Most Digital Marketing Plans Start in the Wrong Place.

There’s a pattern we see often with new clients. They come in with a marketing budget already set. Someone in the organization, a founder, a finance team, or a board, decided on a number. Maybe it was based on last year’s spend. Maybe it was a percentage of projected revenue. Maybe it was a gut call. But it was set before the real questions were asked. Questions like: what does this budget actually need to achieve? How many sales does it have to generate? At what margin? And is the number we’ve decided to spend actually enough to get there? When we pull those threads, the answer is often uncomfortable.

Here’s the planning model we’ve built our practice on and why we think it changes the conversation. The budget was never connected to a target in any meaningful way. It was a starting point dressed up as a plan. That’s the problem ABO Flow is designed to solve.

What ABO Is ABO stands for: Acquisition, Behaviour, and Outcome. It’s a framework for thinking about digital marketing that was developed as a framework by Avinash Kaushik, and modified over the years by TRIBBUTE. The three words describe the full arc of what digital marketing actually does:‍

Acquisition is how you get people to your website. Paid search. Social media advertising. Email. All the channels you use to drive traffic are acquisition.

‍Behaviour is what those people do when they arrive. Do they browse and leave? Add to cart and abandon? Complete a purchase? Behaviour is everything that happens between arriving and converting.

‍Outcome is the business result. Revenue. Profit. The number that matters to the organization.Most digital marketers think about these three things in that order, left to right. We spend on acquisition, we observe behaviour, and we measure the outcome afterward. That sequence feels natural. But it creates a specific and recurring problem: you find out whether the plan worked after you’ve already spent the money.ABO Flow reverses the sequence. It starts at the Outcome and works backwards.
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What Backwards Planning Actually Means.

Here’s the simplest version of the idea. Say your business needs to generate $1.5 million in revenue over the next twelve months from digital channels. That’s your Outcome. That’s where the plan starts. From there, a few questions become answerable: At your average product margin, how much of that $1.5 million stays in the business after cost of goods? At an average order value of, say, $85, how many transactions does $1.5 million in revenue require? About 17,600.

At your current website conversion rate, the percentage of visitors who actually complete a purchase, how many sessions does 17,600 transactions require? If your site converts at 2%, you need roughly 880,000 sessions. If your conversion rate is lower, say 1.5%, you need closer to 1.17 million sessions. That’s a meaningful difference, and it’s determined by how well your site performs, not by how much you spend on advertising.Once you know how many sessions you need, and you know roughly what it costs to deliver a session from each advertising channel, the math produces a number: the media budget required to hit your revenue target. That budget is derived from the target, not decided in advance of it. That’s backwards planning. And it matters because it tells you something before you spend anything.

The Part Most Plans Skip.

There’s a step in that sequence that tends to get glossed over, and it’s the one that causes the most problems. Between Outcome and Acquisition sits Behaviour, your website’s ability to convert the traffic you send to it. Conversion rate is the variable that connects sessions to sales. And unlike advertising spend, it’s determined by your site experience: how easy it is to find products, how well product pages communicate value, how frictionless the checkout process is. What happens when that variable gets ignored? You fund an acquisition plan against a conversion rate assumption that the site can’t actually support. The campaigns run. The traffic arrives. And the revenue doesn’t materialize. Not because the advertising failed, but because the site couldn’t close the gap. ABO Flow forces this question into the open before the budget is set. If your revenue target requires 880,000 sessions and your site converts at 2%, that’s a viable plan. If your site currently converts at 1.1% and you’ve never done meaningful conversion optimization work, the same budget won’t get you to the same outcome. The model shows you that gap while there’s still time to address it.

This is where the Behaviour pillar earns its place in the framework. It’s not a separate conversation from Acquisition planning. It’s a prerequisite for it. Why Running Three Scenarios Is Non-Negotiable. No input in this model is a certainty. Conversion rates change. Average order values fluctuate. Cost-per-click in advertising channels moves with competition. A plan built on a single set of assumptions is fragile.ABO Flow is designed to be run at three conversion scenarios simultaneously: conservative, base, and aggressive. The conservative scenario uses a lower conversion rate, the floor you’d expect if site performance stays roughly where it is. The base scenario uses your current rate.

The aggressive scenario models what happens if conversion optimization work delivers meaningful improvement.What those three outputs show you is the range of your exposure. If the gap between conservative and aggressive required spend is small, the plan has low sensitivity to conversion performance. You can proceed with reasonable confidence. If the gap is large, if a half-percentage-point improvement in conversion rate would save you $200,000 in required media spend, that’s a signal. It means your business results are highly dependent on how well your site converts. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s a decision to make consciously, not discover after the fact. Scenario planning also gives you a more honest conversation with whoever controls the budget. Rather than presenting a single number that depends on everything going right, you present a range, show what drives it, and let the organization decide where to set the target. That’s a more defensible position, and a more useful one.

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What to Do When the Math Doesn’t Work

Sometimes the model produces a number that exceeds the available budget. Or the implied profit margin, after accounting for media spend, is thinner than the business can sustain.This is not a failure of the model. It’s the model doing its job. When the numbers don’t work, there is a limited set of levers to pull:

‍Adjust the revenue target. If the budget available can only support $900,000 in revenue at current conversion rates and channel costs, then $900,000 is the plan, and leadership needs to know that before the year starts, not after.

‍Improve conversion rate. Moving conversion from 1.5% to 2.0% is the equivalent of reducing your required traffic, and your required spend, by 25%. In many cases, investment in site experience delivers better returns than additional media spend.

‍Increase average order value. If customers spend more per transaction, each session is worth more. Fewer transactions are required to hit the same revenue target.

‍Improve product margin. Harder to change, but the framework makes the connection between margin and media viability explicit. A low-margin product line is harder to profitably advertise than a high-margin one, and a plan that blends them without accounting for that difference will mislead. The point is that these conversations happen at the planning stage, not at the quarterly review, where someone is asking why the number was missed.

The Conversation This Changes.

We’ve been doing this long enough to know that the planning conversation is the hardest one to have. It’s easier to execute a campaign than to sit down before a dollar is spent and force agreement on what the target is, whether the budget can reach it, and what happens if the assumptions are wrong. Most agencies don’t push that conversation. It’s easier to accept the budget as given and optimize within it. We think that’s a disservice to the client. The number one reason digital marketing underperforms is not bad campaigns. It’s a plan that was never connected to a realistic outcome in the first place. ABO Flow is our answer to that problem. Start with what the business needs. Work backwards to what it requires. Identify the gaps before they become expensive surprises. Build the plan accordingly.

Try our ABO calculator for free or contact us to discuss this further.