Step two · before any modelling
Can this data answer the question at all?
A fit takes minutes and hands back confident-looking numbers whether or not the design could ever have identified them. So we ask whether it could first, and it costs a second. Nothing here has been modelled — this is arithmetic on your file.
The verdict
Go
Your data can answer the question. Nothing here stops the model from running, and nothing will make a channel's number meaningless.
3 things to carry forward, all about how wide the answers will be, not whether you get them: Paid Search, TV — Broadcast and Out of Home.
How this verdict is decided
There is no score to improve and no percentage to argue with. A caution about one channel never demotes the whole dataset, because it has somewhere better to live: that channel’s own row, and its trust grade after the fit.
Takes about two minutes, and it is the step that catches impossible assumptions before they become results.
Five questions we ask of every dataset
208 rows · 6.1× headroom
34 things to estimate
6.80 · line at 5.00
Paid Search
2 channels flagged
TV — Broadcast and Out of Home
Present
a demand control is mapped
No extreme weeks
nothing the outlier check flagged
Three things to know, each with what to do about it
Paid Search has VIF 6.8 after transformation.
What to do: Worth watching rather than fixing. If this channel also shows low contraction on the Evidence tab, treat its individual number as unreliable.
It runs in 38% of weeks, in bursts rather than at the start or end of the window. The effect is identified from the handful of on/off transitions rather than from the whole period, so its interval comes back wide even when the fit itself is sound.
What to do: Nothing to fix in the data — this is a media plan, not a defect. Expect a wide range on this channel and weight it accordingly; a lift test on a single burst would pin it faster than more history would.
Out of Home is off air most weeks0.524 measured · 0.50 thresholdOpen
It runs in 44% of weeks, in bursts rather than at the start or end of the window. The effect is identified from the handful of on/off transitions rather than from the whole period, so its interval comes back wide even when the fit itself is sound.
What to do: Nothing to fix in the data — this is a media plan, not a defect. Expect a wide range on this channel and weight it accordingly; a lift test on a single burst would pin it faster than more history would.
What we will do about it
Findings change the model, not your numbers. We never impute, winsorise or drop a row — every entry here alters how the fit is estimated, and states what that costs you.
Your data clears every check that would make us alter the model, so this will be a plain fit of the specification you chose.
How much each channel's spend moves about
Ups and downs are what let the model see what a channel does. Spend the same amount every week and there is nothing to learn from — the return comes back as whatever we assumed going in, however large the budget.
| Channel | Spend share | Variation | Overlap cost | Weeks with nothing spent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TV — Broadcast | 28.0% | 1.37 | 1.2 | 62% of weeks had no spend |
| Video — CTV | 15.7% | 0.60 | 3.2 | spent every week |
| Paid Social | 19.4% | 0.33 | 3.0 | spent every week |
| Paid Search | 16.9% | 0.42 | 6.8 | spent every week |
| Programmatic Display | 11.4% | 0.32 | 1.9 | spent every week |
| Out of Home | 8.6% | 1.17 | 1.2 | 56% of weeks had no spend |
How closely your channels move together
Read a cell as: when this channel went up, did that one go up too? 1.00 means always, 0.00 means never. Anything above 0.80 and your data cannot tell the two apart. Measured after allowing for advertising that keeps working once it stops running and for the tenth million doing less than the first — checking raw spend instead is the usual reason a tool declares your data fine and then fails to separate anything.
| TV — Broadcast | 1.00 | 0.06 | 0.18 | 0.19 | 0.04 | 0.08 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video — CTV | 0.06 | 1.00 | 0.17 | 0.12 | 0.22 | 0.11 |
| Paid Social | 0.18 | 0.17 | 1.00 | 0.78 | 0.51 | -0.04 |
| Paid Search | 0.19 | 0.12 | 0.78 | 1.00 | 0.58 | 0.09 |
| Programmatic Display | 0.04 | 0.22 | 0.51 | 0.58 | 1.00 | -0.02 |
| Out of Home | 0.08 | 0.11 | -0.04 | 0.09 | -0.02 | 1.00 |
| TV — Broadcast | Video — CTV | Paid Social | Paid Search | Programmatic Display | Out of Home |