Overview

Prescient’s Campaign Forecasting feature empowers marketers to predict campaign performance, optimize spend, and make data-backed budget decisions. By leveraging saturation curves, Campaign Forecasting provides a clear visualization of how additional spend affects incremental revenue, new customer acquisition, and return on ad spend (ROAS) across different marketing channels.

This tool helps prevent wasted spend on oversaturated channels and identifies opportunities for more efficient budget allocation. Campaign Forecasting is available in two primary areas within Prescient:

Performance Page: Insight Drawers (Forecasting Tab) – Analyze historical spend performance and simulate future spend impacts using interactive saturation curves.
Optimizer Tab: Creating an Optimization Scenario – Integrate forecasting into budget allocation workflows, evaluating how spend shifts influence modeled revenue, ROAS, and new customer acquisition.

Saturation Curves

Saturation curves model the relationship between spend and performance, helping marketers identify when additional spend yields diminishing returns. These insights help answer:

At what spend level does a channel reach saturation?
How much incremental revenue or customer acquisition can be expected from additional investment?
When should budget be shifted to optimize efficiency?

Types of Saturation Curves

Revenue & ROAS Decay: Tracks how incremental spend impacts revenue growth and ROAS, helping pinpoint optimal budget thresholds.
New Customer & CAC Decay: Measures how spend influences customer acquisition and CAC, ensuring cost-efficient growth.

On the Performance Page, users can access saturation curves within Insight Drawers, enabling real-time scenario testing. Users can input specific spend values to visualize projected revenue, ROAS, and new customer acquisition outcomes directly on the curve.

Additionally, after creating an optimization scenario, users can access saturation curves and recommended spend adjustments via expandable sections in the campaigns view. More details are available in the Spend Optimization article.

Scenario Planning & Budget Simulations

Prescient allows users to find optimal spend scenarios for their selected campaigns and see modeled outcomes before making actual budget adjustments. This includes:

Testing incremental spend increases or decreases and their impact on revenue, ROAS, and new customers.
Balancing growth and efficiency, ensuring that budget is allocated to high-performing channels.

These simulations provide quantitative decision-making support, ensuring budgets align with performance goals and business objectives.

How to Use Campaign Forecasting

On the Performance Page: Forecasting in Insight Drawers

Navigate to the Performance Page and select a campaign.
Open the Insight Drawer and click on the Forecasting Tab to access the saturation curve.
Test different spend amounts by entering values into the spend input field; the curve updates dynamically to show projected changes in revenue, ROAS, and customer acquisition.
Identify saturation points and determine the optimal spend level for maximum efficiency.
Use insights to adjust active campaign budgets based on modeled projections.

In the Optimizer: Forecasting in Optimization Scenarios

Go to the Optimization tab and create a new optimization scenario.
Select your optimization target, the campaigns to optimize, and the total budget allocation.
Click Create Optimization Scenario to generate recommendations.
Review and refine the results, adjusting spend amounts to align with your vision and goals.

For a detailed breakdown of our spend optimization functionality, see the Spend Optimization guide.

How to Use Campaign Forecasting to Make Decisions

Campaign Forecasting is a powerful tool that enables marketers to:

Prevent wasted spend by identifying when a campaign or channel reaches diminishing returns.
Optimize acquisition costs by balancing spend levels and efficiency.
Forecast the impact of budget shifts before making adjustments, ensuring profitable allocation.
Align spend strategy with long-term business goals, whether the focus is growth, efficiency, or profitability.
Refine scenario planning by running multiple budget simulations to select the most effective strategy.

By utilizing forecasting insights within the Performance Page and scenario planning in the Optimizer, marketers gain full visibility into spend efficiency and future outcomes.