🗺️ 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

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.

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.

Spend

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

Spikes

The spikes tab allows you to see and control spikes that happen in your Plan. The Default Plan will always use the spikes present in the underlying models, and cannot be edited. Custom Plans (coming soon!) can use the model’s spikes or a custom set of spikes provided by the one building the Plan.

The spike calendar will show you what spikes were in the past, what are in the future, and if there are discrepancies between what’s planned in the statistical models vs. what’s planned in the Plan.

If a historical spike was in the Plan, but never added to the model, it will be crossed out to show that it was not used in the models.

If a historical spike was in the model, but not in the Plan, it will be added to the spike calendar with a special tag to show that it was not planned for.

If a spike is planned in the future in the models but is not part of the Plan, it will not be used for forecasting until the spike is within 30 days of the last modeled day in the model. This is because once a spike is within a month of happening, it can start to influence the historical dates in the model. At that point, we cannot eliminate the effect of the spike using the forecaster. If you want to remove the effect of a spike, you will need to have the model re-run after removing the spike from the model. Your data scientist should be able to help with this.

Only one spike can happen on a given day in a given model. You will be prevented from adding additional spikes if one is already present.

Non-spend Channels

The non-spend tab shows the planned values for any non-spend predictors in your models.

Contextual Variables

The contextual variables tab shows the assumptions we’re using for your contextual variables for the life of the Plan. By default, we use a “carry-forward” approach meaning we will assume the contextual variable stays flat at whatever the most recent value was. When building a new Plan you can instead provide different assumptions to use regarding the contextual variables.

The values provided here will be used when forecasting or optimizing the Plan.

Channel Settings

The Upper funnel setting section in Channel Settings allows you to edit the spend in each channel in your Plan. To edit, click ‘modify’ next to the channel and select how you would like to provide the new spend. You can upload spend in weekly or monthly buckets using columns labeled “Start date” and “End date”.

You also have the option to edit multiple channels at once using the “Edit All Channels” button.

There are 3 ways to edit your spend:

1. Provide a total amount for Recast to spend: Recast will spread this amount across the entire time period of your Plan

   1. Spread the total over future dates: Recast will spread this amount across the remaining of your Plan.

2. Let Recast predict total & spread: Recast will predict your spend based on historical spend patterns taking seasonality into account.

3. Upload Spend: Provide daily spend for your channel. You can upload spend for any subset of dates in your Plan period.

The Lower Funnel Channel Settings section allows you to control how we treat your Lower Funnel channels by default when Forecasting and Optimizing.

Each channel has four options:

1. Uncapped (default) - this means Recast will treat your Lower Funnel channels as an outcome instead of an input. The amount of lower funnel spend will be predicted based on upper funnel activity. Spend will not be stored as part of the plan in this scenario.

2. Capped - Recast will treat your Lower Funnel channels as an outcome up to a certain limit and then forcibly prevent additional spend above the cap. The cap you provide is for the entire Plan period (past and future). If you provide a cap for a Plan that is already partially in the past, we will subtract the actuals from the cap and use the difference as the new cap for forecasting/optimizing the future. If actuals are more than the cap already, the cap will be set at 0 (no additional lower funnel spend allowed). If the Plan starts in the future, when we forecast by combining with the Default Plan, we will scale the Forecast cap up so that the cap during the Plan period is approximately what you indicated, and the cap prior to the Plan period is proportionally the same amount.

3. Off - This will turn the Lower Funnel spend in this channel off completely.

4. Provided - Recast will use a fixed daily amount for spend in this channel. There are two ways to provide an amount: (1) CSV upload, telling us exactly what you want to spend each day and (2) A total amount for the Plan period, which Recast will then take and spread over the period using our business as usual forecasting methodology. If the total amount you enter is less than the total that has already occurred since the Plan start date, the channel will be assumed to be off for the remainder of the Plan.

Once you save these settings, they will be used in all future Forecasts. Optimizations will use these settings by default unless they’re overridden.

Creating Plan Versions

Plan Versions are a record of how your Plan has changed over time. Every time your Plan is updated, Recast automatically saves the updates as a new Plan version. You can browse your Plan version history to see what your Plan looked like at a given point, and review the forecasts and counterfactuals that were run using each version.

This is especially useful when you are constantly making small tweaks to your Plan. With version history, you always have a clear record of your Plan at each point in time, and can understand exactly how changes to your budget drove the forecast.

The Version History Selector

The version history dropdown appears at the top of the Plans page header. It lets you navigate between all saved versions of your Plan.

When you open the dropdown, each version entry shows:

• Version name: Defaults to "Plan Version [n] [date, time]". Future releases will allow you to rename versions.

• Creation date and time: When this version was saved.

• Primary label: Shown next to the version that's currently set as Primary. This is the version with your live Plan that is refreshed each week with your new data.

Viewing a Previous Version

To browse an older version of your Plan, open the version history dropdown and select any version from the list. The Plan Summary will update to show your Plan exactly as it was at that point including your budget, lower funnel settings, spikes, contextual variables, and non-spend channels.

When you switch to an older version, the Adherence, Counterfactuals, and Forecast sections automatically update to show the most recent forecast or counterfactual that was run while viewing that version. Each plot is tagged with the date it was run so you can see when the analysis was performed.

If a forecast or counterfactual was manually switched from within a version, that selection is remembered and shown instead.

Editing While Viewing an Older Version

Edits can only be made to the Primary version. If you attempt to make edits to a non-primary Plan version you will see a modal that will take you to the Primary version.

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.

Plan Compatibility Fixing

When a Plan is created it must be compatible with at least one KPI. Over time, however, changes to KPIs or the underlying model may lead to incompatibilities. The Compatibility UI and Fix Page help ensure your plans remain usable.

When a model underlying one of the KPIs included in your plan is changed, your Plan could become incompatible with the KPI. In this case, you will see the KPI in the compatibility banner turn from grey to red with a warning sign letting you know that you need to fix the compatibility issue before you can use your Plan accurately.

When a KPI is highlighted with this warning symbol, click into the KPI to enter the compatibility fixing page. The compatibility fixing page will display all the channels, spike groups and context variables that are causing the incompatibility. Click through each issue and select from the options to ‘fix’ them. Depending on the type of issue you will be provided with different options to solve the incompatibility.

Upper Funnel Channels:

• Provide total amount for Recast to spend

• Let Recast predict your total budget and spread

• Upload spend

Lower Funnel Channels:

• Uncapped - Recast predicts what you will spend

• Capped - Set a maximum spend

• Off - Set 0 spend in the channel during the plan time period

• Provided - Set your total spend or upload a file with daily spend

Spikes:

• Delete Spikes that are no longer in the model

Contextual Variables:

• Carry forward the last value of the contextual variable

• Upload daily contextual variable

Once you have resolved all the compatibility issues, your Plan will once again be compatible with your KPIs and ready to use.