Budget

This section helps you to manage your marketing budget. This involves setting allocation for different marketing activities, campaigns, and initiatives. By tracking and adjusting your budget on this page, you can ensure the optimal allocation of resources to meet your marketing objectives.

Marketing Activities

This section allows you to plan and organize all your marketing activities. You can outline specific campaigns, strategies, and tactics to execute your marketing plan effectively. Monitoring your marketing activities on this page helps you stay on track and adapt to any changes or new opportunities.

Understanding Status

Below are the different statuses:

• Actual: Refers to money that has already been spent, applicable only to Expenses. 
• Planned: Denotes a budget that serves as a rough estimate. This money is intended for spending, but keep in mind that it is subject to potential changes. This status is relevant to Campaigns and Expense Groups. 
• Committed: Represents money that you are fully expecting to spend. This could be due to signing a contract or receiving PO approval, and it's important to utilize this amount; otherwise, you risk losing it. The committed amount is unlikely to undergo any changes. 
• Available: Signifies money not assigned to any specific campaign, expense group, or expense. It remains completely unallocated and is free for use.

Rows

The leftmost column on the Manage page contains the hierarchy of your marketing activities. It's where you organize your marketing efforts using two building blocks: campaigns and expense groups. Each row in this column represents either a campaign, an expense group, or a combination of multiple campaigns or expense groups, like a segment or goal.

You have the flexibility to group your campaigns and expense groups based on your preferences. You can choose to view them by segment, goal, or simply as a flat list.

If a campaign is related to a specific segment or goal, you will find it listed under that corresponding segment or goal in the column.

Organize by Segment

When you group by segment, the table may have up to 3 additional rows that provide more information about the segment:

• Segment Row: This row represents the segment as a whole. It includes the Total Budget column, which displays the budget set for that segment. This budget figure can be edited by administrators on the Manage page, as it is a manually entered value.
• Campaigns and Expense Groups Row: This row aggregates the budgets of all the campaigns and expense groups within that segment. The cells in this row show the total sums exclusively for campaigns and expense groups. It does not include any budget or actual spending attributed directly to the segment itself.
• Unallocated Row: This row displays the total sum of all expenses attributed to the segment but not allocated to any specific campaigns or expenses within that segment. Since expenses do not have individual budgets, the Total Budget column in this row will always be equal to the Actual Spend column. You cannot plan or commit any budget to an expense, nor can you place any items in the hierarchy below an expense. As a result, the Remaining Committed Budget and Remaining Planned Budget columns will always display N/A. Additionally, since the Available Budget is calculated as the difference between the Total Budget and all other columns, it will always be 0 in this case.

Organize by Goal

When you group by goal, an additional row appears for each goal, and beneath it, you'll find all the campaigns and expense groups attributed to that specific goal. Since goals themselves do not have budgets, the columns displaying the budget show aggregate values for everything within the hierarchy of that goal.

Organize by Campaign

Choosing to group by campaign results in a flat list of all your campaigns and expense groups, while still maintaining the hierarchy of any child campaigns or expense groups within each campaign.

In this hierarchy, every row signifies a different level while maintaining the structure above and below it. However, each cell holds unique and separate values for the segment, goal, campaign, or expense group it pertains to. This enables a thorough analysis of each element's performance without any influence from the adjacent data.

Columns

On the Manage page, the columns can be organized by month, quarter, or entire year, allowing you to view all the values for each element in your hierarchy in the most relevant aggregate. Let's simplify things by focusing on January. The Manage page's table has multiple columns that provide essential financial data.

Total Budget

The first column displays the Total Budget for each segment, goal, campaign, or expense group in the hierarchy. For segments, administrators can edit this value. Goals' budgets cannot be edited directly as they are aggregates. However, for campaigns and expense groups, anyone with admin or read/write permissions can edit the budgets.

Available Amount

The last column represents the Available Amount, which indicates the unallocated funds for the respective campaign, expense group, or segment. For Goals, that do not have their budgets, the available amount is relative to its campaigns' available amounts; there is no available budget within a Goal. The calculation for the available amount is the Total Budget minus the total spent or planned expenses, which results in the remaining available funds. This calculation takes into account all the columns listed between Total Budget and Available Amount. The formula for calculating the Available Amount can be viewed through the Configure Table option on the Manage page.

Actual Spend

The second column displays the Actual Spend, representing the total expenses incurred within each segment, goal, campaign, or expense group. This value is calculated and cannot be directly edited. By clicking on the value, you can access the expense page and see the breakdown of all expenses contributing to that total.

Remaining Committed Budget

The Remaining Committed Budget column represents the portion of the budget from the segment, goal, campaign, or expense group that has been assigned and committed to specific activities within its hierarchy. For example, if a campaign has a budget, the Remaining Committed Budget indicates how much of that budget has been allocated and committed to other campaigns or expense groups within that campaign's hierarchy.

When calculating the Available Amount for the original campaign, it's essential to subtract any budget that has been committed to specific activities, such as approved purchase orders (POs) or signed contracts. This ensures that the committed budget is not considered as available funds. Any object with a committed status will have its committed budget deducted from the budgets of the segments, goals, campaigns, or expense groups above it in the hierarchy.

For example, let's consider a scenario:

• The Customer Satisfaction Program has a budget of $1,000.
• There is a child campaign called Focus Group Sessions with a planned budget of $800.
• Within Focus Group Sessions, there's an expense group called Boston Session with a budget of $250, which is committed.

The committed budget of $250 from the Boston Session is deducted from the budgets of both the Focus Group Sessions and the Customer Satisfaction Program campaigns, as it has been allocated to specific activities within their hierarchies.

Remaining Planned Budget

The Remaining Planned Budget column functions similarly to the Remaining Committed Budget column, except for one distinction: campaigns and expense groups with the Planned status do not have the same level of commitment within the hierarchy.

While a committed amount represents a contract or approved purchase order, a planned amount is more flexible and represents a rough, tentative plan or estimation. Planned budgets are taken into account within a parent campaign's budget, but they do not roll all the way up to the top of the hierarchy.

In the previous example:

• Focus Group Sessions has an additional expense group called Chicago Session, which is Planned. Relative to Focus Group Sessions, it has a budget of $800.
• $100 has already been spent on Chicago Session (Actual Spend).
• $150 of the Chicago Session's budget is committed to the Boston Session (Remaining Committed Budget).
• There is a plan to spend $250 on the Chicago Session (Planned).
• Therefore, Focus Group Sessions' Available amount is calculated as $800 - $100 - $150 - $250 = $300.
  
  

The $250 Planned budget for Chicago Session is taken into account in the budget of Focus Group Sessions, which also has a Planned status. When looking at the Customer Satisfaction Program, the $250 budget of the Chicago Session is accounted for in the $550 Remaining Planned Budget of Focus Group Sessions. This Remaining Planned Budget is the Planned budget of Focus Group Sessions ($800), minus what has actually been spent ($100), and minus what has been committed ($150), which equals $550.