A checklist for aligning finance and marketing

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There are many ways finance can help marketing drive better business results, starting with the best practices we outlined above. But shifting the focus from simply measuring performance to improving it is one of the most vital. To make this shift, keep the following in mind:

Be flexible, not fixed. Monitor search interest to identify rapidly growing search categories and let consumer demand determine how much you spend on search.

Capture every profitable click. Finance and marketing must collaborate to get the right target return on ad spend, use Smart Bidding to execute, and then measure success based on how much money is generated at the target return level, not the budget.

Test and learn to unlock growth. Don’t miss opportunities while waiting for perfect models. Instead, set a small budget for low-risk testing, then continually refine, scale, and iterate, communication directors email list using a shared KPI dashboard to assess value.


Once this work is complete, use automated Smart Bidding as a better way to optimize investment and ensure TROAS levels are met. Automation also removes work, allowing marketing and finance to focus more on TROAS and lifetime value calculations, and collaborating to get these estimates right will help businesses thrive.

Misconception 3: Only perfect is good enough.

A common challenge faced by companies is the mindset that they can’t change search investment strategy until they have the perfect model – one that enables marketing to provide finance with bulletproof certainty about the returns on every dollar spent. But in practice, the road to modeling perfection is endless, and while on the road, business decisions still need to be made.

The big advantage of search is that changes to investment strategy can be tested on a small scale (e.g., one region) first and modified immediately, based on business results that are often available in real time.


This means marketers can run low-cost, tightly controlled experiments that achieve major improvement with minimal risk. Together, finance and marketing can then assess whether, in aggregate, the change is likely to add value and scale, if so, rather than forgoing potential opportunities until the perfect model has been created.

In fact, with search, improvement does not require a costly upgrade of legacy data systems, but rather a cultural and process change. Accepting that uncertainty exists, and having a “test and learn” framework between marketing and finance to successfully navigate it, is the key to success.


Finance needs to equip marketing teams with budget to run small-scale experiments within an agreed set of safeguards to ensure no opportunity is missed as consumer behavior changes and models improve.

Create a simple performance dashboard to jointly monitor key results like revenue, margin, ROI, and click-through rate. You can then use this data to continually refine, scale, and iterate.