Plans

The Plans feature allows you to build, view, forecast, and optimize marketing plans, all within the Recast platform. These comprehensive plans allow you to specify your marketing budgets, spikes (promotions and holidays), non-spend variables, and contextual variables. This makes it easier than ever to plan, forecast, and optimize marketing budgets using Recast.

The Plans Tab

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The Plans tab is the homepage for your team's plans. Here you can see all the plans that have been created, filter to current or future plans, and build new plans (coming soon!).

The Default Plan

Your Plans page will always include a Recast created, default plan. This plan is automatically updated each time your model updates. The spend is predicted using Recast's "business as usual" forecasting approach that assumes your future spend will follow the same general pattern as your historical spend. This plan can be used as a starting point for optimization and to give you a rough idea of forecasted revenue (or conversions). The default plan will cover the time period between your earliest last model date (if you have multiple models) and up to 730 days after that. The default plan will include all channels in any of your models. Spikes used in the default plan will match what is planned for the future in your models. Any contextual variables will carry forward their last value for all dates in the future.

On initial release, the default Plan will be the only plan available for use. New tools for building plans are coming soon.

Viewing a Plan

Clicking "Open" on the Plans page takes us to a page to view a specific plan. Here you can see the components of the plan (spend, spikes context variables), as well as Recast’s forecast of performance for each KPI if you follow that plan.

The header shows the plan name, the time range it covers, the total budgeted amount, and the KPIs the plan is compatible with. It also gives you the ability to export the plan for use in other places.

To be compatible with a KPI a plan must provide all spend, non-spend, contextual variables, and spikes necessary to forecast that KPI.

[Coming Soon] If a plan is incompatible with a certain KPI, clicking the KPI will walk you through what information you need to provide in order to make it compatible.

The Plan Summary section shows a breakdown of the planned spend over time and in aggregate.

Additional tabs for spikes, non-spend variables, and contextual variables are coming soon.

The Forecast Results section shows a forecast of each KPI if you follow this plan. It includes all the results you’re used to from our Forecasting tool.

Below the forecast results, you’ll get a recommendations on how to change the plan to increase the forecasted KPI.

KPIs

Your plan can be used to forecast and optimize specific KPIs. There are two types of KPIs in Recast:

Single model KPIs - these KPIs have a direct relationship to a model built by Recast
Aggregate KPIs - these are weighted sums of single model KPIs that are aggregated into another KPI. For example, if you have an DTC revenue model and an Amazon revenue model, these can be summed (using weight 1) to an "All Revenue" aggregate KPI.

For your convenience, Recast has created a single model KPI for each of your models. If you desire to create aggregate KPIs that would be meaningful to your business, please reach out to your model building team. Once created, plans will check for compatibility with the KPI and make forecasts for each KPI of interest.