Marketing budget management software and PPC budget management software are similar solutions to a specific need. They both track the spend and efficacy of marketing channels in a unified platform in a way that gives marketers a clear understanding of their macro and micro marketing performance.
One could argue that PPC budget management software, which provides marketers the ability to track and monitor digital advertising spend, is a subset of marketing budget management software. However, the use cases for each type of software vary enough to make them two separate solutions. Likewise, PPC budgeting software commonly falls under PPC management software (which enables the management and optimization of digital advertising campaigns).
Agency vs. Enterprise
While some marketing budget management solutions, such as Plannuh, have an agency offering, many marketing budget management software solutions are best suited for individual enterprise-level organizations. The software provides transparency across an organization by giving Chief Marketing Officers, the marketing operations team, and the finance team a unified way to plan, track, organize, and optimize marketing plans and budgets.
Conversely, most PPC budget management software solutions, such as Shape.io, focus on serving agencies first and individual businesses second. PPC budget management software allows agencies to track and optimize ad spend at scale across multiple clients, ad accounts, ad platforms, and budget plans.
Marketing Channels vs. Ad Networks
Marketing budget management software allows marketers to add every marketing channel, tool, etc., to help businesses track, allocate, and forecast marketing plans and budgets accordingly. It’s possible to track search engine optimization, digital advertising, email, traditional media, conferences, and more using marketing budget management software.
On the other hand, PPC budget management software allows marketers to track and optimize advertising spend specifically for paid media channels. Marketers cannot track SEO efforts (for example) and primarily rely on PPC budget management software to track campaigns across ad networks.
Tracking vs. Optimization
Finally, marketing budget management software unifies how an organization tracks, collaborates on, and plans its marketing initiatives and budgets. Instead of marketing team members tracking and reporting on marketing initiatives in ten different ways across ten different tools, marketing data is centralized and unified in a way that makes it easier for the team to understand and use.
Typically though, the software is unidirectional. Marketing and advertising data flows into the platform and is analyzed. The data may be used to adjust marketing plans, reallocate budgets to highly successful channels or initiatives, and forecast future marketing performance. But, marketers must still optimize campaigns and tweak budgets in the ad networks themselves. If the software offers bidirectional changes, those integrations are typically with systems such as Salesforce or other top-level CRM or financial software solutions.
While marketers can track digital advertising spend and performance in marketing budget management software, PPC budget management software often provides additional functionality that marketing budget management software does not offer. For example, while marketers may be able to “reallocate” how much budget is allocated to digital advertising in a given quarter in their plan, campaign budget changes must be implemented in the ad platform.
PPC budget management software not only enables marketers to track digital advertising spend across multiple ad networks, but many solutions also offer the ability to make campaign changes directly from the software to ad networks. The software solutions are bidirectional, meaning PPC spend and performance data flow into the platform from the various ad networks. After analyzing that data, marketers can make daily budget adjustments, enable/disable campaigns, or even implement automation with PPC budget management software to help pace advertising spend and prevent overspending from occurring.