Which media split buys you the most orders?

Three media plans on the same $90,000, with the response rates moving as the spend concentrates. The balanced plan wins by about 700 orders a month, and it only wins because the assumptions were allowed to move together.

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After you install, this is the model to open.

Three Media Plans, Compared

In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.

The answer

The winning plan: Balanced $30,000 each to search, social and video
Orders a month: 7,482 against 6,764 search heavy and 6,488 video heavy
Cost per order: $12.03 against $13.31 and $13.87
The margin: +718 orders and it only exists because response rates moved with spend

Three ways to split the same $90,000, and the thing that makes this template worth reading is what sits in the assumption block. It is not just the three spends. It is the three response rates as well, because a channel does not keep converting at the same rate when you triple its budget: you buy the good impressions first and then you buy the rest.

Save the assumption column as Search heavy, then copy the Balanced column over it and save that, then Video heavy. Search heavy returns 6,764 orders at $13.31 each and $581,716 of revenue. Balanced returns 7,482 orders at $12.03 and $643,474. Video heavy returns 6,488 orders at $13.87 and $557,982. The balanced plan wins by about 700 orders a month against the plan most media meetings would choose, which is to put the money where the best rate is.

And it only wins because the rates were allowed to move. Hold all three rates at their best values, which is what a plan built on a single number per channel does, and search heavy wins by a distance and the client spends a year finding out otherwise. That is the difference between this and a data table: a data table sweeps one input while everything else stands still, which is exactly the wrong model of a media plan.

Save a fourth case if you like, Balanced with pessimistic rates, dropping all three rates by 15 percent, and you will see whether the ranking survives being wrong about the whole account, which is a better test than being wrong about one channel. What the sheet cannot tell you is where the saturation point actually is: those rates are estimates, and the honest way to improve them is to regress orders against spend from your own history, which the free Data Analysis panel will do.

Replace the impression costs, the rates and the average order value with your own, and add a line for each channel if you run more than three.

The model

It arrives on a tab called Template: Three Media Plans, carrying these columns:

This plan
Search heavy
Balanced
Video heavy

with the model computed beside the data:

Search orders	4,125
Social orders	1,377.8
Video orders	1,261.4
Total spend ($)	90,000
Total orders	6,764.1
Cost per order ($)	13.31
Revenue ($)	581,716.2

Once it is in your sheet

The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.

Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.

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