Recommendations

Recommendations can be found in various places in the Recast app (currently: Goals, Forecasts, and Plans).

The Recommendation engine takes an existing budget, and sees if it can improve it by optimizing it based on Recast’s ROI estimates. To see these recommendations:

1. Scroll down to the “Recommendations” section.

2. Select your Setting tab. The Conservative option will adhere most closely to your original budget, while the aggressive option will make large departures from your original budget.

3. View the proposed budget changes via the graphs.

4. (Optionally) Download optimized budget.

How to read the graphs

The graphs summarize the changes Recast thinks you could make to the budget to increase the outcome of interest.

• The graph on the left compares your current budget against the Recast recommended budget. Here you can see which channels Recast proposes you increase or decrease spend in. You can also read how close to optimal your spend is in each channel.

• The graph on the right shows the current budget vs. the optimal recommended budget. Using this graph you can see the channels in which you are under and over spending, compare budgets and see which channels Recast recommends you change spend in most.

• The graph below shows Recast’s proposed spend over time in each of your channels. In visualizing it in this way, you can see how to improve your spending over time in each of your channels to further realize your goal.

• The table at the bottom shows the difference between the current and optimized budget. Use this to determine the necessary adjustments in spending for each channel.

Constraints used by Recommendations

The Recommendations tool has some constraints that are useful to be aware of. To run more realistic scenarios that change these assumptions, you can set up an Optimization.

• The total spend on every day needs to be the same

• The spend in every cell day over day (channel x day) can’t change more than ±0.8x of the original spend for the conservative setting, ±2x for the moderate setting and ±10x for the aggressive setting.

• The optimization is for total impact, not total impact in the time period, so it may be that the optimized budget gets less impact in the time window, but more overall.

Why are Recommendations not always available?

Recommendations may not display if the optimization is unable to find significant improvement to the outcome while obeying the constraints listed above. This can happen for a variety of reasons, for example, if the budget you’re working off of is from the Optimizer, Recommendations will likely fail the first time because the money has been allocated optimally. However, as your models update and new ROI estimates are obtained, the Recommendations can update to show you new opportunities based on the latest model learnings.

Missing Recommendations does not mean that there is no way to improve your budget, but rather you may need to relax more of the assumptions by running a less constrained Optimization. A basic Optimization that would have much more flexibility than the Recommendations would be to do the following:

• A total spend cap equal to the total spend in the budget

• An objective to reach an impossibly high outcome (e.g. $1 trillion)

• Date range that covers the same dates as the budget

• All channels in the same constraint group, with a minimum of 0 and a maximum equal to the total spend cap