What you’ll end up with
- A total budget with a flight window.
- A split by channel, each line traceable to a reason.
- A target for the primary KPI, so the spend can be judged as worth it or not.
- A reserve, and a stated rule for what may draw on it.
Before you start
The process
1
1. Start from the target, not the money
Work backwards. If the campaign needs 400 signups and your historical cost per signup is $45, the budget is roughly $18,000 before you argue about it. Starting from an available number and asking what it can buy produces a budget nobody can judge afterwards.Where there’s no history, say so in the brief and treat the first flight as a learning budget with a smaller number and an explicit read date. That is a pilot, not a campaign: it needs a budget ceiling, a read date, and a kill or scale rule written down before launch, because “we’ll see how it goes” has no outcome that ever ends it.Check the number buys enough events to read, whatever the flight is for. A budget that produces twenty conversions cannot support a target bid strategy or a confident decision. Each platform brief carries its own thresholds: Google, TikTok, Meta, LinkedIn.
2
2. Split by channel, with a reason per line
Every line item carries a reason, because “roughly 45%” is not a reason and cannot be revisited sensibly later.
3
3. Separate media from production
Production is spent once, up front, and buys nothing directly. Media is spent over the flight and is what pacing tracks. Blending them makes a campaign look like it’s overspending in week one every time.
4
4. Set the flight and the daily rate
Divide the media budget by the flight length to get the expected daily rate. This single number is what pacing compares against, and it doesn’t exist unless someone writes it down here.E.g. $25,000 media over 50 days is $500 a day. Platforms front-load, so expect week 1 to run above that and plan for it rather than reacting to it.
5
5. Hold a reserve, and say what releases it
A reserve with no release rule gets either spent immediately or never. Name the condition and the person who decides.E.g. 10% reserve. Released by the head of growth if cost per signup at the week-3 read is at or below target. Otherwise it stays unspent.
6
6. Get budget approval, then record it
Budget sign-off runs through the approval process. Record the approved figure and date on the brief in the campaigns library, because the question “what did we agree?” arrives at the retrospective.
What makes a budget hard to judge later
Exceptions
Always-on budgets don’t have a flight, so set a monthly rate and a review date instead of an end date. Everything else on this page still applies: the split needs reasons, media stays separate from production, and the rate is what pacing checks against.Related resources
- Budget concepts What a budget is made of, and the trade-offs behind each way of splitting one.
- Pilot brief For a learning budget with no control: read date, ceiling, and kill or scale rule.
- Budget pacing process Tracking spend against this plan once live.
- Budget reporting process Reporting both on a cadence.
- Marketing campaign brief Where the budget is recorded.
- Approval process Who signs the budget off.
- Make a campaign Where budget planning sits in the campaign path.