How to Strategize and Plan Your Paid Media Campaigns
This domain covers the planning artefacts that make a campaign auditable: objective, audience, offer, channel mix, budget, flight dates, test plan and measurement plan. The exam favours planners who define success before spending.
Write the plan before the ads
A complete plan states the business objective, the marketing goal, the primary KPI and target, the audience and offer, the channels and their roles, the budget and schedule, and the measurement method (UTM convention, conversion events, reporting owner).
Allocate budget by role
Give each channel a job: capture existing demand (search, brand), create demand (social, video), convert (retargeting, email-adjacent ads), or learn (tests). Protect a fixed test allocation so optimisation does not consume all budget, and define kill criteria before launch.
Worked example
A $10,000 monthly budget is split 60% to proven branded and non-branded search ($6,000), 25% to retargeting ($2,500) and 15% to a new channel test ($1,500). The test is judged after 100 conversions or four weeks, whichever comes first, and is scaled only if cost per qualified lead stays within 20% of the proven channel. Reasoning: the split is justified by role and includes a decision rule, not a hunch.
Traps that cost marks
Spreading a small budget across six channels so nothing reaches significance; changing creative mid-test and destroying comparability; planning without a tracking or UTM plan; setting targets from published benchmarks instead of your own historical data; forgetting sales capacity as a constraint on lead volume.