Free Marketing P&L Template
Without a long intro, get your free marketing P&L template here. No signup or other nonsense required. Just open the Google Sheet, click “Use Template” in the top right and you’re on your way. It’s a simple version of what can be an extremely complicated document, but for small businesses this is probably all you need. The first column I entered some template numbers; you should remove these and add your own data. You should add all your own data to all other cells in white too. Everything else is calculated for you (for example, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, return on investment, etc.).
To understand more about P&Ls, especially in relation to marketing, and how to use the above document, keep reading.
What is a P&L sheet?
P&L stands for “profit and loss”. It’s a sheet that tracks all of your incoming revenue and outgoing expenses to see the overall financial health of your business. Whether you’re a solopreneur or a Fortune 500 company, you should have a P&L. Even if you don’t know what a P&L actually is, hopefully you have a document that serves the same purpose.
What is a Marketing P&L document?
A marketing P&L is a P&L sheet but just for marketing costs and revenue. For example, in a marketing profit & loss sheet you won’t include costs like staff salaries or server upkeep costs, you’ll only include costs associated with marketing, things like direct media spend (e.g. Google Ads), merchandise costs (e.g. printed brochures). And you’ll track all your revenue in the same document, attributed to each channel it came from (e.g. how much revenue did your influencer campaigns generate?).
Again, even if you don’t know what it is exactly, you probably have some kind of system for tracking how much you’re spending on marketing. Hopefully!
How to Create a Marketing P&L
Typically, marketing P&Ls track key performance indicators (KPIs) over time for the various marketing channels your business is active on. Before you even start making the actual P&L, you need to identify what your KPIs are and what channels you want to include. With channels, be generous — even if you’re not active on a specific channel now but you think you will in the short or medium term, include it in the P&L. It saves a headache later.
The opposite is true for KPIs — be conservative. You’ll definitely want to include revenue, return on investment, customer acquisition cost, and cost per lead (with perhaps a bit of variation in name dependent on your industry and business model). But your P&L shouldn’t include things like website visitors, number of Instagram followers, or number of A/B tests you ran. Those are too specific for a P&L sheet.
How to Use the Free Marketing P&L Template
If you haven’t already, get a copy of my template marketing P&L sheet here. This is a version of the P&L sheet I used at a past job (read more about my experience at Walnut Coding here).
I added some placeholder numbers for the first column. You should delete these and add your own data in. Any cells in white you should input data in (even if it’s 0), all other cells will be calculated automatically.
Each business is unique, so you’ll definitely need to adapt the version above for your own needs. Here are just some additional ideas you might want to try:
If your business operates in multiple countries, add separate tabs for each country, and include a combined sheet for the sum of all countries
Add in different operational costs, e.g. staff salaries, server costs, supplier costs, etc.
Add/remove channels that are applicable or not to you
Add historic data from past months to keep all your financial info in one place
Add in any other critical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that are valuable to your business. But note this is primarily a financial sheet. If you want to track traffic volume or social media engagements, I’d recommend keeping those in separate documents
Use past channel data to waterfall your marketing budgets for the next month/quarter/year. But be mindful of what the data shows…
Interpreting Data
So, you made a P&L (or you copied mine) and you added all your historic metrics for your carefully-selected KPIs. What next? It’s time to analyse your data.
A P&L is great for telling you how much money you made on a given month, but it can also tell you how you can make more money, and/or tell you how to stop losing money. If all your data is accurate, you can easily see which channel has the best ROI, i.e. which channel earned the most revenue in relation to spend. For example, running ads in Google Search might be expensive, but in many cases you’ll see what you earned a lot of revenue from it.
Conversely, maybe you tried paying a few social media influencers to promote your brand because they had a big audience of people you thought were relevant to your business, but maybe you didn’t generate as much revenue from that as you thought, so then you might want to look into the influencer campaign data more deeply to see what the root cause was.
One important note: numbers tell a story, and the story isn’t always obvious.
Perhaps that influencer campaign did amazingly well and you got a great ROI from it, so you want to pump 10x more budget into influencers next month. But maybe there aren’t that many relevant influencers with great audiences for your brand. And you can’t just work with the same influencer over and over again; their audience will get tired of seeing your products and the next campaign might be less effective (or maybe not!). Or maybe you got a great conversion rate from your last email campaign, but it was related to a big shopping holiday like Black Friday. Black Friday only happens once a year, so you probably won’t get the same results the next month (although there still might be lessons you can learn from that campaign anyway).
Having a P&L with accurate data is hugely important, for marketing and for your overall business, and hopefully my template will help you on your way.
After having the data, you need to examine what it shows and understand the whole picture before adjusting your marketing strategy. Done right, your business can grow successfully.
