When you plan to implement an advertising campaign, one of the most important steps is to get your media plan in top shape. These days, a well-crafted media plan can be the difference between a successful campaign or a failure.

In this guide, we are going to guide you through all you need to know to create a perfect media plan including the best free templates to get you started.

What Is Media Planning? Meaning and Definition

These days, when marketers need to do much with less, meeting their audience at the right channel and serving the ads at the right time, planning is essential to prevent wasting time, money, and efforts.

What’s in a Media Plan?

The media plan consists of the details of the media you will create. It has your budget spending and details when and where you will publish to engage and convert your audience. Some plans support a company’s global campaign while others are individual strategies to connect with followers and/or customers.

But it is not only a budget detail. The media plan displays the steps on the advertising strategy, the channels to use, the frequency of the publishing, etc. The plan allows marketers to have a view at a glance of the advertising activities that will be carried for the advertiser.

So what’s in a media plan?

Here are the key components of creating an effective media plan:

1. Marketing problem: the media plan always starts with trying to solve a marketing problem.  For instance: not seeing enough conversions from their website.
2. Marketing objectives and KPIs: this is what the organization wants to achieve, it can create brand awareness, increase sales or engagement. This becomes the marketing objective, in the form of measurable goals. This includes selecting what metrics you will use to track success.
3. Media objectives: these are the objectives for the advertising campaign. To define the objectives the marketer needs to take into account:  the total budget, the media budget, key messages, calls to action, deliverables, timeline, specifications.
4. Media strategies: these are the actual recommendations and implementation ideas of the media plan. Which channels to use, ad types, when and where to launch. This stage includes monitoring and measuring the advertising campaign effectiveness.

Figure1. How media objectives and marketing strategies interact as factors of media planning.

What Are the Top Factors That Affect Media Planning?

1. The Product

What are you going to advertise? Is it a product or service? The nature of the product influences the type of media you can use. You may want to advertise technical or software products on review pages for SaaS, for example. Social media may be a better fit for fashion and consumer products.

2. The Customers

Your audience is the most important factor. Check the demographics of potential customers, the age group, gender, income, interests, education level. Targeting the wrong crowd can be disastrous. It is critical then to learn as much as possible about the people that may buy the product or service.

3. Conversion Goals

This is a specific factor among business goals. It refers to what are your goals for that particular campaign, how many people do you expect to convert, click or make a purchase on the ad? Miscalculating the conversion goals can give you an inaccurate idea of what you expect from the campaign.

4. Frequency

This factor stems from your potential customers’ habits. You need to know when and how often they are online on the channels you want to use to reach them. Running the ad too frequently may annoy customers, running it too sparingly may fail to get their attention.

5. Is Your Goal Reach or Engagement?

Failing to answer this question can make or ruin a campaign. If the goal of your campaign is to generate brand awareness, then achieving the maximum reach should be an objective. For instance, if you are launching a new product you want everywhere to know about.

6. What Do You Consider a Successful Campaign?

You should set from the onset what is the expected outcome of the campaign. Do it in measurable terms. For instance, grow 15% of the engagement or acquire 20% more clients than last quarter. Having a measurable goal can help you make adjustments if needed.

7. What’s Your Message?

Think of what type of messaging can resonate with your target audience and drive engagement. What is the message you want to deliver with the campaign?. A good advertising campaign aligns with the core message of the company and enhances it.

8. What’s Your Budget?

This is perhaps the most complex factor. Planning a budget too tight can be a cause of expensive top-ups. On the other hand, setting a budget too high can lead to a waste of resources. Set a realistic budget that accounts for leeway so you don’t have the problem of getting overboard in the middle of the campaign.

9. What Media Are the Competitors Using?

We are not saying to copy your competitors but to keep an eye on what they are doing. Take a look at what tactics are successful. By knowing what works and what doesn’t you can focus on doing things better.

10. What’s the timeline?

How much time can you realistically dedicate to the campaign? What is the campaign timeline? The timeline needs to be precise to generate the maximum impact.

Media Planning Step by Step

1. Define Your Goals

Before any planning first, you need to know what you want to achieve with the plan. Therefore, evaluate the organization’s main goals and how the future campaign aligns with the company’s main goals and objectives.

