When evaluating software, it's important to have a clear picture of the desired outcome it should help you achieve.
This desired outcome has two parts. First, there's the goal(s) your company wants to achieve. Second, there's the appropriate experience, how you expect to achieve it.
Source: Lincoln Murphy
Goals
We like to define goals as objective + time frame. Without a time frame, you can't plan towards achieving your objective(s), making them a wish or a hope instead of a real goal.
Company goals can usually be grouped into one of the following categories (inspired by The Right Way To Select Technology):
Reduce risk: anything that helps you prevent revenue loss, troubles, and disasters. Think of solutions that help you prevent customers or employees from becoming dissatisfied (and leaving you) or solutions that help you prevent compliance and legal issues.
Create value: anything that helps you generate more revenue or customer loyalty.
Improve people efficiency: anything that will help you produce more work with the same or fewer people.
Improve media efficiency: anything that will help you generate better results from advertising, with the same or less ad spend.
Qualitative transformation: anything that enables your business to pursue different business models.
Most companies pursue a combination of these goals, but it's unlikely that one single technology will help you with all of them. So it's important to focus on the most important goal(s) during the selection process.
If you're wondering what to focus on, answering these questions will usually point you in the right direction:
How does your manager measure if you're successful?
For agencies: how do your clients measure if you're successful?
Appropriate experience
The appropriate experience is all about usability, features, learning curves, user experience, and interactions. So even though multiple solutions can help you achieve a goal, the experience can be vastly different.
For example, having 20 different Google Ads scripts to monitor your accounts on a daily basis may help you reduce risk, but it may not provide you with the most appropriate experience.
In short: an appropriate experience is what is required to make you "feel" successful, while the goal is a measurable objective that your company is trying to achieve.
Creating the business case
Often, you'll need to create a business case to get approval for purchasing software. Especially when the yearly investment is more than $5,000. That's why we recommend pilot projects for larger subscription plans.
The simplest business case clearly summarizes the expected costs and benefits. To get a positive decision, the benefits should obviously outweigh the costs.
On the cost side, it's relatively simple when it comes to TrueClicks: it's the price that goes along with your monthly ad spend (under management) + the one-off hours for learning and customizing TrueClicks (usually less than 2 hours per user).
Within your spend limit, there are no hidden fees for adding accounts, users, features, etc.
Calculating or estimating benefits is always more complex. While outcomes like value creation and efficiency gains can be quantified, other benefits can be harder to quantify. Of course, this doesn't mean they have no value to your business.
So for every benefit you expect to achieve, try to quantify it with conservative estimates that everyone can agree on. If that's not possible, simply list it out as a non-quantifiable benefit.
Luckily, many business cases are already ROI-positive based on value creation and efficiency improvements alone. In that case, all other benefits can be considered as a significant 'bonus'.