OptalX forecasts the short- and long-term impact of every media mix scenario, so you can see what you gain and give up before you spend. Direct response and brand equity, side by side, by placement or down to the ad.
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Marketing teams are expected to deliver performance today without sacrificing the brand that drives growth tomorrow. But most planning tools optimize for what’s easiest to measure, so spend drifts to the bottom of the funnel and the long-term picture stays out of view.
Teams need short-term results without giving up long-term brand growth, but most tools treat the two separately.
Balance brand and performance in a single, streamlined planning workflow built for fast-moving marketing teams.
Creative drives most of performance, but most models only see channels and campaigns.
Forecast by channel and placement, or go deeper to connect ads, keywords, and audiences to brand equity.
Teams optimize daily, but brand impact can take months to surface, leaving long-term strategy in the dark.
Model short- and long-term impact in minutes, with built-in time lags that show how long each stage of the journey takes.
Put most of your weight on lower-funnel metrics and the forecast looks incredibly efficient, but scale hits a ceiling. Give weight to reach and the picture changes. OptalX lets you run scenario after scenario and see what each one gains and gives up, so you can land on the mix with the best balance of scale and efficiency.
Illustrative example. Actual forecasts are built from your data and industry benchmarks.
Reach, engagement, traffic, and conversions all matter, but you can’t maximize everything at once. In OptalX, you get 100 percentage points to allocate across your objectives. Every point you move changes the forecast, so the trade-offs are visible the moment you make them.
A powerful exercise to run with leadership: adjust priorities together and agree on the mix before a dollar is spent.
A billboard will never beat a Meta ad on conversion rate, so most platforms shift all the spend to Meta. Qualitative Impact is a custom objective for things like brand sentiment and brand association. Give it weight, and OptalX forecasts the impact that shows up down the road.
Simplified demonstration. In OptalX, forecasts are calculated from your data and industry benchmarks.
Most tools make you choose between performance metrics and brand metrics. OptalX forecasts both for every scenario in a single view, then shows how today’s brand equity gains turn into tomorrow’s sales.
The short-term results your team reports on every week.
The long-term impact that standard dashboards miss.
See what your brand equity gains are worth in sales down the road. OptalX translates awareness, consideration, favorability, and search lift into the conversions they’re forecast to drive weeks and months from now.
Impressions don’t turn into awareness, consideration, or sales overnight, and the delay is different for every channel and placement. OptalX forecasts the time lag from impression to awareness lift, consideration lift, and long-term conversion lift for each placement, so you know when to wait and when to optimize.
Avoid pausing campaigns that are working on a delay.
Set realistic expectations with leadership.
Compare search, social, programmatic, TV, and audio on equal footing.
Every forecast range comes with its expected time lag.
| Channel · Placement · Tactic | Spend | Brand awareness lift | Time lag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta · Various placements · Various tactics | $459,528 | 680K – 920K | 0.1–3 days |
| Google Search · Search · Non-branded | $345,926 | 68K – 92K | 0.1–2 days |
| Google Search · Search · Branded | $324,955 | 3K – 5K | 0.1–2 days |
| Programmatic · Advanced TV · Prospecting | $95,000 | 29K – 39K | 1–10 days |
| Programmatic · Display · Prospecting | $85,000 | 42K – 57K | 1–14 days |
| Total | $1,400,000 | 892K – 1M |
A media mix model might tell you to spend more on retargeting, but it has no idea how many people are actually in your retargeting pool. OptalX does. It starts with the real numbers in your ad accounts, adjusts them for your dates, and factors in auction competition, so every recommendation stays within what each placement can deliver.
Your current retargeting pools, prospecting audience sizes, and search volume for the keywords you target.
A three-day campaign can’t reach your whole retargeting pool, since not everyone logs in or keeps their cookies. Planning months ahead? OptalX forecasts what those audiences will be by then.
The share of each audience or search volume you can realistically reach, based on competition, bids, and historical performance in search, social, and programmatic auctions.
Illustrative numbers. In OptalX, these come from your ad accounts and auction data.
OptalX turns your marketing objectives into a complete media mix strategy and budget allocation, then forecasts the outcome of every variation.