Once you do that, you can define the media goals and objectives which are the goals for the campaign. To achieve it, the marketer needs to analyze the current marketing position, including the competitive environment so they can approach the present marketing problem.

When you have a complete analysis, then you can put these objectives into goals you can measure with key performance indicators (KPIs).

2. Who’s Your Target Audience?

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Now is the time to define exactly who you are directing the campaign for. The golden rule is the more targeted the message, the better the outcome. Since different audiences react to different media, ad types, and messages. You need to consider this when creating the media plan.

Your target audience also has preferences for specific content types and platforms. That’s why it is important to market to the audience where they use to spend their time online. Without researching the target audience, the message can be too broad or scattered and it won’t be measured accurately.

Once you find your target audience, you need to gather as much information as possible. Not only the demographics but their habits, interests, and how they consume media, then define the rest of the plan around these data.

3. Consider the Budget, Frequency, and Reach

Next, it is important to determine how much and how often you will serve the ads to your audience. Marketers should take into consideration to avoid alienating the audience, serving them too many ads.

There are three main approaches to ad frequency: 

• Continuity: this refers to running an ad on a fixed schedule so the audience is constantly exposed. This approach works well with generic consumer products and awareness campaigns.
• Flighting:  this method involves running ads intermittently. This method works best with seasonal items.
• Pulsing: this is a combination of both methods. Here you run a consistent stream of ads at the most convenient times and pulse reminders at other times.

Finally, you need to define the reach of the campaign. This is determined by the size of the audience. The larger the audience, the broader the reach.

4. Select the Media Channels

At this stage, you already know who is going to consume your audience and what’s the goal for your campaign. Now you need to select which channels you are going to use to reach them.  Take into account which pricing method you will use, which platform you will sign on, etc.

5. Write the Plan

Once you have all the pieces in place, it is time to write the plan. A media plan should be specific and measurable. It should include details like the specific media channels, the number of impressions,s and development specifications.

6. Monitor, Measure, Analyze and Repeat. 

Now comes the part of executing the campaign. Analyze the measurable goals by tracking the engagement, conversions, and all the rest of the KPIs. Thus you can check what is working and what it isn’t. There should be continuous optimization in a constant loop of monitoring, measuring, and analyzing.

Benefits and Challenges of Media Planning

Challenges of media planning

• Platform preference: brands need to reach consumers in the various channels and platforms that the target audience uses while keeping the campaign within budget.

• Too focused on the budget: campaigns that revolve too much around the budget don’t have the flexibility to allocate a bit extra to different channels that prove more successful.

• Inaccurate measurements: because of the diversity of online and offline channels, it is difficult for marketers to compare the performance of each other and detect which are the most effective.
• Not targeted at the consumer level: to be successful, a campaign needs to be able to reach at consumer level with in-depth marketing.

Benefits of media planning

• A deeper knowledge of your target audience. 

• Keep control of the budget 

• More decision-power over which platforms and channels to share your content

• Monitoring advertising efforts on a deep level

Best Free Media Planning Templates to download

1. Hubspot media plan template: The best solution for budget tracking

In our opinion, this is the best solution for budget tracking. The spreadsheet has all the macros you need to track and report your media spending.

What it lacks is space to add an overview of the previous stages of media planning, like objectives, strategies, and goals, (the plan itself), which can be easily added in another document or tab.

You can download it from here, and make your own copy via Google Sheets. While it can work in MSExcel, we recommend keeping it in Google Sheets for better performance.

2. Hootsuite social media strategy template: Best for social media strategies

This plan enables you to easily set the goals, objectives, and metrics of your social media campaign. You can use it to create and adjust social media profiles, create personas and overall have a view at a glance. You can download it with your business email from here.

3. Slidebean Media planning template: Best for presentations

This slide deck media planning template offers you the framework to create a presentation of your media planning. With slides that cover all aspects of your marketing and media plan, from detailing the problem to the campaign breakdown in an editable file. You can download the pdf version or register to use an editable version.

While it is good for presenting the media plan, this template does nothing to help you execute or track the results. You can download the template here.

4. New Old Stamp Media Plan for Advertising Template: Simplest of All

If you are just starting and don’t need much tracking and reporting, you can use this example to create your own spreadsheet and track your media plan. It is very simple and doesn’t allow for reporting, but it can be useful to jot down data for a glance.

