Media plan template: deciding where the budget goes before it goes anywhere

A media plan template lays out where advertising money goes over a period: which channels, on which dates, at what budget, aimed at whom, with the result you expect written down before you spend. Agencies produce elaborate versions of this. A small team needs one grid, and the discipline it enforces is worth more than the sophistication it lacks.

The discipline is simple: nothing gets money without a line, and every line carries an expected result and an owner. That single rule is what separates a media plan from a list of things somebody was excited about in a meeting.

The columns a media plan template needs

• Channel and placement — specific enough to buy from. Search is not a channel; search on these terms in these regions is.
• Flight dates. Start and end, so overlapping activity is visible and you can tell which week produced which effect.
• Audience. Who this placement is aimed at, in the same language your positioning uses.
• Budget, committed and spent, kept as separate columns. The gap between them is the number that goes missing in every plan tracked as a single figure.
• Expected result and the unit it is measured in — qualified conversations, trials, orders. Impressions belong in the delivery report, not in the plan.
• Cost per result implied by those two numbers. Writing it down before the buy is what makes an unreasonable plan obvious.
• Owner and status. One name per line.

Building the plan

1. Set the total and hold back a reserve — ten to twenty per cent — for whatever works. A fully committed plan cannot respond to its own results.
2. Split the rest between channels you have evidence for and one or two you are testing. Testing without a named budget means testing with whatever is left over, which is nothing.
3. Size every test so its result will be readable. A budget that produces four conversions cannot distinguish a good channel from a bad one, and spending it is a decision to learn nothing.
4. Write the expected cost per result for each line. Compare it to what a customer is worth to you; delete the lines that do not survive the comparison.
5. Fix a review date per line, before the money is committed, and say what happens at three outcomes: scale, hold, stop.

The most valuable column is the one people leave until later: expected cost per result. Filled in during planning, it kills unreasonable lines while deleting them is free. Filled in after the fact, it becomes a justification exercise, and by then the budget is gone and the argument is about whose channel underperformed.

Reading it afterwards

A media plan is only useful if the same sheet holds what happened. Keep committed against spent and expected against actual on the same rows, and review on the dates you set rather than at the end of the quarter when everything is already bought. Most of the value shows up in the second period, once you have real cost-per-result figures for your own audience instead of benchmarks from somebody else's.

Where to keep it

This is a grid with arithmetic in it, so Ettex Sheets is the natural home — budgets, actuals and cost per result recalculating as numbers arrive. The campaign work behind each line, with owners and dates, sits better in Ettex Board, and the surrounding strategy is covered in marketing plan template and marketing budget template.

What we do not do: there is no ad platform integration, no automated spend import, no attribution modelling and no campaign reporting. Actual spend and results are entered from your ad accounts and analytics. If you need multi-touch attribution across channels, that is a dedicated product and this is not it.