Media planning basics: setting a paid budget around business goals

Start with one business goal

"More awareness" and "more sales" are too vague for a media plan to work with. Pick one objective per campaign and make it measurable, for example:

• 150 qualified leads for a new residential project this quarter
• 400 online orders a month at an average order value of EGP 1,500
• Reaching 200,000 people in Alexandria before a new store opens

Each of these needs a different plan. A lead generation campaign needs landing pages and lead forms. An e-commerce campaign needs a product catalog and purchase tracking. An awareness campaign is judged on reach and frequency rather than cost per sale. When one campaign tries to do all three, it usually does none of them well.

Work out what a result is worth to you

Before you decide how much to spend, figure out how much you can afford to pay for one result. This is your target cost per acquisition, and it should come from your own numbers rather than a platform benchmark.

Here is a simple example. Say one new customer brings in an average profit of EGP 10,000, and your sales team closes one in every ten qualified leads. That makes each lead worth up to EGP 1,000 to you. If you want to keep at least half of that profit, your target cost per lead is EGP 500 or less.

Now you have a number to plan against. If campaigns bring in leads at EGP 350, you have room to spend more. If leads cost EGP 900, something needs to change: the targeting, the offer, the landing page, or the target itself.

Build the budget from the goal

Once you know the goal and the target cost, the starting budget is simple arithmetic:

Budget = number of results you need × target cost per result

In the example above, 150 leads at EGP 500 each gives a starting budget of EGP 75,000 for the quarter. Treat that figure as an estimate. Real costs depend on your market, your competitors, the season, and the quality of your ads, so the first month works as a test that shows what results actually cost.

If the business can only afford a fraction of that figure, it is better to find out now. You can lower the target, narrow the audience, or focus on one channel instead of spreading a small budget thinly across four.

Split the budget across channels

Each platform does a different job, so your channel mix should follow your audience and your objective:

• Meta (Facebook and Instagram) reaches broad consumer audiences and is often the main source of leads at scale.
• Google Search reaches people who are already searching for what you sell, which usually means high-intent traffic.
• LinkedIn usually costs more per click, but it lets B2B brands target by job title, industry, and company size.
• TikTok reaches younger audiences and favors ads that look like native short-form video.

We usually recommend putting most of the budget, around 70 to 80 percent, into channels that have already proven they can hit your target cost. Keep the rest for testing new platforms, audiences, or ad formats. That test budget is how you find your next good channel without putting the whole plan at risk.

Plan for the full funnel

Not everyone who sees your ad is ready to buy. A balanced media plan reaches people at different stages:

• Awareness: introduce the brand to people who have never heard of you.
• Consideration: give interested people a reason to learn more, such as a video, a guide, or a product comparison.
• Conversion: ask warm audiences to act, and use retargeting to bring back people who visited your site but did not buy.

Smaller budgets should lean toward conversion, where spend turns into results faster. As the budget grows, investing in awareness keeps new people coming into the funnel.

Set up tracking before you spend

A budget built on cost per result only works if you can measure results. Before launch, check that:

• The Meta Pixel, Google tag, or LinkedIn Insight Tag is installed and firing on your site
• Conversions such as form submissions, calls, and purchases are set up in GA4 and in each ad platform
• Every ad link carries UTM parameters
• Each lead can be traced back to the campaign that produced it, ideally inside your CRM

Without this, you end up judging campaigns on clicks and impressions, which tell you very little about revenue.

Review the media plan and move money every month

Plan to revisit the budget at least once a month. Move spend toward the campaigns and channels that are hitting your target cost, and away from the ones that are not. Give each test enough time and budget to produce a fair result before you judge it. A campaign switched off after three days has barely left the platform's learning phase, so the numbers from that window say little about how it would have performed.