Plain-English definitions of the concepts behind forecast-led media planning. Each entry explains what the term means and why it matters when you decide where the next pound of budget should go.
Incremental return on ad spend - the revenue advertising genuinely creates, not what it is credited with.
The return on the next pound of spend - the metric that should govern whether a channel is worth scaling.
The curve used to model how channel response flattens as spend approaches saturation.
How advertising impact carries over after exposure, creating delayed commercial effect.
How channel performance flattens as spend rises - the relationship behind diminishing returns and budget ceilings.
Why each additional pound of spend tends to return less than the one before it.
The spend level beyond which a channel can no longer return profitably.
Modelling best, base and worst case outcomes before budget is committed.
Predicting the commercial outcomes of a paid plan before spend is committed.
Modelling how budget changes translate into performance, channel by channel.
The outcomes advertising genuinely caused, not those it was merely credited with.
How close predictions land to actual results, and how much to trust a forecast.
The range a forecast is expected to fall within, expressing uncertainty honestly.
Deciding where, when and how much to spend across channels to hit an objective.
Splitting a fixed budget across channels by marginal return rather than habit.
How credit for a conversion is assigned across the touchpoints that preceded it.
Estimating each channel contribution from aggregate data - a privacy-durable alternative to user-level attribution.
Moving committed budget between channels by marginal return, not average performance.
How much it costs to acquire a new customer from marketing and sales spend.
The cost of generating an enquiry - and how it differs from cost per customer.
Customer lifetime value against acquisition cost - the clearest test of sustainable growth.
Profit on ad spend - what advertising returns after costs, not just revenue.
The minimum ROAS where ad revenue covers product cost and fees.
Return on ad spend - revenue per pound of advertising, and why the average can mislead.
The decline in ad performance as an audience sees a creative too many times.
Systematically testing concepts and variants to find winning creative.
Introducing new creative before performance declines, on a planned cadence.
How many concepts and variants you need to test, refresh and scale paid social.
How often an average person sees an ad - the most direct driver of fatigue.
The share of viewers who watch past the first few seconds of a video ad.
The rate at which scrolling users stop on an ad - the first gate of attention.
Evolving winning creative into new variants rather than starting from scratch.
The confidence that a measured difference is real, not noise - vital for testing.
These ideas come together in marginal ROAS vs average ROAS and in our free planning tools.