You have a budget, you know your past performance benchmarks and you’ve been given a target to meet. How do you decide how your budget gets allocated across all those channels? You could fire up a spreadsheet and try to write some formulae to help you. It might take you hours. That’s not a pleasing thought.
Try Instant Allocator to help you start off the budget planning process. As long as you have an idea of which channels you want to use, and how they’ve performed in the past, you can get a budget allocation instantly. It might save you hours.
How does it work though? Surely a trusted Excel file will be just as good, right? Possibly, yeah. But with Instant Allocator, what’s happening is linear programming. Ah, that old chestnut!
Linear programming is basically using a set of equations to find an optimal result. It’s exactly what a budget allocation process goes through, when your client or boss gives you a budget and KPI target, and then asks you how that budget needs to be shared around different channels. Where should you start? Giving half of it to Facebook first? You could end up playing around with it for a long time, and possibly not getting close enough to your target.
Instant Allocator’s process here uses your historical performance benchmarks for your chosen channels as weights for the optimisation process. You then need to provide some maximum and minimum budget values per channel – these are important, they act as the constraints in the linear programming. Logically speaking, these are needed because you may wish to restrict a particular channel, or have a channel spending at least a certain percentage of budget. With your total campaign budget and target KPI, your now ready to calculate how your budget should be allocated using linear programming with Instant Allocator!
How does that sound? Are you ready to give it a try? Let’s see how much time you get back.
Here’s a few guidelines for you to get the best out of the tool:
- Make sure all channels are working towards the same KPI type
- Select a target KPI that is between the biggest and smallest channel KPI performance (the overall target should be achievable if it’s within this range)
- You can select 0 for minimum budgets if you’re unsure, but the tool may suggest you ignore a channel completely
- You can use the total campaign budget for the maximum budgets of individual channels