Google Analytics cross-channel budgeting helps you optimize your paid channel investments and track performance across channels.
- Projections: Projection plans help you identify areas for improvement and make in-flight optimization decisions. You can monitor how your advertising channels are projected to perform against key performance indicators (KPIs) such as budget, conversions, and revenue.
- Scenarios: Scenario plans help you analyze predicted return on investment (ROI) at different budget levels and create optimized media plans for future initiatives that drive the highest return based on your defined budget. Use Projection and Scenario plans together to continually plan and optimize your media budgets.
Cross-channel budgeting in Google Analytics provides actionable insights for cross-channel budgeting and media planning. Its benefits include:
- Evaluate cross-channel budgets: Make informed decisions on where to place your marketing investment using empirical evidence and data-driven insights.
- Monitor in-flight pacing: Track the pacing of your spend and conversions weekly to make quick, in-quarter adjustments based on overperformance or underperformance.
- Plan for the future: Build comprehensive annual or quarterly media plans by modeling optimal cross-channel budget allocations based on your historical data.
These tools are for planning purposes only and won’t affect budgets or spend in your connected accounts.
On this page
View reports
To view budgeting, make sure you set up the Advertising section in Google Analytics, including linking to Google Ads and setting up conversions. The Advertising section is only available on the desktop version of Google Analytics.
- Sign in to Google Analytics .
- From the left menu, select Advertising.
- Click a report name in the Budgetingdrop-down menu.
Budgeting overview page
The Overview page provides quick access to your saved budgeting plans and the import sources that power your budgeting models. This page contains:
- A table showing your most recently created or modified plans.
- Product links : Google products you are currently linked to, for example, Google Ads, Display & Video 360, or any other product.
- Cost import : Usage, date of last upload, and file match rate. This is how you can upload campaign data for non-Google campaigns and channels.
- Manual integrations (third-party integrations): shows static text that explains how to set up manual integrations to import ad events from third-party campaigns. In the future, this section will dynamically show which platforms have manual integrations available for budgeting models.
Projection
A projection plan helps you understand how your campaigns are expected to perform against a target key performance indicator (KPI). It allows you to monitor in-flight performance and optimize budgets across channels based on projected outcomes.
Projection plans help answer questions such as:
- Am I on track to spend my plan budget?
- Am I on track to drive my target number of conversions?
- Am I on track to achieve my target revenue?
- Which channels are overperforming or underperforming?
- Where should I shift my budget to optimize overall performance?
Create a projection plan
To create a Projection plan, your property must be eligible for cross-channel budgeting and have sufficient historical data.
- Sign in to Google Analytics .
- From the left menu, select Advertising.
- Under “Budgeting”, click Projection.
- Click Create plan.
- Enter a plan name. For example: My Q4 plan.
- Enter a planning period. For example: Q4’25
- Under target KPI, select a key performance indicator that you want to optimize for:
- Budget: To spend the entire budget during the plan period.
- Conversions: To drive a certain number of conversions during the plan period.
- Revenue: To drive a certain amount of revenue during this plan period.
- Enter a target value for the key performance indicator you selected.
You can view the list of eligible conversions for your budgeting models based on the available historical data.
Review your projection plan
After you create a projection plan, you can view how your campaigns are pacing toward your selected key performance indicator. The chart shows projected performance over your selected date range:
- The solid line represents the actual performance to date.
- The dotted line represents how your plan is projected to perform.
- The shaded area indicates model confidence bounds.
If there are significant changes that aren’t explained by seasonality or holiday effects, the confidence intervals may be wide. This indicates that performance patterns have changed, and the model may need additional data to adjust.
Recommendation and insights
At the top of your projection plan chart, recommendations highlight the most and least efficient channels based on expected performance. These insights are based on historical data and model estimates to support data-driven budget decisions. If your budgets change, you can create a Scenario plan to explore how to allocate the remaining budget. Projection outputs are based on modeled estimates and shouldn’t be treated as guarantees of performance.
Example use case
Using projection to course-correct (The "In-Flight" optimization)
- Problem: You are running a 12-week long media initiative targeting a $100,000 revenue goal, so you created a Projection plan to monitor its performance. Five weeks in, your plan shows that you are significantly under-pacing for both spend and revenue.