5. AdCMO media planning template

This simple media planning template enables you to have a high-level overview of the project and the goals you want to achieve. It is another example of a simple media plan but a bit more complete, including events and other types of media. You can download the plan template here.

6. Amazon media planning template

If you are using Amazon advertising, they provide a very useful quick media plan template you can download from here.

The template is very simple, a basic checklist you can copy/paste to your own document. It will help you have a high-level view of the entire plan.

We suggest combining this template with other, more in-depth templates for a complete solution.

Is Media Planning the same as Media Buying?

Media buying is the next step after the media plan is complete. The media plan sets the framework according to which you will buy the media required to achieve the goals of the campaign.

Learn more about what is media buying in Media Buying Explained

Media buying involves evaluating and selecting all advertising options within your budget and other criteria specified in the media plan. Then, buying according to the combination of ad types and media channels will produce the best campaign results.

What Is the Point of Media Planning?

Media planning aims to detect the perfect mix of media channels that fit into a present budget to advertise a product, service, or brand. The best media plans enable organizations to meet customers on the channels they are.

A well-crafted media plan allows you to create the optimal mix of paid online and offline media that will produce the results you expect from your advertising campaign, by using data, research, and lessons learned from previous campaigns

Media Planning on Social, What’s the Difference

Social media advertising revenue is soaring. Social media advertising is the second biggest market for digital advertising according to Statista research. Today’s revenue of $138.2 billion is expected to reach $182.4 billion in 2025. The largest spending in social media advertising happens in the U.S, followed by China.

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That’s why advertising on social media platforms is critical for most companies’ growth strategies these days. It includes content and ads posted on social media platforms.

The key steps of creating a social media plan for paid advertising are similar to digital ads media planning. The difference is that every social media platform is in itself an ad network and has its own requirements and pricing scheme.

Facebook

Facebook enables the creation of images, video ads, carousels, and personalized shopping ads. It works as an ad network, connecting advertisers with publishers on Facebook and mobile apps.

LinkedIn

Linkedin uses programmatic advertising to help advertisers publish on the platform according to the goal of the campaign, be it awareness, consideration, or conversion. Advertisers can set a budget and run the campaign with several options for their bidding strategy. The platform enables users to run video, static or native conversation ads.

Instagram

Instagram allows advertisers to run video ads. It also enables shoppable ads with call-to-action buttons. Instagram advertising may cost from $2 to $6.7, depending on the pricing model for the bidding. CPC can go for $2/click and CPM over $6 for a thousand impressions. Since it is owned by Facebook, it allows you to build multi-platform campaigns, turning posts into ads on Facebook and Instagram.

• It uses programmatic advertising to manage the budget for the ad campaigns.
• They suggest you run the ad for 7 days to let the algorithm learn about the audience.
• They offer video ads and promoted posts.

How to craft the Perfect Media Plan for Advertising (5 Tips)

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• Define the problem well: ask questions and try to find out what the marketing problem is as accurate as possible. When creating the plan, keep going back to the problem definition so you stay on track.

• Set clear goals: ensure the goals and objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely).

• Invest in knowing your audience: the better you know your audience’s interests and habits, the more you can target them. The target audience should feel like an old friend you know very well how to catch their attention easily.

• Have a distinct brand personality: your brand’s voice is what makes you recognizable from your competitors. Take time to build your brand personality and message so they will be memorable and your audience can recognize it at once.

• Pay attention to the content journey: when creating the media plan, think about how consumers will get to your ad, what is the customer journey and at what stage in the funnel they are when they get there? It is not the same to create ads for the top of the funnel as for the bottom.

How to Split the Budget Between Offline Media and Online Media

All the factors we analyzed as part of your media plan will help you determine what is the best channel to communicate with your target audience. This may include allocating some of your budgets to offline channels.

Do Offline Channels Still Have an Impact?

Depending on your audience, you may have to include some offline media alternatives. For instance, if your product demographics include older generations, advertising on TV and Cable may still get the attention of viewers.

