Media plan template for Ecommerce

The media plan with five extra columns a store needs: which slice of the catalogue the line sells, the margin on that slice, the promotion it sits inside, what the creative is doing, and where the click lands.

Everything else is the general plan, unchanged. One row per line of spend, budgets as integers in minor units, one currency named per row, and a target column that ships blank because the number is yours.

Use it when the thing being sold varies more than the audience does — which is the normal condition of a store. A plan that treats a clearance line and a full-price launch as the same kind of row cannot tell you which of them paid for itself.

Write it before the season is built, and re-read it the week a promotion window opens and the week it closes. Those two weeks are where a retail plan actually gets decided, and they are the ones a monthly rhythm walks straight past.

Most media plans are organised around who is being reached. For a store that is the less useful half of the picture, because what is being sold changes more, and changes faster, than who is buying it. The same audience, on the same platform, with the same creative theme, is a different line of spend when it is pointed at clearance than when it is pointed at a launch — different margin, different urgency, different definition of a good result.

So the catalogue segment column comes before the budget column, and it is filled in first. Choose the smallest slice of the range whose margin and creative you would describe differently from its neighbours. For most stores that lands on four or five segments: best sellers, new arrivals, a hero product or two, the long tail, and clearance. A store with one product has one segment and should say so rather than inventing five.

Once the segments are named, the rest of the row follows from them almost mechanically. The creative theme is constrained by what the segment is; the landing page is the segment's collection; the margin is the segment's margin; and the target is whatever that margin will bear.

Gross margin is the field that most plans leave out, and leaving it out is how a store ends up with one blended acquisition target applied to lines whose economics have nothing in common.

Fill it per segment, after discount and after expected returns, and after shipping if the store carries that cost. Those two adjustments matter more than they look: a segment that discounts heavily and a segment with a high return rate can both look healthy on revenue and be the two worst lines in the plan on contribution.

What you do with the number is the ordinary arithmetic, done once per segment rather than once for the whole account. The margin on an order is what is available to pay for winning it, everything else being equal, and a target that ignores the difference between segments will be too tight for the thin ones and far too loose for the fat ones. Both failures are expensive, and the loose one is worse, because it looks like success for as long as it lasts.

Where you do not know a segment's margin, leave the cell blank and say so in the notes. A blank margin with a note is a question somebody can go and answer this week. A guessed margin is a wrong target that will be defended for the whole flight.

A store's spend is lumpy by design. Promotions, drops, seasonal peaks and delivery cut-offs all set dates that have nothing to do with the end of a month, and a plan that reports monthly will average across exactly the weeks that decided the quarter.

So the promotion window column exists, and lines are cut at its edges. A line that runs from before a sale to after it is two lines, because the offer changed halfway through and everything downstream of the offer changed with it: the creative, the expected conversion rate, the margin, the target. Keeping them as one row makes the result unreadable in exactly the period that mattered most.

Auction costs move around retail peaks too, in the direction everybody expects and by an amount no template can tell you, because it is a fact about your auction and your competitors rather than about retail in general. Plan for the shape rather than the size: name the window, give it its own rows, put the budget where the demand is, and read the cost off your own account when the week arrives instead of off somebody's benchmark.

The delivery cut-off deserves its own line in the notes on every row that runs into it. Traffic sent after the last date an order can arrive in time converts worse for a reason that has nothing to do with the creative, and a plan that does not record the cut-off will spend a week blaming the wrong thing.

Retention and acquisition go in separate rows even when they run on the same platform, to the same catalogue segment, in the same week.

Blended, they produce a cost per order that flatters acquisition and hides whether retention is contributing anything. They also have genuinely different economics: a repeat order from an existing customer carries no acquisition cost and often a different margin, and holding both to one number means holding at least one of them to the wrong one.

The same discipline applies to the retargeting rows in between. Give them their own objective, their own target and their own audience description, and write in the notes what they are retargeting from. A retargeting line whose source of traffic is not named is a line that will be credited with orders that some other line paid for.

The last thing a general media plan does not have to worry about: a store can sell out.

Before committing a budget to a segment, check that the stock behind it can absorb it. Put the cover in the notes — weeks of cover at current rate, or units, or a date — and make it part of the pre-flight check rather than something discovered in week two. A line pointed at a hero product with four days of cover is not an aggressive plan; it is a plan to spend money teaching customers about something they cannot buy.

The reverse case is worth planning for too. Clearance segments exist because stock has to move, and their target is usually not an acquisition cost at all but a sell-through date. Say so in the primary metric column rather than forcing the row to answer to a metric that was never the point.

Every row names a catalogue segment. Every segment has a margin or an honest blank. Every promotion window has lines that begin and end with it. Stock cover is written against every segment carrying a budget. The delivery cut-off is in the notes on every line that crosses it. And retention sits in its own rows, so that at the end of the season the two halves of the account can be read apart.