[GA4] Cross-channel budgeting (alpha)

Cross-channel budgeting in Google Analytics 4 enables you to analyze performance trends in your historical data to help determine where to invest incremental dollars or adjust budgets for in-flight and future media initiatives. Cross-channel budgeting includes the Budgeting Overview and the Projections Report. Cross-channel budgeting is currently in a closed alpha and only available to those users.

Benefits

• Evaluate cross-channel budgets based on data-driven insights
• Monitor inter/intra channel budget pacing and spend projections
• See recommended cross-channel budget allocation

View the report

1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. From the left menu, select Advertising.
3. On the left, go to Budgeting.

Don't see the report? To get the Advertising section, you must link your Google Ads account to your property. Additionally, the Advertising section where the report is found is only available on the desktop version of Google Analytics. This report is in a closed alpha currently.

Understand the data

Budgeting overview page (alpha)

You get an overview of your previously created plans and the data sources that power your plans on the Budgeting overview page. This page contains:

• A table that shows your most recently created or modified plans
• A table that shows:
  • Product links shows which Google products you are currently linked to, for example, Ads, DV360, or any other product.
  • Cost import shows whether or not you are using cost import, date of last upload, and file match rate.

Note: Cost import is how customers can upload cost for non-Google campaigns and channels.

• Manual Integrations (3P Integrations) shows static text that explains how to set up manual integrations to bring in ad events from 3P campaigns. Longer term, we plan to show where we are seeing manual integration data from.

Projections Report (alpha)

This report allows you to view how you are projected to perform against a target KPI per each channel, and optimize budgets across channels for in flight initiatives. Projections Report answers these questions:

• Am I on track to spend my planned budget?
• Am I on track to drive my target number of Key Events (ex: purchase)?
• Am I on track to drive my target revenue?
• Which channels are over / under performing and where should I shift budget to optimize overall performance?

The projection outputs are estimates based on our mode, and not guarantees of performance.

To create a projections plan, a customer inputs the following information:

• Plan Name (example: My Q4 plan)
• Planning Period (example: Q4’24)
• Target KPI
  • Meet Spend Targets
  • Drive Key Events
  • Maximize Revenue
• Target Value: This is the value for the target KPI you selected (ex: $50K USD budget, 200K purchase key events, $500K USD revenue goal)
• Key events: Select the key events that are relevant for this plan

Data sources

• All integration data via product links or manual integrations and cost import is included in the projections models
• Offline data is also included if the customer is using offline import

Granularity

• Reports at the Channel level, such as Paid search. While in alpha, you will only see channels where we have enough data to run a projections model, so you might not see all of your advertising channels appear immediately.
• Reports error message if there is not enough data for accurate modeling.

Reasons for Data Quality Messaging

You may receive a notification on data quality if there is not enough historic data for a channel or key event. This may happen if you have recently started advertising on a new channel, or recently created a new key event. It can also happen if you’ve made any significant implementation changes to existing channels and key events. You can always check your property’s change history.

Model Methodology

We will model revenue and conversions for each channel as a function of cost using per-channel revenue / conversions for historical data from the property’s attribution model (DDA or Last Click, depending on what you have set at the property-level). Forecasts will be consistent with the historical ROAS / CPA numbers and Revenue and Conversions are directly tied to the ad spend on each channel. During the alpha, we are training on 2 years of data so our models can account for seasonality.

The report shows model confidence bounds via the shaded area in the line chart. If there are significant changes (fluctuations) that are not explained by seasonality or holiday effects, the confidence intervals may be wide. That means that the behavior we learned for the channel has changed significantly and the forecasting model needs time (more data) to learn new patterns correctly.

Dimensions in the report

The report includes the following dimensions:

Metrics in the report

The report includes the following metrics:

• Ads cost: The total amount you paid for your ads.
• Cost per key event interaction: The total cost divided by the number of selected key events.
• Ads clicks: The total number of times users clicked on your advertising campaign.
• Ads cost per click: The average cost you paid per click for your advertising campaign.
• Total revenue: The sum of revenue from purchases, subscriptions, and advertising (Purchase revenue plus Subscription revenue plus Ad revenue).
• Return on ad spend: The revenue for selected key events divided by the total cost for your ads.