With offline channels, you have the problem that it is difficult to measure and track the impact of such advertising. Tracking direct sales after an offline marketing campaign is one of the ways to do it. Here are some indicators that your offline campaign is successful:

• You notice an increase in direct or indirect sales
• There are more inquiries to partners, direct or resellers.
• You notice your website traffic is increasing
• Surveys show better brand awareness
• More leads or better qualified

Online Channels

Online channels have the advantage of being easily accessible and tracked. Online channels have metrics that give you a quicker and better understanding of the impact of the campaign. Some of the indicators of success for offline campaigns are also useful to monitor for online channels.

For online advertising, you should look at a combination of:

Social media: This channel allows you to have maximum reach and highly targeted impact. Most platforms offer advertisers to publish ads and build a community.

Programmatic advertising: This highly targeted method of advertising, uses algorithms to find specific audiences and serve the right ads can save you a lot of time and effort. It uses real-time bidding to select the highest paying advertisers for the digital property.

PPC: Pay-per-click is a popular form of online advertising Publishers sign with an ad network and get served display ads and search ads targeted to the visitor’s intent.

Simplify your Media Planning with CodeFuel

Defining, planning, and executing your media plan can be a lot of effort and take a lot of your budget. By serving highly targeted intent-based search and display ads, CodeFuel makes sure your advertising campaign hits the target every time. Publishers can monetize digital properties by leveraging search, shopping ads, and news to enhance user experience.

Learn more about how CodeFuel can simplify your media planning by contacting us.

If you are looking for ways to monetize your website, selling ads is a convenient and potentially profitable way to do it. You surely have questions about how to start, requirements. Also, should you sell the ads directly or join an ad network?

Don’t worry, the CodeFuel team prepared this guide to answer all questions you may have for selling advertisements the right way.

What to Do Before Starting Selling Ads?

Before you sell ads on digital property, you need to be sure your website is attractive for high-paying advertisers. Whether you plan on selling directly from your website or sign up for an ad platform, there are some common requirements.

1. Basic Requirements for Selling Ads

Each ad platform has its own requirements, but  there are three basic factors that determine your quality as a publisher for advertisers:

Traffic

For Google AdSense for example, your site must be active for at least six months, attract 250 unique visitors a day and the majority of the traffic must come from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Europe. Traffic that goes against Google policies (fake impressions, invalid click activity) are prohibited.

Content

The content of your website needs to be unique, relevant, and provide value to users. The more niche the content, the better for advertisers because it means the website is highly targeted to their audience. Your site needs to have enough pages for a reasonable dwell time (20 to 30 pages) and allow visitors to browse, with rich, value-based content.

Design and Usability

Look at your site design. Is it clean? Entices the visitors to learn more about your content? It should be professionally designed and visually attractive. To attract conversions, it needs to be easy to navigate, with a simple structure, and fast to lead to provide a great user experience. Make sure the page is mobile-friendly so visitors can reach your site (and its ads) from any device.

What Are the Requirements for Selling Ads on Your Properties?

Two of the major programs are Google AdSense and Bing Network Contextual Ads Program.  If you want to expand your site’s reach, you are not limited to AdSense. Let’s review both networks characteristics:

2. Understand the Current Site Audience

Before going on searching for advertisers first you need to understand who your visitor is. Look into your website analytics: what are the demographics? Check from where the traffic is coming. Do you have peak traffic times?

It is important that your audience is targeted, comprising visitors that are heavily interested in what your advertisers may offer. For instance, if you have a website about video games, while teenage gamers don’t have a high income as a collective, the audience is very attractive for game console companies and game developers.

3. Make Your Online Property Attractive

How to make your online property attractive to advertisers? We already mentioned some factors above but let’s explore this a bit more. The golden rule is that if your site is appealing and engaging to visitors, it will catch the attention of advertisers trying to reach those visitors.

A clean, engaging website design creates trust and enhances the user experience. So, here are 8  tips to create an engaging website design:

• Keep the layout simple

• Make navigation intuitive

• Design clear calls to action

• Minimal and impactful content

• Whitespace is your friend

• Use eye-catching colors in your brand palette

• Attractive and easy-to-read fonts draw attention

• Add media and images but keep tabs on the load speed.

