ROI calculator: Learn how much you can save with the optimal budget allocation

Imagine if you knew how much of your advertising spend you could save if you made the optimal budget allocation across your advertising channels. Well, this is now possible with our new return on investment calculator (ROI calculator).

All you have to do is provide some basic details on your target audience, campaign budget and advertising channels. Based on this, the ROI calculator estimates your potential savings from doing cross-media measurement and using the insights generated to allocate your budget against the optimal reach in target audience.

A real-life example

Let’s have a look at a real-life example from a UK brand.

The brand has a target audience of 25-44-year-olds and advertises on Meta, YouTube and the open web, with 40% of its budget allocated to Meta, 40% to YouTube and 20% to the open web.

The brand aims for a frequency of 3+ in its target audience and has a yearly budget of 3.5M GBP distributed across 12 campaigns annually.

Based on this information, the UK brand learned that it could save 12% of its yearly budget, corresponding to 420K GBP, if it made the optimal budget allocation across the three channels.

When translating that into reach efficiency, the brand furthermore learned that it could reach around 15 people per GBP with the optimal budget allocation compared to only a little more than 13 people per GBP with the current budget allocation.

With a yearly investment of 86K GBP for getting access to AudienceProject’s cross-media measurement platform, it means that the brand will have a return on investment of 388%.

This is, of course, a return on investment calculated based on the perfect media mix, which you might not achieve after the first re-allocation of your budget. However, it clearly illustrates the potential of working systematically with campaign optimisation.

Assuming that the brand optimises its media investments to gradually increase how efficiently it reaches its target audience based on the platform’s insights, it will already have its investment paid back after 149 days.

In this example, the brand included the advertising channels they are currently using. However, it is worth noting that you can also include advertising channels that are not part of your media mix today to see how it would affect your potential savings and reach efficiency if these were included.

How it works

The ROI calculator is designed to answer the following question:

This question is answered based on our deep knowledge of how reach is built, gained through years of experience and modelling.

The figure below represents an example where an advertiser puts its budget into a channel (Channel 1) with a small universe. Channel 1 leads to around 50,000 impressions and a reach of close to 10,000. In this example, Channel 2 could have provided the same reach with only a little more than 20,000 impressions. This means (if the price of the advertising on the two channels is the same) that around 60% of the budget could be saved by reallocating it from Channel 1 to Channel 2.

Our model uses this concept and expands upon it, including methods of handling channels with overlapping universes and desired target group specifications.

This leads to several thousand reach curves estimated with optimised budget allocations to give the lowest advertising spend. All this is done while taking into account different channels’ targeting capabilities, cost of advertising, joint viewership demography, relative channel overlap, and more.

Want to try the ROI calculator?

Do you also want insight into the potential savings you can get by optimising your media investments based on cross-media measurement insights? Fill out the form below to get started.