In the media planner, you can set up your planned budget distribution for each source for a defined period of time. The defined budgets are understood as constraints for the model in the backend.
Please note:
You cannot plan further than 45 days in the future. As forecasting will get unpredictable the more you go into the future.
Based on the media plan input you can run a scenario. The result of this scenario is the recommended distribution of your budget by source for the given time period and an estimated outcome of conversions and CPA under your defined spend.
Media plan constraints
Please note that scenario calculations can fail if you go totally overboard with your constraints as the model never saw a behavior like this in the past and will have a hard time calculating valid results for you. You can set budget constraints (upper tiers) for each of your sources. And of course, you can decide whether a source should be considered for the recommended scenario or rather not as the source needs to have a steady budget anyways. If you don't want to type in the budgets on source level you can always just enter a maximum spend under restrictions and leave the source budgets blanc. Thus the algorithm is only taking your maximum spend as defined spend (maximize Conversion or revenue strategy is mandatory to do this).
Restrictions
As we always want to return results that matter to you and your overall targets you have the opportunity to define spend and conversion restrictions in case you need to spend a certain amount of budget in the given period or you can’t go under a certain level of conversions even though you can save budget.
In respect to what we said above: ‘ We want to show you recommendations that matter to you’ an optimization strategy can be defined on top of the media plan. By setting a strategy we’ll choose from two different models which will be triggered in the backend. The model either optimizes your spend against a maximize conversion target under a given spend or it will optimize against your spend by decreasing it.
The selected strategy will determine the restrictions you can choose at the bottom of the media plan:
Maximize revenue or conversions = spend restrictions are possible to set
Minimize spend = Minimum conversion restriction is possible to set
Please note:
The calculation of one media plan scenario can take up to 25 minutes.
FAQ
Why is my media plan failing?
There are several reasons why a media plan fails to load or calculate here are some of the most frequent reasons. If none of those fit your set up, please contact support@adtriba.com and we'll have a look to your media plan set up.
Timeframe constraints - media plan can only be set up 45 days into the future (due to difficulties with forecasting further into the future). The plan would fail if a longer timeframe is selected.
Please note, that the 45 days are calculated from the last day that your data is available in the UI (not the actual 'today' date).
Budget constraints - budgets that are too restrictive can cause a media plan to fail (for example, the maximum budget for the media plan is way lower than the actual spend ever was; the suggested spend is lower than the model's outcome; etc).
Too many restrictions per source (not leaving the majority of them on 'auto') can also cause the plan to fail.No Optimal Solution - the media plan might fail if the model simply cannot find any optimal solution for the given timeframe and budget constraints.
2. Where is the historic spend/revenue coming from?
It depends if the plan is being set up for the past dates or into the future:
For the past dates - the media plan is taking the actual spend/revenue from those dates when available;
Into the future - depends on the day when the media plan is being generated:
Example 1: Let's say, it is June 30th and you're setting up the plan for the whole July - the historic spend/revenue will show zero values because those days are in the future, so no history to take the data from;
Example 2: The plan is being set up on the 5th of July for the whole July - the historic spend/revenue will display the data from the first 4 days of July because that's how much history we have for July (considering that the latest data in the UI is visible until the July 4th).
3. Why can't I plan the budget for all my sources?
Currently, the media plan does not give a possibility to add the budget for:
Baseline sources - those are excluded from the media plan. Branded Search spend displayed in the generated Media Plan is predicted by the upper-funnel spend, therefore it is not part of the media plan budget restrictions field.
Impression-based sources like email, etc. (there are custom cases where it is possible, please reach out to support@adtriba.com for more details).
4. How does 'Set to historic' budget restriction work?
Set to historic feature is only recommended to used when generating the media plans for the past dates - it would take the historic spend in such case (if this data is shared with Adtriba).
For future media plans, please use Custom or Auto budgets.