Paid Social Funnel Planner
Enter your budget, order value, and margin, and the planner splits spend across the funnel — reach, nurture, convert — then forecasts customers, CAC, ROAS, and profit. Slide the create-vs-capture balance and it tells you where the next dollar pays best.
A paid social budget has to do two jobs at once: create demand at the top of the funnel and capture it at the bottom. Tilt too far toward creating and warm audiences pile up faster than you can convert them; tilt too far toward capturing and you harvest a shrinking pool. This planner splits your budget across TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU, forecasts customers, blended CAC, ROAS, and profit, and finds the balance point where customers per month is highest for your economics.
Paid Social Funnel Planner inputs and result
| Stage | Budget / share |
|---|
How to use this calculator
- Enter your monthly budgetUse your total monthly paid social spend across all stages. The planner divides it among TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU for you based on the create-vs-capture position you set below.
- Add order value and marginEnter your average order or deal value and your gross margin. Order value scales revenue; margin decides whether the customers you win are profitable after the media bill.
- Pick your audience typeNiche, mixed, or broad. Breadth changes how cheaply you can warm audiences — niche costs more per warm user, broad costs less — which shifts the math for the whole funnel.
- Slide create vs captureMove the position from all-reach toward all-direct-response and watch customers, CAC, and ROAS respond. The tool flags whether you are over-creating or over-harvesting.
- Apply the recommended splitRead the recommended capture percentage in the verdict and analysis. Set the position there for the mix that maximizes customers per month at your economics, then export the plan.
RGM Expert Says
The mistake we unwind most often in paid social is a budget that does only one job. A brand pours everything into prospecting and wonders why the conversions never come; another runs nothing but retargeting and slowly drains a warm pool it stopped refilling. The funnel is a system: reach feeds nurture, nurture feeds conversion, and the budget has to keep all three fed in proportion. This planner makes that proportion visible.
What the tool really sells is the idea of a balance point. There is a create-vs-capture split where the next dollar buys the most customers, and it is not 50/50 — it moves with your order value, margin, and audience breadth. When warm audiences are piling up faster than BOFU can convert, the answer is to shift toward capture; when conversion is starved of fresh demand, the answer is to feed the top. The recommendation finds that point for your numbers.
We treat the output as a starting allocation, not gospel. The cost and conversion bands are planning assumptions calibrated to typical paid-social benchmarks — your real CPMs, warm-audience costs, and conversion rates will move the answer. But the structure holds: plan the funnel as a whole, fund the stage that is starving, and add budget at the balance point rather than reshuffling it. That discipline is the difference between a media plan and a pile of campaigns.
How it works
The planner allocates budget across three stages, forecasts how many people each stage moves, and finds the split where the bottleneck — warm supply or conversion capacity — is best balanced.
- Create vs capture — the split between demand creation (TOFU/MOFU) and demand capture (BOFU).
- Audience type — niche, mixed, or broad; sets how cheaply you warm audiences.
- Warm audiences — people moved from cold to considering; the supply BOFU converts.
- Customers — the lesser of warm supply converted and what BOFU budget can capture.
Worked example: a $20,000 budget, $120 order value, 60% margin, mixed audience, 40% toward capture splits to ~$8.4k TOFU / $4.6k MOFU / $7.0k BOFU and forecasts ~292 customers at a $69 blended CAC and 1.8× ROAS. Cost and conversion bands are RGM analysis from typical paid-social benchmarks; treat the output as directional, not a guarantee.
Why full-funnel beats single-stage spend
Single-stage paid social fails in a predictable way. All-prospecting builds an audience nobody asks to buy; all-retargeting converts a pool that thins every week because nothing refills it. The funnel only compounds when reach, nurture, and conversion are funded in proportion — and that proportion is not obvious, because it depends on how cheaply you warm audiences and how much each customer is worth.
The create-vs-capture balance is the lever most teams never tune. There is a point where the marginal dollar buys the most customers, and it shifts with your inputs: higher order values justify spending more to create demand, broad audiences make warming cheaper, thin margins force discipline toward capture. The planner sweeps every split to find that point so you are not guessing with real budget.
Finally, the planner reframes the budget question from ‘how do I reshuffle’ to ‘where do I add.’ When you are already near the balance point, the answer is not to move money between stages — it is to add budget where it is working. When you are off-balance, it tells you which stage is starving. Either way you end with a defensible allocation instead of a hunch.
Reading the funnel verdict
These bands are RGM planning analysis from typical paid-social economics. Your real CPMs, warm-audience costs, and conversion rates will move the answer — replace the defaults with your account numbers for a precise plan.
| Verdict | What it means | Move |
|---|---|---|
| Balanced | Near the sweet spot for your economics | Add budget, do not reshuffle |
| Over-creating | Warm pool grows faster than you convert | Shift toward capture (BOFU) |
| Over-harvesting | Conversion starved of fresh demand | Feed the top (TOFU/MOFU) |
| Recommended split | The customers-per-month maximum | Set position there, then export |
What practitioners say about the funnel
Demand creation and demand capture are different jobs with different metrics; budget for both or neither works.
The fastest way to stall paid social is to keep harvesting a warm audience you have stopped refilling.