How do you decide when and how much budget to move between channels?
Move budget when a channel's marginal cost per booked job crosses the ceiling for the work it produces — not when its average looks worse than another channel's. Change one thing at a time, in a step large enough to exceed normal week-to-week variation, then wait a full lead-to-cash cycle before judging. Reallocating weekly on noisy data mostly measures your own reaction time.
The trigger is marginal, not average
A channel whose average cost per booked job looks poor may still be worth funding at a lower level, because the first portion of its spend is far more efficient than the last. Cutting it entirely because the average is unattractive throws away the efficient part along with the inefficient part.
So the reallocation question is never simply which channel is better. It is where the next increment of spend produces a job at the lowest cost relative to what that job can afford. Those are different questions with different answers, as covered in paid media management.
Sizing the move so you can read the result
Too small and the effect disappears into normal variance. Too large and a wrong call costs a full season. A workable rule: the change should be big enough that the expected effect on booked jobs exceeds the channel's typical week-to-week swing, and small enough that you would accept the loss if it produced nothing.
Move one channel at a time. If two channels change in the same window, and total bookings move, you will not know which one did it — and the temptation will be to credit the one somebody advocated for.
Wait longer than feels comfortable
- Lead-to-cash lag. Nothing is judgeable until the affected cohort has had time to book, schedule and complete.
- Learning periods. Automated bidding systems re-stabilize after a budget change; the first days after a change are not representative of anything.
- Seasonality. A change made at a seasonal inflection point will be credited or blamed for the season.
- Capacity. If the schedule was already full, extra leads convert at zero and the channel takes the blame.
Keep a decision log
Write down the date, the change, the reason, the expected effect and the review date. Six months later this log is the only reliable record of why the account looks the way it does, and it is the difference between a marketing program that learns and one that cycles through the same three ideas every year.
It also makes automated reporting far more useful, because changes can be annotated on the trend line instead of being reverse-engineered from the data. That is why our intelligence briefs carry change markers alongside the numbers.
Topics: budget · reallocation · testing · paid media
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.