I Built a Budget Optimiser That Showed Me the Cost of My Own Rules

For a long time I thought the hard part of a data project was getting the right answer. This one taught me that getting the answer was only half the job. The harder part was being able to explain where it came from.

It started with a pretty ordinary problem. A small business has a fixed marketing budget and several channels competing for it. Someone has to decide how to split the money. Not rank the channels. Actually decide. How much goes here. How much goes there. Whether one channel gets very little, or nothing at all.

At first I thought this would be a scoring problem. I would calculate which channels performed best, rank them, and allocate more money to the stronger ones. That version looked neat. It was also almost useless.

A ranked list is not a budget decision

The problem is that budget allocation is not really...

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