A media plan is a plan to attract traffic through different promotion channels. It is needed to distribute the advertising budget in advance and ensure maximum coverage of the target audience. With the help of a media plan, you can predict the results of advertising campaigns. After the launch, check the plan for applications and sales: if the campaign does not give the desired result, adjust or stop it, if it works better than the forecast, invest more money.
The media plan is in the form of a table. This includes advertising channels, ad formats, campaign timing, projected reach, leads, sales, costs, key metrics, and bottom-line revenue. As the campaign progresses, the results are checked against the plan every day.
Every media plan should consist of the following components:
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Advertising expenses |
Amount spent on advertising. It is either prescribed immediately or calculated based on the expected profit. |
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Advertising channels |
You can place both offline and online ads. Other indicators will be calculated for each channel. |
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Advertising formats |
This includes the distribution of flyers at stores and advertising banners on social networks. |
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Campaign Timing |
The period in which the campaign is run. |
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KPI |
Metrics that track how ads are performing. When developing a media plan, predicted values are entered in the table. |
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Profit |
Money that is received from the sale of goods and services through advertising. |
Why track the effectiveness of advertising through a media plan
Looking at the statistics on a random day, you can see 7 daily orders from YAN and calm down. But that’s not how you track trends. If in total every 3 days only 14 requests come in instead of 21, this is a blow to profit: you will receive only 66% of the result. This means that instead of every million, the business will receive only 660 thousand in profit.
100% of the result is achieved only by companies that track results every day. If something goes wrong, they quickly adjust their ad campaigns and don’t lose money.
How to track the effectiveness of advertising through a media plan
Media plans can be maintained manually. This requires a lot of time and the involvement of employees. It is necessary to collect all data on advertising in one table:
- campaign costs;
- advertising metrics – clicks, conversions;
- results of placement – applications and purchases.
It may take a lot of time for an advertiser to keep track of such a pool of data for even one ad campaign. Filling in large tables manually is a difficult routine task that takes a marketer’s resources. The time spent filling out a media plan in Excel can be spent on hypothesis testing, which will bring more value to the business.