Set the budget for any initiative: an upcoming month, a sale, a launch, or an event.
Allocate 100 points across reach, engagement, traffic, conversions, and qualitative impact.
Add your channels. OptalX pulls in real audience sizes and search volume, plus 6,000+ benchmarks.
Create as many variations of your strategy as you need and see what each one may gain or give up.
See direct-response and brand equity forecasts side by side, with time lags and long-term conversion lift.
Make micro-optimizations as new data comes in, without losing sight of the big picture.
Your minimal history + your industry’s trend data = a fast, reliable forecast
Traditional media mix modeling needs a lot of historical data and a lot of patience. OptalX developed the world’s first intermix model (IMM), built by former engineers from Facebook, LinkedIn, and IBM. It pairs your first-party data with granular industry trend data from similar advertisers, so it can forecast with minimal history and keep pace with day-to-day decisions.
Blends your historical outcomes with trending performance from advertisers like you to fill the gaps.
Uses the real audience sizes, search volume, and auction competition in your ad accounts to set realistic spend limits, by placement or down to the ad.
A proprietary method from former Facebook, LinkedIn, and IBM engineers that fills the gap between big-picture MMM and the decisions your team makes every week.
From monthly plans to last-minute promotions, OptalX helps your team make faster, better-informed budget decisions.
Plan a media mix for an upcoming month based on your historical data or trends from advertisers in your industry.
Forecast what may be gained or sacrificed with each variation of your marketing strategy.
Make weekly micro-optimizations to your media mix based on live first-party or trending industry data.
Decide how to allocate budget on the fly for an upcoming promotion, sale, release, or event.
See the realistic spend ceiling for each channel, based on your audience sizes, search volume, and competition.
Add custom data segments to your Benchmark Library to inform future planning at any level of granularity.
Everything you need to know about forecasting your media mix with OptalX.
OptalX is a media mix planning and forecasting platform. It turns your marketing objectives into a media mix strategy and budget allocation, then forecasts the short- and long-term outcome of every scenario across both direct-response and brand equity metrics.
Traditional MMM is built for big-picture, macro decisions. It typically needs large amounts of historical data and can take months to produce results. OptalX combines your first-party data with granular industry trend data, so it can forecast in minutes with minimal history and forecast at the channel and placement level, with the option to go as deep as individual ads, keywords, and audiences. OptalX also looks inside your ad accounts at real audience sizes and search volume, so it won’t recommend more retargeting spend than your retargeting pool can support. MMM is still important, and we encourage brands to use it. OptalX takes it several steps further for day-to-day decisions.
It’s the share of an audience or search volume you can realistically reach. OptalX starts with the real numbers in your ad accounts, like your current retargeting pool or the search volume for your keywords. It then projects how much of that you can reach based on your dates, platform usage, auction competition, bids, and historical performance, and keeps forecasts and budget recommendations within those limits.
Very little. Where your own benchmarks are thin or missing, OptalX fills the gaps with 6,000+ integrated benchmarks from advertisers in your industry. As you add your own data, forecasts become even more tailored to your brand.
Brand equity metrics capture the longer-term impact of your media: brand awareness lift, brand consideration lift, brand favorability lift, and branded search lift. OptalX forecasts each of these alongside your direct-response metrics, along with the cost per lift.
Long-Term Conversion Lift translates your forecasted brand equity gains into the conversions they are expected to drive over time, for example, 90 days from now. It connects brand building to the sales outcomes leadership cares about.
Qualitative Impact is a custom objective for value that is hard to measure, like brand sentiment and brand association. It keeps channels such as billboards from being undervalued just because they don’t compete with social ads on conversion rate, and it lets you forecast the impact they deliver down the road.
Every channel and placement takes a different amount of time to move from impression to awareness, consideration, and long-term conversions. OptalX forecasts those time lags so your team knows how patient to be before judging performance or optimizing a campaign.
OptalX models paid search, paid social, programmatic display, video, CTV, and audio, broadcast radio, linear TV, and more. You can add custom channels and data segments to your Benchmark Library at any level of granularity.
Book a demo with our team. We’ll walk you through the platform and show you how different scenarios play out for your brand.
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