PPC budget planning & reporting
Forecasts, budget splits and monthly reporting that show what is working, what to cut, and where more budget would actually help. Plan a budget first with the free media spend calculator, then make it defensible as part of your paid search programme.
£160M+ in ad spend managedFund here. Each extra pound still brings profitable volume.
Diminishing. More spend mostly inflates cost; the budget works harder elsewhere.
Budgets often get set by last year plus a gut feel, and reporting too often arrives as a data dump that celebrates clicks and impressions while the numbers finance cares about stay unanswered. When leadership asks what another £5,000 a month would return, or which campaigns to cut, most accounts cannot say.
We make the budget defensible and the reporting decision-led: forecasts you can take to a finance meeting, splits that follow where money actually works, and monthly reporting that ends with a recommendation, not a dashboard.
What we deliver
- Budget forecasts and scenarios you can take to finance
- Channel and campaign budget splits by return
- Marginal-return analysis: where the next pound works hardest
- Monthly reporting tied to revenue, leads and bookings
- Brand versus non-brand reporting, separated honestly
- Pacing and seasonality management to avoid under or overspend
- Clear scale, hold and cut recommendations
- Board-ready summaries non-specialists can act on
How we make a budget defensible
When leadership asks what another £5,000 a month would return, or which campaigns to cut, the answer should already exist. We build the budget so it does.
Forecast with scenarios
Roughly what a spend should return, at what cost per lead or sale, with conservative, expected and aggressive cases finance can weigh.
Split by marginal return
Fund campaigns where the next pound still brings profitable volume, using lost impression share, demand and conversion economics, not a flat ROAS target.
Separate incremental from existing
Tell demand you would have captured anyway apart from genuine growth, so budget funds what moves the business.
Pace and revise
Pace spend through the month, plan around seasonality, and revise the forecast as real data comes in rather than setting it once.
Go deeper
Related services & tools
- Media spend calculatorForecast what a budget should return.
- Agency media plannerTurn a budget into a cross-channel plan.
- Paid social advertisingPlan and report budget across the full funnel.
- Programmatic advertisingWhere upper-funnel budget is planned and measured.
- Data & analyticsDeeper dashboards and revenue modelling.
- Paid search managementThe wider PPC programme.
Common questions
What teams ask about budget planning & reporting before they hand over an account.
Make your paid media budget defensible
Get a free senior review of your paid media budget and reporting, what is working, what to cut, and where the next pound would help, from a Google Premier Partner managing £160M+ in ad spend.
- Where budget produced no profitable return in the last 90 days
- Whether your conversion tracking and values are reliable
- How much of your performance is genuinely incremental vs demand you already had
- Which campaigns are worth more budget and which to cut
“A useful PPC review should make the next decision obvious: what to cut, what to protect, and what is worth more investment.”
Fraser Smith, Chief Strategy Officer, reviews every submissionFree senior PPC review
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