Paid Media Operations: Audits, Proposals, Budgets and Forecasts

Paid Media Operations: Audits, Proposals, Budgets and Forecasts is an advanced course for consultants, agencies and in-house leads who run paid marketing projects and answer to finance. It follows on from Marketing Operations: Systems, Data and Dashboards, so take that course first if tracking plans, attribution, unit economics and dashboards are new to you. Lessons point back to it wherever a topic builds on the basics.

The course teaches you how to design, run and deliver paid optimization projects from start to finish. You start with commercial fundamentals: how to conduct a 30-minute intake, audit ad spend and bank receipts, price your services cleanly, and write winning technical proposals and statements of work.

You then explore technical infrastructure and data engineering. You will learn how to design standardized event tracking plans, implement server-side tracking on Google Cloud Run, set up Meta CAPI and Google Ads Enhanced Conversions, build BigQuery data marts using dbt, and resolve identity stitching across devices.

The course dedicates deep modules to financial modeling and budget optimization: calculating diminishing returns, marginal ROAS curves, cross-channel budget allocation formulas, automated budget pacing sheets, and Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM). You will master bottom-up forecasting, saturation Hill curves, Monte Carlo simulations, executive dashboards in Data Studio, weekly memos, and ongoing retainers. 42 detailed lessons with practical formulas, architecture diagrams, and workplace exercises throughout.