Embrace roles to get the most from HawkeAI

Budgets budgets budgets. The Bookkeeper’s sole prerogative is to keep an eagle eye on the ticking of budget spent vs. expected budget spent to ensure they’re tracking in tandem. Their set up check sheet is a pretty straightforward one: do all the platforms have target budgets alongside them? So long as they do, they’ll be able to ensure everything is as it should be. If there isn’t a target budget alongside a platform on your account, you can expect the bookkeeper to be prodding you until there is.

In terms of who is best to fulfill this role, it is typically someone with P&L responsibility for the team. After all, they’ll be the ones having to make sense of budget overages. That’s not to say it has to be, but the role is generally best fulfilled by someone who is a little distance away from the day-to-day of optimization – as they can dispassionately call out the red numbers whenever they see them.

The Bookkeeper’s day-to-day interaction with the platform is simple. After ensuring everyone has filled out their target budgets, the Bookkeeper logs in once or twice a day and looks over the properties on the Performance Overview. Checking that each budget is on target – and flagging them when they’re not.

The Watchmen’s focus is the performance of KPIs. The complexity of this role really depends on the variety within your book of client accounts. You can select up to 8 metrics on the Performance Overview, so selecting the right KPIs that can allow for meaningful analysis of multiple different types of business model will be key. If you’re just watching over one account or multiple accounts that operate on the same model, then this will be a breeze. Once the metrics are selected you’re responsible for ensuring the people working the accounts have input targets alongside all relevant metrics – then monitoring performance over the course of the month.

The ideal person to fulfill this role will depend on the size of the team. In very small teams you might choose to combine this role with the Bookkeeper so that the two ‘oversight’ roles live with one person. With larger teams it is better to follow team structure. If there is one senior person responsible for a certain collection of client accounts, or responsible for a certain platform, then they’ll be best placed for the role – in this scenario you might end up with a few Watchmen.

Each day the Watchmen log in to check progress against performance targets. The Performance Overview should allow them to easily identify which accounts are struggling – at which point they can follow whatever internal processes you might have in place to discuss with the person responsible.

The Insight Miners have the most fun job. Their prerogative, essentially, is to identify the key insights HawkeAI has flagged that can provide key information for optimization or reporting to stakeholders. HawkeAI’s benchmarking data, alongside its ability to determine standard deviation and forecast results, means it can offer crucial insights into performance anomalies and opportunities.

The ideal people for this role are likely those who are either involved in optimization directly, or who love the data and analysis side of digital marketing. They’ll have an understanding of the nuance of respective accounts and a keen eye for identifying the most relevant insights.

The day-to-day of Insight Miners will be much more ad-hoc than the other two roles – as well as taking some direction from them. The Bookkeeper and Watchmen will be the first ones to raise a flag if there is an issue with budgets or KPIs – once the flag is raised the Insight Miner can jump into the platform to try to identify if there is an explanation for a dip in expected performance. Is benchmark data showing an uptick in competitor activity? Perhaps the downward trend is being observed across your category and is an indicator of a broader external factor. Using Forecasting to determine month end results they may say that the issue doesn’t need an extreme, as the downturn was predicted somewhat and we’re expecting an uptick towards the end of the month. In short, the Insight Miner is there to stay plugged in to the context of the broader category (via benchmark data) and to understand the nuance of performance. At least once a month, they’ll be spending some serious time with the Monthly Insights generated for each account that matches industry trends with account trends to better understand performance variables.