Starting with an unconstrained optimization

Typically the marketing team will have aligned with finance and other stakeholders on the budget, volume, and performance targets for the time period (e.g. month, quarter, or year). From there, it’s typically easiest to begin with an unconstrained optimization.

This will typically give results that raise a few eyebrows — that’s okay! For example, it may recommend ramping a channel far more than you would be comfortable with, or turning a major channel off.

At this point, we recommend adding in constraints progressively to keep the results within the range you would be willing to implement.

Once you have iterated and found a solution that you want to implement, we recommend setting a goal with your volume target and this budget, so that you can get weekly forecasts and recommendations on how to adjust spend.

Starting with a general idea

Some customers have a more concrete idea of what their budget will be, possibly building off the last period’s budget, or last year’s. In these cases, we recommend starting with the budget builder and the forecaster, to see how this would perform.

If the budget would require more spend in order to achieve your goals, we would recommend using this budget as the baseline and following the instructions in if you have more budget than planned. Similarly if you need to improve efficiency you may use the section if you have less budget than planned to find areas to reduce spend.

Once you have iterated and found a solution that you want to implement, we recommend setting a goal with your volume target and this budget, so that you can get weekly updates to your forecast and recommendations on how to adjust spend.

How to include business Context

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Adding business context to your model can help it give you more actionable budget recommendations.

Optimizer Outputs

1. Review the outputs and determine tweaks you might want to make.
2. What do you know that the model doesn’t?
   Ex. Some channels can’t run every day
   Ex. Can only spend $X on search

Optimizer inputs after adding context:

1. Copy Settings to New Optimization
2. Make changes to constrain outputs to improve actionability

You can modify your inputs to add context to your Optimizations:

• There are different objectives you can set when optimizing depending on your marketing goals.
• You can edit channels to reflect relevant business context to make the results actionable (committed spend, drop days, limited budgets)
• In most cases you can optimize up to two years into the future.
• You can amend future spikes in the model when optimizing
• You can limit or cap spend for channels configured as lower funnel