- Actionable insight: The Projection data table and recommendation highlight that Channel A is the most efficient with 75 ROAS, while Channel B drives the lowest ROAS.
- Resolution or value: You shift $5,000 from the Paid Social budget to Paid Search, and the Projection model updates to show that you are now back on track to achieve your revenue goal.
Scenario plans
Scenario plans help you create comprehensive plans to maximize effectiveness across channels for quarterly or annual media plans. You can flexibly create and view scenarios to understand return on investment (ROI) at different budget levels and create future media plans that drive the highest return based on your defined budget.
When these plans are live, you can understand pacing and projected performance by jumping back into the projections report. With the Scenario plans, you can answer questions like “How should I allocate my budgets to maximize revenue and ROI?”
Create a Scenario plan
To create a Scenario plan, your property needs to include data-driven attribution from your Google Analytics property, along with campaign data from linked integrations or data imports. Offline data is also included when you’ve set up offline imports.
- Sign in to Google Analytics .
- From the left menu, select Advertising.
- Under “Budgeting”, click Scenarios.
- Click Create plan.
- Enter a plan name. For example: My Q4 plan
- Enter a planning period. For example: Q4’25
- Under target KPI, select a key performance indicator that you want to optimize for:
- Conversions: To drive the most number of conversions possible with my defined budget.
- Revenue: To drive the most revenue possible with my defined budget.
- Select your budget plan estimate.
- Select a conversion.
- You can view the list of all conversions that are eligible for your budgeting models based on the amount of historical data available. You can only select one conversion at a time.
Review your Scenario plan
After you create a Scenario plan, you can view insights that help guide your budget decisions. The response curve shows the optimal budget allocation to drive the highest ROI across channels for your defined budget. You can interact with the curve to understand optimal budget allocation and compare ROI at different budget levels. You can also view projected performance, which shows how your plan will perform if no optimizations are made.
Scenario plans can only start on future dates. If you check your plan during or after its date range, the response curve will remain the same as when it was first created. The curve reflects market conditions at the time of creation and doesn’t update automatically unless you actively modify any of the plan settings such as budget, date range, target metrics.
To check the updated response curve and projections, create a new plan. Creating plans regularly with updated data helps you make better budgeting decisions. Once campaigns are live, you can use a Projection plan to monitor pacing and performance. Scenario plan outputs are estimates based on our model, and not guarantees of performance.
Recommendation and insights
Scenario plans provide suggested budget allocations across channels, highlights channels likely to perform best for your key performance indicator, and identifies opportunities to shift spend to improve overall performance. Keep in mind that these insights are static estimates tied to the plan parameters at the time of creation. To view updated recommendations, you’ll need to create a new plan.
In order to improve the ease of use and actionability of your budgeting plans, we are launching new source grouping dimensions, source platform dimensions, and (alpha-only) source platform x campaign type dimensions. With these changes, you will be able to better analyze and optimize performance and standardize reporting for both Google and other platforms.
Example use case
Using scenario plan for future allocation (The "Strategic Planning" optimization)
- Problem: You have a new budget of $50,000 for Q1 next year ($1,500 more than Q4) and need to allocate it across your three existing channels (Search, Display, and Video) to maximize conversions.
- Actionable insight: You create a scenario plan. The recommendation banner and the data table show that you can drive 3% more conversions by increasing spend on Search by $1,000 and Video by $800, while decreasing spend on Display by $300.
- Resolution or value: You apply the budget changes based on the recommendations. You are now confident that you are entering the new quarter with a media plan optimized to drive the highest return. You can then create a projection plan to continue monitoring expected performance, and make adjustments throughout the plan period.
Model methodologies
Depending on whether you have Google Analytics or Google Analytics 360, cross-channel budgeting plans are powered by either a DDA-based model or Google's open-source Meridian model. Learn more about model methodologies:
- DDA-based budgeting model (currently in beta and available to Google Analytics and Google Analytics 360 customers)
- Meridian-based budgeting model (currently in alpha and only available to select Google Analytics 360 customers)
