One row per line item, not per channel. Split paid social into prospecting and retargeting; split search into brand terms and generic. Use annual budget. Set % brand to the share of that line you believe is genuinely building future demand — the reference tables further down give you a starting point, and the four questions will settle anything ambiguous.
The rows below are a common starting set — rename them, delete what you do not buy, and add whatever is missing.
| Line item | Annual spend | % brand | % perf | Brand | Performance | Search | Remove |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | — | — | — | — | — | ||
Nothing you type leaves your browser. There is no account, no tracking, and no server — if your browser allows it, your figures are saved locally so you can come back to them.
No channel is inherently brand or performance. The execution decides.
The IPA used to infer the split from the media plan — TV was assumed to be brand, direct mail was assumed to be activation (performance). In 2016 they stopped, and asked case authors to split their budgets into brand and activation medium by medium, because the channel was no longer a reliable proxy for the job being done.
That same body of work produced the number this page is built around. Across the IPA databank, campaigns putting roughly 60% of budget into brand-building and 40% into activation (performance) were consistently the most effective. Later studies land in the same region rather than on the same point, which is why the meter above scores against a range.
A sixty-second film on YouTube built for broad reach and emotional response is brand investment. A fifteen-second discount code on YouTube, retargeted to people who abandoned a cart, is performance. Same channel, same platform, same invoice line. Different job.
If the targeting requires a prior signal from the buyer, the demand already existed. You are converting it, not creating it.
For any media channel you are unsure about, answer these four questions. Three answers landing on the same side settles it.
| Points to performance | Points to brand |
|---|
Ordered from the most brand-building line items at the top to the most purely converting at the bottom. The two percentage columns are what a typical execution in that channel is doing — enter the brand figure in the worksheet, then adjust it once you have applied the four-question test to your own work.
| Channel or line item | Average % brand | Average % performance | What to watch for |
|---|
These are working estimates, not research findings. The ranges are wide because the channel does not decide the job — length, targeting and the ask do. Online video spans 50–75% because a sixty-second film and a retargeted promo code both live on that invoice line.
The 60:40 benchmark describes how a paid working media budget is allocated. It was never a statement about total marketing spend. Everything below is real marketing investment, much of it brand-building — but putting any of it in the calculator moves your number against a benchmark that does not contain it.
| Leave out | Why |
|---|
When you have to defend buying television, audio or out of home to someone reading a last-click dashboard, this is the number to bring.
The long-term multiplier is a channel’s total effect divided by its short-term effect. A multiplier of 2.2 means total payback is 2.2 times what lands in the immediate window. Turn that around and it tells you something more useful: how much of a channel’s value arrives after your reporting period closes — which is precisely the money attribution cannot see and therefore never credits.
The pattern is the argument. The channels with the highest multipliers are the ones your dashboard undervalues most, and the channels that look best in-quarter are the ones with the least left over.
| Channel | Long‑term multiplier | Share of total effect landing after the immediate window |
|---|
Thinkbox, Profit Ability 2, 2024; creator figure from the IPA Influencer Benchmarking databank. The all-channel average multiplier is 2.2 — meaning that across everything, roughly 55% of advertising’s payback arrives after the window most marketers measure in. Two-thirds of television’s payback lands beyond the first week alone.
Before you take your figure anywhere, check it against these. Each one quietly moves the brand column up.
Brand-term search counted as brand. Around 30% of paid search is driven by brand and upper-funnel activity in the first place. When you count it as brand investment, you are booking the same dollar twice — once as the cause, once as the effect.
Retail media counted as brand. RMN reaches a shopper standing in the aisle with the category already in mind. That is valuable and it is not brand building. If the network offers an off-site awareness product, split that line out; do not classify the whole spend by the vendor.
Broad-reach campaigns optimized to conversion. A prospecting campaign judged on CPA will be steered by the platform toward the warmest available audience, which is precisely the audience brand investment is not for. If the KPI is a conversion metric, the money is doing performance work no matter what the brief said.
Twelve things you will hear when you take the number above into a budget conversation.
Everything on this page, defined plainly. Where a term belongs to a particular researcher, that is noted.
No term matches that. Try a shorter word.