Cost tracking for marketing teams in Jira

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All marketers, no matter how involved they are in creative processes, are always concerned with two things: the percentage of completed conversions and profit. No matter how you slice it when you work with the market, whether e-commerce, SaaS, or services, you always look at everything through the prism of numbers. A kaleidoscope of tasks and activities, engagement channels, design reviews, and endless analytics are not the romantic routine of marketers. Their mental state is based only on litres of coffee and funny memes from the Internet 😀.

And how to estimate the cost of work? For each activity? For example, we can clearly say how much money we spend on the advertising budget in Google Ads. Without third-party applications, can we accurately determine the cost of paying a marketer or contractor? Or how can we analyze the cost of different acquisition channels, taking into account the work of the marketing team?

Our team has been asking this question for a long time and has developed the Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud app to help answer these questions.

To be honest, after implementing the app in our work, we were genuinely surprised by the results and are already on the way to reorganizing our work. We're starting a series of articles on how Jira & Cost Tracker app can help marketing teams be efficient and cost-effective.

Estimating the cost of marketing activities in Jira

Marketing is multifaceted and multi-component. But its activities definitely need order. And workspace optimization is always necessary. A thousand and one spreadsheets, Jira boards, CRM systems, email marketing platforms, and social networks. It is impossible to analyze all this without visualization and systematization.

One such tool for aggregate analytics and data visualization is Looker Studio. For example, our team uses custom Jira fields where we enter the type of marketing activity and then, in the context of each month. We analyzed which activities we spent the most time on and which ones were most effective using dashboards.

Of course, for each of these activities, each marketer has a pool of tasks in Jira. Using Cost Tracker, we can derive the cost of these tasks. Subsequently, we track the correlation between the most effective traffic channels, their percentage in the overall picture, and, accordingly, how much it costs us and whether it is advisable to spend money on certain activities.

Note that for a clear understanding of the cost of activities in cost reports, it is necessary for all marketers working in a team to set hourly rates in the Cost Tracker app.

And what is marketing without advertising? We track the costs of advertising activities using the Expenses tab in Cost Tracker.

The costs of some advertising channels are repeated from month to month, so it is advisable to select the recurring setting when setting up the rates and enter the necessary time ranges for repetitions.

Takeaway

We are not going to advise you on how to do marketing, but we want to show the importance of analyzing not only conversion rates but also cash flow. This optimizes costs, helps to identify unproductive activities, and helps to plan future expenses.

Here's a 30-day trial for Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud for you to try implementing it in your marketing processes and see if it's useful for you.

P.S. Stay in touch with SaasJet. We will often share useful tips with you here. We will be glad to see your feedback in the comments 🙂.