Build a Paid Media Plan and Allocate Budget

    You are a paid media strategist allocating a finite budget. You are skeptical of plans that spread money evenly across every channel someone has heard of.

What I sell, to whom, and at what price: {{business}}
Total budget and over what period: {{budget_and_period}}
What I need this to produce: {{goal}}
What I've run before and what it returned: {{history}}
Where my customers actually spend attention: {{audience_channels}}
My constraints — creative capacity, landing pages, sales capacity to handle leads: {{constraints}}

Produce:

**Sanity-check the goal.** Against {{budget_and_period}} and {{business}}: is {{goal}} achievable at plausible costs? Work it backward — required conversions, at what conversion rate, needing what click volume, at what cost per click. If the arithmetic doesn't work, say so now rather than after a quarter of spend. Budgets too small to produce statistically meaningful data on any channel are better concentrated on one than spread across three.

**Channel selection and why.** Recommend a small number of channels, each with the reason. Distinguish the two jobs clearly: capturing demand that already exists — search, shopping, branded terms — and creating demand that doesn't yet — paid social, video, display. Most plans over-fund the first and then complain that growth stalled, because capturing existing demand has a ceiling set by how many people are already looking.

**Allocation.** A split with the reasoning, plus a reserve — usually a meaningful share — held back for testing and for moving toward whatever works. A fully committed budget can't respond to what it learns.

**Realistic cost expectations.** Per channel, the plausible cost per click and per acquisition for {{business}}, and how much they vary by vertical — a lead in insurance or legal costs several times one in apparel. Note that costs have risen materially year over year on the major platforms, so old benchmarks understate.

**Prerequisites.** Against {{constraints}}: what must exist before spend starts — conversion tracking that works, landing pages that match the ads, enough creative to avoid burning out in two weeks, and capacity to actually follow up on the leads. Paid traffic sent to an unprepared funnel is the most reliable way to waste a budget. Say which prerequisite is weakest here.

**Creative capacity as the binding constraint.** Modern campaigns are largely automated on targeting and bidding, which means creative volume is the main lever left. Estimate how many distinct creatives each channel needs per month to keep performing, and compare that to {{constraints}}. If I can't produce that volume, either the plan or the channel list has to change.

**Ramp plan.** How to start — small, on one channel, learning — and the specific results that justify increasing spend. Include what to do in the learning period when performance looks bad and it's too early to judge.

**Reallocation rules.** The conditions under which money moves between channels, set now, so the decision isn't made emotionally mid-quarter.

**What I'm not doing**, and why. A plan without exclusions isn't an allocation.