What is waterfall planning and how do I use it?

A new whitepaper from Google uncovers some of the strategies developed by the firm’s own marketers – here, we explore the waterfall media planning strategy.

Why it matters
Waterfalls help to manage complexity by prioritising investment in top performing channels, meaning marketers can remain both financially disciplined and focussed on results. As a technique, Google says, it works equally well on small and big budgets, local and international campaigns – read the full whitepaper here.

What is it?
The waterfall method allocates budgets to different channels based on their efficiency.

• Effectively, it involves placing full funding into the best performing channels in order to capture demand as measured through cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS) goals.
• With this channel saturated, the rest of the available funds then cascade into the next best channel, on and on until the campaign has met its CPA and ROAS goals set according to customer lifetime value (CLV).

^{Image: Google}