4. Check How Much You Can Get For Ads In Your Niche

Including ads on your website is one of the most popular ways of monetization. Online advertising is a cost-effective advertising method for companies, compared to traditional advertising. While the average cost to reach 1000 people with online ads is $3.45, offline ads cost $22 and up to reach the same number of people.

The key to success monetizing with ads is to set your prices right. How much should you charge for ads? Your rates (Cost per Mille – or per thousand impressions) will depend also on your niche. You also need to take into account how much the ad network will pay you for every click on the ad (Cost per Click).

Related content: What is it, and How to Increase Your Page RPM?

So how much do you charge? We researched industry benchmarks for the highest and lowest cost per click:

The average cost per click for most verticals is $2 to $4, but top industries like lawyers, insurance, and loans can go by $6 per click.

The platform you choose to monetize your impressions is also important, with a significant difference in costs between search and display ads. Check the below table for average CPC and CPM costs per platform (including social media):

How do you price advertising space?

Your rate should attract high-paying advertisers and at the same time help you meet your monetization goals. Here are some questions you should ask to find out your ideal rate:

1. How much is your minimum rate?Define how much you need to charge for your ads to cover costs and make a profit. Take into account your business expenses and how much income you expect to make from sales. The remaining amount is how much sales you’ll need to cover from selling ads.

2. How much can you sell from ads on your page?On the other side, you should find out how much you can actually sell from ads on your website. This will depend on your layout and how many ads you can fit on your pages without cluttering them.

Look at the ad placement and format. Will you include video or interactive ads? Banners? Check the size of the potential ads and the position on the page.

Here are the banner ad sizes that perform better in 2021:

3. How much are your competitors charging?Finally, it is good to know the market for ads in your niche. Look at how much your competitors charge for ads on their sites, the types of ads they display, their placement, and their frequency.

Selling Ad Space: 4 Top Ways for Selling Ads

Selling ads on your website is a great way to monetize your site’s traffic. Still, it is not that easy to achieve a reasonable income from it.

Sell directly

This model doesn’t require an intermediary (ad networks, ad exchanges, affiliates) and potentially enables a publisher to earn more by being in direct contact with media buyers. However, this method requires a lot of time and effort.

Pros

• Publishers retain 100% of the advertising revenue.
• You can set your own rate and control who advertises on your site, and how they will pay.
• By choosing the brands to work with, you establish unique and potentially long-term business relations.
• It is simple without hassling over clicks, conversions, and impressions.

Cons

• It’s a ton of work finding advertisers manually and negotiating terms with them.
• It requires you have an established website, with lots of traffic, good conversions, and a community of visitors that regularly browse on your pages.
• Requires manually controlling your ad sales and performance.

Affiliate advertising

This is one of the fastest ways to earn money with your website. This method involves promoting a product or service in exchange for a commission.

Usually, publishers place affiliate links, text ads, or banners on their sites. When a visitor takes the desired action through the affiliate link (making a purchase, opting into a newsletter, etc) you get paid.

Pros

• Easy to enter. Most affiliate networks have minimal requirements: your own domain, an email account linked to it, and a website layout that supports different ad formats.
• Free for publishers
• High commissions per purchase. The average purchase commission for a user clicking on the affiliate link and purchasing through it can range from 30 to 50%.

Cons

• Generally, you only get paid when the visitor completes a purchase from the link. Very few affiliate networks will work on CPA (pay-per-action) or CPC (cost-per-click). Learn more about pricing models: CPC vs CPM Explained: What’s the Difference in 2021?
• You need to promote your site and the products to encourage sales. That means investing time and effort in social media posts and posting content on your site to drive visitors to click on that link or ad.

The 80/20 rule for Affiliate Marketing

Most affiliate publishers (80%) are paid on a PPS basis—pay per sale—, 18 percent on CPA (pay per action), and only the remaining 2% use CPM and CPC models as compensation methods. 

That being said, affiliate marketing can make a website really profitable. Commissions can be around 30 to 50 percent.

Ad Networks

The easiest option is to join an ad network that takes care of selling your impressions, track your earnings, and arrange placement on your site for a commission. Most ad networks set minimum monthly traffic you need to meet. CodeFuel is an example of a complete platform that leverages data management and artificial intelligence to maximize revenue from ads for publishers.

