Set a monthly budget across channels

The first number is not a split. It is the total, and it comes from the business rather than from advertising.

Three questions produce it. What is the most you can spend this month without the answer mattering to anything else you are doing. What do you need back from it for this to have been worth doing. And how long can you wait before you find out — because a month of money on a product with a ninety-day sales cycle is a question you will not be able to answer at the end of the month.

Write those three down before opening anything. A budget with no stated tolerance is a budget nobody can be wrong about, and a budget nobody can be wrong about will be defended long past the point where it should have moved.

If you want the arithmetic behind the second question, work it on your own margin rather than a benchmark: the ROAS calculator and the CPA calculator take your figures and no account, and the break-even line they produce is the number the split has to beat.

The split is the decision with the least evidence behind it and the most opinion. Reducing that ratio takes about ten minutes.

Which campaigns carried the spend over the last ninety days, and how concentrated was it?

Give me the brief for that ad account.

The account brief is the long form: what the window covered, the totals, a comparison against the previous twenty-eight days, the mix of objectives, how concentrated the spend is, the rankings by return and by cost per acquisition, and the rhythm across weekdays. It is computed rather than live, carries its own age, and is flagged once it is more than seven days old.

Two things to read carefully. Ratios come back empty when the denominator is zero — an empty cost per acquisition means there were no conversions to divide by, not that acquisitions were free, and reading the blank as a nought is how a losing line survives a review. And a total spanning several currencies comes back as a labelled estimate with the date of the oldest rate it leaned on, so a cross-currency comparison is a comparison you know is approximate.

What has earned money. Not what has spent it. Concentration is the thing to look at first: if one campaign carried most of the spend, the account's aggregate numbers are that campaign's numbers wearing a disguise, and a split derived from the aggregate is a split derived from one line item.

What has room. A channel that returned well on a small budget has not proved it returns well on a large one. Every ad account carries its own daily ceiling in Tempio, derived from what that account has actually done — three times the highest single-campaign daily spend in its last twenty-eight days, floored at a default in the account's own currency. That ceiling is a useful proxy for the question you are actually asking, which is how far this account can be pushed before the answer stops resembling the evidence.

What you are testing. Some of the month is not an allocation, it is a question. Name it as such, give it a number you are prepared to lose entirely, and do not let it be graded against lines that are not experiments.

Three buckets is usually enough: what works, what has room, and what you are finding out. A split with eleven lines and a rationale for each is a split nobody will revisit.

The document that holds this is a media plan: a window, one currency, one line per campaign you intend to run, and nothing in it touching live spend. How to write a media plan is the full procedure; what matters for a monthly budget is two fields.

The window is the month, not the campaign. Every item's flight sits inside it, and the total at the top of the plan is the number you committed to. If half the month is a launch, that is still one plan with one window — otherwise the total stops being the number you are actually spending.

Each item's budget is the whole-flight total. Not a daily rate. The daily figure a platform wants is derived at materialisation by dividing the total over the inclusive length of the flight, which means a line running twenty days out of thirty carries twenty days of money and produces a higher daily rate than a line running the whole month for the same total. That is the arithmetic that catches people out, and it catches them out at the refusal rather than at the keyboard.

For the sheet version of the same division — several lines, the percentages, the running total — the budget allocator template is the spreadsheet, and the media plan template is the same structure for whoever will not read a web page.

A split is a hypothesis. The useful part of writing it down is that it can be wrong in a way you notice.

Put three things in the plan's brief. The date you will look. The evidence that would move money, stated as a comparison rather than a feeling — one line beating another on cost per result over a window long enough to mean something. And what you will not do, which is usually the sentence that earns its place: the reallocation you have already decided not to make in week two because the numbers will not be ready.

The plan does not watch this for you. It states what you intended and the reporting side states what happened; holding the two against each other is work you do on the date you wrote down. A planning surface that implied it was tracking drift would be describing a different product.

When the shape is right, materialising the plan turns every item into a create-campaign draft at the approval gate, one batch per connection, with items keeping their board order. It validates everything before it writes anything — flights inside the window, budgets as whole numbers of minor units, an ad account resolved for every item, each account billing in the plan's currency, then the kill switch and the budget guardrails — and a failure at any step drafts nothing at all.

The arrangement underneath, stated once: your connections read your accounts, a change is written as a draft on the record with the state it would change from and the checks it passed, applying it is gated on approval — by you, or by a rule you wrote — and no platform write reaches a customer account until that platform has granted write access. Applying a cleared change to a platform is in private beta. A create is never a rule's to clear, so a materialised plan always waits for a person, and every create lands paused, so approving the batch builds the structure without starting delivery.

Turn a media plan into campaign drafts is that step in detail, and Split budget between prospecting and retargeting is the division this guide deliberately left as one line.