The Media Planner helps you simulate and optimize future media investment strategies based on your marketing objectives. It allows you to allocate budgets efficiently across channels, set specific restrictions, and estimate performance outcomes based on model-driven recommendations.
You can define your targets, apply constraints, and explore different planning scenarios before committing budgets.
Use Media Planner to:
Design forward-looking marketing plans
Forecast conversions, cost per action, spend, and revenue
Optimize spend allocation across media sources
Simulate different investment strategies for upcoming periods
The Media Planner enables strategic decision-making by using model learnings to create data-driven media plans.
Before creating a media plan, you should understand the following concepts:
Optimization period: The future date range for which the media plan will recommend budget allocations.
Reference period: A historical period the model uses to inform its recommendations by analyzing past spend and performance data.
Optimization strategies:
Maximize conversions or revenue: Achieve the highest possible results within a defined spend.
Minimize spend: Achieve a target number of conversions while spending as little as possible.
Budget constraints:
Source-level constraints: Define maximum budgets for specific channels.
Overall maximum spend: Set a single total spend limit if you do not want to allocate budgets per source.
Spend and conversion restrictions: Set minimum or maximum spend levels or conversion requirements based on your business needs.
Scenario calculation: After defining the plan, the model will simulate an optimized distribution and project expected conversions, spend, revenue, and efficiency metrics.
Historic spend and revenue:
For past dates, the system uses actual recorded data.
For future dates:
If the plan is set before the future period begins, the historic values will be zero.
If the plan is set for the future period, the system uses available data up to the current day.
Requirements
Access to the Funnel’s Triangulation and permission to create media plans.
Availability of a validated measurement model.
Completion of data ingestion and model updates for the relevant periods.
Guidelines
Plan within a maximum of 45 days into the future from the last available data date.
Choose a representative reference period that reflects stable or typical performance.
Use realistic budget values aligned with historical data patterns.
Apply broader constraints where possible to allow the model more flexibility in optimization.
Limitations
You cannot manually set budgets for baseline sources or certain impression-based sources, for example, email.
Overly restrictive budget constraints may cause the media plan calculation to fail.
Scenario calculation can take up to 25 minutes to complete.
Set to historic budget restrictions are recommended only for media plans targeting past periods.
Procedure
Complete the following steps to create a media plan in Funnel’s Triangulation:
From Funnel, select Measurement > Media Planner > Create new mediaplan.
You may have to log in when directed to Funnel’s Triangulation.
Enter a Plan name.
Select the Optimization Time Frame.
Choose the date range for which you want to simulate budget distribution.
Confirm that the selected range does not exceed 45 days into the future based on the latest data available in the system.
Select the Reference Time Frame.
Choose a historical time frame that the model will analyze to inform optimization recommendations. You can also choose the same time frame as that of the optimization time frame, which is the default reference time frame.
Select a period that reflects typical marketing behavior whenever possible.
Select an Optimization strategy.
The available options are:Maximize conversions: Focuses on achieving the highest output within a defined spend constraint.
Minimize spend: Focuses on achieving a target number of conversions while reducing total spend.
Your choice will determine which restrictions you can apply later.
Define Budgets for various sources.
You can choose between two approaches:Set source-level budgets: Manually enter maximum spend amounts for individual media sources. The available options are Auto, Set to Historical, and Custom Budget. Set to historic uses the past period spend as the budget limit. Use it only when planning for past periods. For future planning, use Custom or Auto budgets.
Set an overall maximum spend: If you do not define budgets per source, specify a maximum total spend. In this case, you must use Maximize Conversions.
Set spend and conversion Restrictions.
Depending on what you choose in Step 5:For maximizing conversions: Define minimum or maximum spend limits.
For minimizing spend: Define a minimum conversion target that must be achieved.
Create a media plan.
The model may take up to 25 minutes to complete the optimization and generate results. Analyze the projected spend, conversions, revenue, CPA (cost per action), and ROAS (return on ad spend). Compare the optimized plan against the reference period to assess expected gains or improvements.
Review and validation
After receiving the optimized media plan:
Verify that spend distribution aligns with your business goals.
Confirm that channels included in the plan are operationally feasible.
Check if the projected metrics meet the defined restrictions and targets.
Troubleshooting common issues
Some of the causes for your media plan to fail are:
The optimization period extends beyond the allowed 45 days into the future.
Budget constraints are too restrictive compared to historical values.
Too many manual constraints at the source level prevent the model from finding an optimal solution.
The model cannot calculate a feasible plan under the defined conditions.
If none of these reasons apply, contact support.