What are the most reliable marketing administration tools for tracking ad spend across multiple channels?

When running ads, small businesses or solopreneurs need a different approach than companies with bigger marketing budgets. One of the biggest factors to consider is your ad spend. Once your ad spend exceeds $3,000 to $5,000 a month, a dashboard becomes essential to avoid overspending. My favorite tool is HubSpot Marketing Hub. It’s a CRM, marketing dashboard, and tracker with great analytics. However, it’s expensive and can be hard to navigate for beginners. For those just starting, AdEspresso is a fantastic alternative. It tracks both social media and Google Ads, offering an easy-to-use interface and valuable insights without the high cost or complexity.

The most reliable marketing administration tools for tracking ad spend across multiple channels include Google Analytics, HubSpot, AdStage, and Marin Software. These tools offer comprehensive tracking, reporting, and integration capabilities to manage and analyze ad spend effectively.

Hey there! For robust ad spend tracking across various channels, I highly recommend tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads Manager, and HubSpot. They offer comprehensive insights to optimize your marketing strategies effectively. ?? #MarketingTools #Analytics

To effectively track marketing spend across multiple channels, inherently there needs to be an ability across a core platform (or platforms) to either integrate directly (or indirectly) with your source of truth. For many companies, the data warehouse acts an aggregator for all spend (and overall customer intelligence) where it can thereafter be visualized in a business intelligence or visualization platform. In that example, the data warehouse is the source of truth and it needs to have the ability to ingest information, especially spend, from your channels. The ingestion can occur natively or can be done indirectly through API aggregators (i.e. Zapier, Workato). Channels needs to integrate into a source of truth.

You need to track your campaign results real time to be able to shift budget, improve targeting if required (which will improve ROI), but whether you need a tool to manage your ad spent budget depends on your company size. If you are only running few campaigns at a time you can just track spent in your ads account and track your campaign results in your data warehouse. Make sure your ad accounts connected to your data warehouse so you can build full funnel reports. When you start growing and having lots of campaigns them you can invest in a new tool to manage your spend if you need.

I’m not sure if you need a specific tool to track ad spend (especially for small companies), you could just do it in a dashboard . Get the data from all ads accounts to your data warehouse, also create a table with your budget and forecasts and then bring all this data in your dashboard. I’ve also seen companies use excel or google sheets to track budget. Of course big companies with tons of campaigns and huge budget will need a more advanced tool but for small companies you can track manually in excel rather than buying more tools.