Control Budget Across Marketing Campaigns
Design a campaign operations workspace for monitoring spend, approvals, and delivery across several advertising channels.
The brief
Understand the problem
Background
Marketing teams run campaigns across search, social, display, and email systems that report cost and status differently. Budget problems can develop before performance data is complete.
User context
Ravi manages a regional product launch with twelve campaigns and a fixed monthly budget. One social campaign is spending too quickly while a search campaign is barely delivering.
Product problem
Teams need a normalized operational view without pretending that channel metrics are directly equivalent. Changes to budget and status also require clear authority and history.
Objective
Create a cross-channel campaign dashboard and budget adjustment workflow.
What to design
Define the experience
Required experience
- Portfolio dashboard with pacing and delivery exceptions
- Campaign detail with channel-specific context
- Budget reallocation proposal and approval
- Change history and sync state
Screens and states
- Campaign portfolio
- Campaign detail
- Budget change
- Approval review
- Sync issue
Core user flow
Follow the critical path
- 01
Ravi scans current spend against planned pacing
- 02
He opens the overspending social campaign
- 03
He compares its delivery with the under-spending search campaign
- 04
He proposes a budget transfer and explains the rationale
- 05
A director approves it and the system reports channel sync status
Product rules
Requirements and constraints
Requirements
- Show actual spend, committed budget, and forecast separately
- Keep channel-specific definitions available near normalized metrics
- Prioritize exceptions that require action
- Require appropriate approval for material budget changes
- Track who proposed, approved, and applied each change
- Show connector freshness and failed syncs
Constraints
- Channel data arrives at different intervals
- Currency and time zones vary by campaign
- Some channels cannot apply changes immediately
- Permissions differ by market and budget threshold
Reality check
States worth considering
Finish line
What to deliver
- Design five desktop screens for pacing review, reallocation, approval, and connector failure.
Optional direction
Visual resources
Use these as a starting constraint if you want one. They are not part of the required solution.
Stint Ultra Expanded & Pontano Sans
Clear interface writing gives people the confidence to understand what changed and decide what to do next.
Stint Ultra Expanded & Pontano Sans
Clear interface writing gives people the confidence to understand what changed and decide what to do next.