What is the Waterfall media planning method?
In waterfall media planning, the budget is allocated to the various channels on the basis of their efficiency.
We start with the low-hanging fruit over the best performing channels and try to get the most out of them. The best performing channel receives the full budget until it has absorbed all available demand within our CPA and ROAS targets. At that point, the channel is considered fully saturated; only then does the next best performing channel start receiving budget, and so on. We continue to prioritise channels in this way until our overall CPA or ROAS reaches the target set by the customer. In other words, we are always going to get the most out of each channel.
How can you apply this strategy now?
Every company and every campaign is different, of course. But there are channels we can use for each waterfall tier, depending on our marketing objective. With lead generation, there are a number of KPIs we can steer on, namely: calls, contact form completions, mailto's... The objective within Google Ads for this could be; a cost per lead or return on ad spend.
In this example, we are of course assuming data in the account. We also recommend that you always take this into account. We see that search & discovery campaigns work well to generate leads for customer X. This is where most of the budget will go. We will make the most of this, based on the desired cost per lead or ROAS that client X has set.
Once we reach our ceiling here, we start up new campaigns in Display and add lead form extensions to our campaigns. Again, we will optimise to the desired cost per lead or ROAS.
Finally, we switch DisplayVideo 360 and YouTube ads when we have reached our ceiling for Display and lead form extensions. Here too, we optimise again to the desired cost per lead or ROAS. So you can go further and further.
"The farther down the 'waterfall' you move, the more important multi-touch attribution solutions become." - Lili Papadimitriou, Google Marketing Team
Omnichannel strategy
You can, of course, extend this strategy into an omnichannel strategy. For example, you start with Google Ads, because you can easily capture customer intent here. You are going to get everything out of the different types of campaigns at Google Ads, so that you can then deploy on other channels. The next step is to set up Bing Advertising, which can still provide 10-15% additional search volume. Again, you start optimizing until you reach your ceiling in leads. Next, you start up social ads with a lead campaign. You can also do some branding here via Social Ads. An extra would also Marketing Automation may be. And so on and so forth. There are plenty of channels to bet on and get the maximum return from. Does this seem like a good strategy to you, but you still need help implementing it? Digitong to the rescue!
