As a marketer, you need to invest your budget wisely, maximizing spend on channels that have high returns, so that you’ll hit your yearly or quarterly targets.

InfiniGrow's forecaster helps do exactly that, by predicting the outcome of your marketing spend and helping you identify optimal budget scenarios.

InfiniGrow’s forecaster uses several channel-specific data points, such as a channel’s cost efficiency, velocities, and conversion rates, to predict how a given future budget will translate into your various bottom-of-funnel KPIs.

Then, the channel-specific predictions are aggregated, to provide you with monthly and cumulative total outputs per KPI, based on your marketing plan.

All data points are calculated per channel, to forecast how each channel will impact results.

Prerequisites:

Data points:

Cost per: The average “cost per MQL” of each channel. The number of new MQLs is calculated using the "cost per" metric.

Note: The costs used for this calculation are drawn from your actuals. To make your forecast as accurate as possible, you'll need to make sure that the channel you’d like to forecast has updated actual costs for the past 12 months. Learn how to here.

Conversion rates: The rate at which each channel converts through the funnel. From the number of MQLs expected to be generated, the conversion rate is used to calculate the number of new {target focus KPIs}. Learn how InfiniGrow calculates conversion rates.

Velocity: The average time it takes each channel to transition from MQLs to {focus KPI}. Channel Velocity is used to calculate how long it takes for an account to move between two funnel transitions, on account journeys where the channel was present.

InfiniGrow’s forecaster uses your account's benchmarks to calculate and forecast results. The number of expected new MQLs is calculated by dividing the budget for each channel by the cost per MQL of the same channel. Using the number of MQLs, velocities and conversion rates, InfiniGrow calculates the expected results for each channel and funnel stage.

As an example, here are your Google search benchmarks:

If you enter a budget of $1K for Google ads in January.

Your forecast results will be:

A marketing plan consists of both paid and organic channels, with organic channels usually having no associated costs. Even if you invest in organic channels, there's no correlation between the amount invested and the results.

For example - although you can invest in improving your SEO ranking (tools, freelance writers, etc.), the results generated from this channel don't really correlate to your investment, you can even stop investing and it will continue generating new leads. If an agency’s fee doubles, that isn’t expected to result in double the results.

This is why InfiniGrow defines three types of channels and treats each differently:

You can figure out which channel type is the right one for a given channel by asking yourself “how many leads will I generate if I stop investing in this channel altogether?”.

If the answer is zero, it’s a paid channel, if it keeps generating new leads even when you're not spending money on it, it's an organic channel.

InfiniGrow uses the above cost-per based method to calculate paid channel output, but to provide a forecast of your organic output, InfiniGrow uses a different calculation. For that reason, setting up your channel types is required for forecasting to be accurate.

By default, InfiniGrow will assign the type "None" to custom channels (channels that have been manually added to the platform) and "Paid" or "Organic" for all default channels (e.g. Google PPC, SEO, Tradeshow).

You can update a channel type under settings → attribution management.

Choose the channel that you’d like to update and click "Show Advanced Options", then adjust the "channel type" field.

The forecaster is located at the bottom of the Budget page in the plan section.

Click on the "FORECAST" tab at the bottom of the screen, or scroll all the way down.

On the left side of the module, you can see the available KPIs that you can forecast.

Once you click on one of them, a graph will appear, showing the forecasted monthly result (bars), as well as the cumulative result all the way to the end of the year (Line).

By hovering over a specific month, you can view the exact forecast for that specific month, and the cumulative result from the beginning of the year till this month.

To see how your current plan compares to an alternative one, switch to Edit mode by clicking on the “Edit” button at the top of the page.

Whenever you make a change in your plan while on Edit mode, the forecaster will present an Update button giving you the ability to generate an alternative scenario (presented with different color bars and a dashed graph) versus your original plan.

Hovering over the monthly results will now show both the original plan’s predicted performance as well as the alternative prediction.

Whenever you are satisfied with the plan, click on "Commit" at the top right corner of the page. By doing so, your changes will be saved.