Note: Budgets is a beta feature and may have limitations or changes as it evolves. Reach out to your Funnel contact for feedback and support.
Marketing budgets are often managed in static spreadsheets, while the actual spend occurs across multiple channels. This disconnection can lead to:
End-of-month surprises: Discovering you overspent after the invoice period has closed
Under-utilization of budget: Hoarding budget due to lack of visibility, resulting in missed performance targets.
Funnel’s Budgets feature solves these issues by automating the calculation of pacing. Apart from ensuring financial predictability, this feature also helps your teams adjust the pacing early in the campaign cycle to maximize budget utilization.
Budget planning in Funnel enables your marketers and finance teams to track the financial performance by comparing planned costs against the actual costs. When you define your budget and map it with your existing data, you get real-time visibility into your spending speed without the need to export to external tools.
Key concepts
The Budget definition
A budget in Funnel acts as a container for your financial targets. It is defined by three main properties:
Date range: The specific duration for which the budget is planned
Cadence: How the budget amounts are viewed and entered, typically on a monthly basis.
Comparison metric: The actual data metric used to measure performance against the plan, most commonly Cost.
Breakdowns
While you can set a top-level budget, for example, Global Marketing Budget, Funnel allows you to increase granularity by applying breakdowns.
By selecting specific dimensions, such as Traffic Source, Country, or Campaign Type, you can allocate funds to specific segments. This allows individual team members to view and manage the specific portion of the budget they are responsible for, rather than only seeing the aggregate total.
Budget allocation
You can input budget values in two ways:
Manual entry: Typing specific amounts for each period and breakdown segment.
Automated Allocation: Using the Allocate tool to enter a total amount, which Funnel then distributes evenly across the selected timeline and breakdowns.
Visualization and pacing
After you configure a budget, Funnel generates a dedicated dashboard pre-populated with essential health metrics. This allows your stakeholders to monitor progress without entering the configuration screens.
Key metrics available in a budget dashboard include:
Total budget: The cap set for the period.
Total cost: The actual spend ingested from your platforms.
Budget pacing: A health metric that indicates if you are on track, overspending, or underspending relative to the elapsed time. It's the total cost divided by the budget per day.
Common Use Cases
High-level monitoring: Your stakeholders can view a clean, visual summary of the total budget to ensure the department is financially safe.
Regional or channel management: By adding dashboard filters for dimensions like Traffic Source, teams can isolate performance for their specific region or channel responsibility.
Proactive adjustments: Using the pacing metric, performance marketers can adjust bids and daily spend limits mid-month to prevent end-of-period overages.
Prerequisites and guidelines
Ensure to have access to your Funnel workspace.
Connect to at least one data source that contains spend or cost data. For example, Google Ads. Facebook Ads, and so on.
Have a core monetary metric available in your data explorer. If it’s a standard metric, Funnel usually maps this automatically as Cost. If you intend to budget against a custom calculated metric, ensure that this rule is created and active before setting up the budget.
Clean the dimensions for breakdowns. If you plan to allocate budgets by specific segments like by channel or by region, ensure that the relevant dimensions exist in your workspace and are populated.
Create rules correctly to group your platforms. Example, grouping Facebook and Instagram under Social.
If you plan to budget at a granular level, keep your campaign naming conventions consistent.
If dimensions are not populated or consistent, spend data will not be populated.
Procedure
Complete the following steps to create a budget.
Step 1: Configure basic settings
In your Funnel workspace and from the left navigation pane, go to Plan > Budgets.
Click + New budget to get started.
The Settings section appears.
Enter the basic information:
Budget Name: Use a clear and consistent naming convention. Example, Marketing Budget 2025
Date: Select the duration for which you want to plan the budget.
Comparison Metric: Select the metric you'll compare against.
Currency: Select the currency from the drop-down list.
Funnel creates the following metrics that will help you calculate the budget pacing.
Budget
Budget total days
Budget days passed
Budget days remaining
Budget pacing
Budget remaining
These metrics are created only when you create a budget for the first time. You can reuse these metrics for all your budgets.
(Optional) Preview your configurations on the right.
Choose how you want to view the budget by selecting Daily or Monthly options.
You can also group by Date.
Click Continue and proceed to the Breakdown step.
Step 2: (Optional) Add breakdowns
Break the budget by one of more dimensions and track the performance at a granular level. You can add up to three breakdown dimensions.
Click + Add Breakdown.
Select a dimension from the drop-down list.
Tip: A common and useful dimension is Traffic Source.
Select the specific dimensions you want in the breakdown.
The options are populated based on the dimension you select in the previous step (step 2.2). For example, if you select Traffic Source in step 2.2, you may see the following options in this step:
Facebook
Google
You can preview all your changes on the right.
Click Continue to proceed to the Amounts step.
Step 3: Allocate budget amounts
In this step, you can set a budget for each period and breakdown. You can allocate budget in the following ways:
(Recommended) Automatically allocate budgets using the Allocate option.
Enter the budget for each time period manually.
Automatic budget allocation
Select the cadence for which you want to allocate your budget.
Available options are Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Duration. If you choose Duration, you are allocating a budget for the complete duration you selected in step 1.3.
Click Allocate.
The Allocate budget dialog appears.
Enter the Budget amount.
Choose how you want to allocate the budget evenly across the timeline.
Available options are:
By day
By the cadence you selected in step 3.1.
Choose how you want to allocate the budget evenly across breakdowns.
Available options vary based on the dimension breakdowns you selected in step 2.
Click Allocate.
Note: Allocating budget automatically will replace your previous allocations.
(Optional) Preview the budget allocation on the right. You can group and filter the budget allocation too.
Click Create budget.
Manual budget allocation
Select the cadence for which you want to allocate your budget.
Available options are Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Duration. If you choose Duration, you are allocating a budget for the complete duration you selected in step 1.3.
Enter the budget for each breakdown per cadence period.
Example: If you selected Media type breakdown in step 2 and a weekly cadence in the previous step, you will have to enter the budget for every breakdown for every week.
(Optional) Preview the budget allocation on the right. You can group and filter the budget allocation too.
Click Create budget.
After you create the budget, you can see the budget details, such as:
Lifetime budget
Duration
Average budget
Comparison metric
Budget preview
Step 4 : (Optional) Visualize budget in a dashboard
Monitor your budget in a dashboard.
In the Budget Details page, click + Create dashboard from the right pane.
Enter a dashboard title and click + Create dashboard.
Edit the dashboard if needed.
Refer to the help articles in the Dashboard collection for more information.
Best practices in creating a budget
Use breakdowns for actionable insights: Don't stop at setting a top-level budget. Break it down by Country, Campaign Type, or Channel. This allows your team members to see the specific budget they are responsible for.
Create a specific dashboard for each budget: It provides a clean, visual summary without needing to go into the budget setup.
Add dashboard filters: Make your dashboards interactive. Add a filter for the Traffic source dimension, or whichever breakdown you used. This allows your teammates to filter the entire dashboard and see the performance for their region or any area of their responsibility.
Monitor budget pacing: The Budget Pacing metric is an important health metric. It tells you if you are on track, overspending, or underspending relative to the time elapsed, allowing you to make adjustments proactively.