Pros

• Once you sign on to the network, the platform takes care of everything, dealing with the impressions via real-time bidding (learn what is real-time bidding).
• Niche or premium networks can offer more revenue for ads since they attract higher-intent customers, which in turn attracts higher-paying advertisers.

Cons

• Large ad networks have strict requirements for publishers to join their networks.
• The traffic minimum can be high for some publishers.

Native advertising

With this method, you create ads that blend with the surrounding content. Sponsored posts, content, and reviews are examples of native ads. Native advertising can be more effective than display ads since they integrate with the content. For instance, native ads can have 18% more purchase intent than display ads.

Source: eMarketer

Pros

• Builds brand awareness because
• They integrate into the customer experience, enhancing it.
• Can be used to target specific audience segments.
• Increase click-through rates

Cons

• Time-consuming. Requires creating content, like articles, reviews, social media posts.
• It is complex to measure performance. You need to combine measuring impressions, clicks, and CTR with website metrics like time on site, engagement rate, views, and cost per action.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is the group of technologies, tools, and processes that publishers and advertisers use to automate the media buying process. Publishers can leverage their available ad inventory by using a Supply Side Platform (SSP).

A supply-side platform is an advertising technology tool that coordinates and manages the sale of ad space. The platform sends the ad offerings and requests for bids to the ad network. On the buyer’s side, the demand side platform sends the bids. Check our guide if you want to know more about how a supply-side platform works.

Pros

• Reaching a much larger pool of advertisers
• Automating the ad space sales, saving money and effort
• Maximizing the yield by encouraging competition amongst bidders

Cons

• Most supply-side platforms have high traffic requirements.

What’s Better – Sell Directly or Through an Ad Network

Selling ads directly can be tempting. It may produce a high revenue but it comes with a few caveats:

• You need to have a top-performing website. That means, from the traffic to the design, it should be optimized to generate maximum conversions.
• It is also extremely time-consuming. You’ll be handling all the advertising sales and negotiation yourself.

So if you are not ready or you want to save time, it is better you join an ad network.

Still not sure? Let’s do a quick test.

Should I sell ads directly on my site? Checklist 

• Do you have significant traffic? If your site gets over 50,000 unique visits a month it may be worth it to target direct advertisers.
• Is your audience highly targeted? Advertisers want their ads to go as directly as possible to people who will buy their products. So, if you have a high-intent, interested audience it may be valuable for advertisers.
• Can you find active advertisers in your market? Your success will depend on clients that will actively (frequently) place ads on your website. If your website is suitable for a dynamic market that releases updates and new products all the time, check this item.
• Do you already have direct relationships with companies? If you are an expert on your niche and already have relationships with companies it will give you the advantage to get them to place adverts on your site.

Results: If you checked all the items on the checklist above there might be a chance for you to generate money from direct ad sales.

Still, remember you need to invest time and effort. First, putting your site in shape to attract advertisers, then investing time in contacting potential clients.

Using an ad network takes all the hassle of chasing advertisers. The right ad network increases the value of your website by placing contextual ads that enhance your user experience. Thus, you gain for the performance of the ads and you also make your online property more valuable.

How much can you make on selling ad space on your website?

This will depend on the pricing model you choose. If you sell by Cost per Mille (cost per thousand impressions). If your CPM is $2 and your site generates 200,000 impressions per month, you can expect to make $400 a month.

If you sell by Cost-Per-Click (CPC), you will get paid according to the number of people that actually click on the ad.

Can you sell ad space with low traffic?

The short answer is yes. It will depend on the level of engagement of your audience. If your site boasts a highly engaged audience it may be a valuable asset for advertisers.

Think about it. If you were an advertiser, would you prefer to present ads massively to an audience that may or not convert? Or get your message directly in front of a group of highly engaged potential customers? The answer is clear. While traffic is a basic requirement, having an engaged audience is a good asset to attract advertisers.

Where to start?

As a publisher, you have a great opportunity to generate revenue and earn passive income from placing ads on your website. The easiest and most effective way is to sign with an ad network.

CodeFuel combines the advantages of a large reach with the enhancing of the user experience through contextual ads. You can leverage search, shopping, and text ads in a single monetization platform to maximize revenue and increase engagement.

Start monetizing your website today with CodeFuel