📁 Create a Budget

Recast has several options to help you create a budget in our app depending on how much of your budget you already have planned.

Have Recast predict a Baseline Budget

If you do not have a planned budget and instead simply want to begin your planning from a baseline budget, select this option. When you select this option, our Budget Builder will use your historical spend patterns to project what Recast expects you to spend in each channel during the time period selected. This is not a prediction of what you should spend optimally but simply an extrapolation of your current spend patterns. This gives you a budget that is in line with what Recast expects you to spend in each channel if your spending pattern stays the same. This option is available in the Forecaster tool only.

Provide a Total Spend Number

If you have a certain amount of money allocated to your total budget but have not broken this spend down by channel or day, then select this option. When you select this option, the budget builder sets a spend limit constraint when projecting your expected spend per channel. Similar to the option “Have Recast predict a Baseline Budget”, the budget builder uses the pattern of your historical spend to project the spend per channel. This gives you a budget that is in line with your past spending patterns that is capped to the amount specified. This option is available in the Forecaster tool only.

The app will show you how much you've spent in the previous time period of the same length. If your request is too different from the previous time period (say <50% or >200%) the algorithm used to forecast your spend may not be able to find a budget that spends exactly the number you asked for. In this case, please use "Upload a Budget" to provide more details about how exactly you're planning to cut or increase spend.

Upload a Budget

You can upload your own marketing budget directly into the Forecaster, Goals and Optimizer tools. If you want Recast to apply these tools on a predetermined budget that has spend broken down per channel per day, the budget should be in the format of this template provided below, which is one row per day, and one column per channel. Clicking “download template” will generate a template file which you can edit. You may add or delete rows as needed to control the length of the forecast (up to two years from the last-modeled date), but forecasts must always start on the day after the last modeled date.

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You do not have to include columns for channels that have no spend.

➡️ Budget Template

If you have a partial budget that:

• Has multiple dates per row (e.g. one week, or one month)
• Has multiple channels per column (e.g. you upload a channel called “Facebook” that maps to “facebook_prospecting” and “facebook_retargeting”

Recast’s model will then “spread out” the budget to a day-by-channel budget that can be used for forecasting or optimization. We take each row in your budget and have it represent all the missing dates in between that particular date and the next one given in the file. The last row in your file is taken to represent the same number of dates as the row before it. This is how we expand your partial budget into a full budget that you can use in your forecasts and goal setting.

ℹ️Note: Your budget can be extremely simplified — the budget builder can fill in the blanks!

If the channel names in your budget are different from the channel present in the model, you will be taken to a mapping model which allows you to map the channel names in your model with the columns in your budget.

To use the column mapping:

1. Log in to Recast
2. Navigate to one of the Recast tools that require a budget to be uploaded
3. Select “Upload Budget” and upload a spreadsheet with rows for each day of spend and column for every channel you want to include.
4. You can also optionally map multiple channels present in your model to a single column in your budget to aggregate channels.
5. You have the option to select a saved mapping. A saved mapping will contain all the columns in your budget mapped to the channels in your model in a custom format.
6. Alternatively, you can select a new mapping. By default, our tool matches any columns in your budget with channels in your model of the same name. Any channels not found in your budget will have the option to drag and drop to map.
7. Save and use the mapping to reuse the same column format for other budgets.
8. (Optional) If needed, edit your budget by clicking in the cells you wish to change

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You may include columns for lower funnel variables, if you would like to manually override Recast’s predictions for these channels.

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You do not need to include columns for channels without spend