This document discusses three Excel tools - Goal Seek, Data Tables, and Solver - that can help perform what-if analysis. Goal Seek allows the user to determine what a variable needs to be set at to achieve a desired output. Data Tables enable examining the effect of changing one or two variables at a time. Solver optimizes an output metric based on constraints set for other metrics. Examples are provided for how to set up and use each tool to analyze scenarios like how budget allocations or changes to click-through rate and conversion rate could impact metrics like cost-per-acquisition or return on ad spend.

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3 Excel Tools That Help
You Perform A What-If
Analysis
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Overview

8. What We’re Covering
● Goal Seek: How to find the right value
● Data Tables: Examine the effect of multiple inputs
● Solver: Optimize a metric when constrained by other metrics

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Goal Seek

10. What is Goal Seek?
Goal Seek allows you to answer questions such as,
● What does the conversion rate need to be to hit X conversions the month.
● How large does AOV have to be to hit an ROAS goal.
Goal seek is perfect for cause and effect problems. In order to see this effect, what has
to change?

11. Setting Up Goal Seek
Set up a formula to calculate the output.
For this example we’ll use CPA =
Cost/Conversions
Or CPA = Cost / (Clicks * Conversion Rate)
Note - The output (CPA) should be a formula,
the changing variable (clicks or conversion
rate) should be a static value

12. Running Goal Seek

13. Setting The Parameters

14. Output

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Data Tables

16. Answer Those Dreaded
Questions
What would Performance look like if,
o We tried to maximize
impressions?
o CTRs changed next month?
o Impression share was between –
15% and +15% during next
quarter?

17. Why Use Data Tables?
o Data tables allow you to quickly calculate ranges of values.
o This removes the need to calculate these values manually and helps you better
outline multiple scenarios.

18. Getting Started
Simple right?

19. Single Input Table
We use these when we only need to change a single value.
o Change in CTR
o Change in Conversion Rate
o And more!
But the output can be anything!

20. Setting up the Formula
Our top cell in the table is going to be our formula for the current data.

21. Configuring the Settings
Select the data table option and set column input to the value you want to
change. Select column because the variables are in the column. If the table was
transposed you would select row.

22. Output
Excel will now calculate the
same formula substituting our
original input cell for the
variables in row to the left.

23. Adding More Outputs
You can set up multiple calculations!
Simply insert the formula for each metric and select the entire table than a single
column.

24. Using Two Variables
o What if you want to change two
variables?
o How would ad testing and CRO
impact our revenue?
o How would market changes lead
to different ROAS levels?

25. Project Based on Two
Variables
Build your table exactly the same but put a second variable along the top.
Insert your formula in the top left corner, the intersection of the row and column.

26. Calculate Total Revenue
Instead of choosing the column input, we’ll select a row as well. Based on our
table. Based on the table we’ll choose CVR as our column and CTR as our row
value.

27. Two Input Table Output
Revenue calculations for each range of CTR and CVR changes.

28. Tables for Sense Making
This table was used to show what ROAS would be with CVR and AOV
improvements. Based on these numbers, a 20x ROAS seems unrealistic but 6 or
under would be possible with successful optimizations.

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Solver

30. What it Does
The solver tool optimizes or minimizes
a value based on a set of constraints.
o Cost
o Traffic
o Impressions
o And more
For example, maximize conversions while
keeping cost below $50,000.

31. Where to Find it

32. Maximizing Budget
We have campaigns that are limited by budget and could spend more.
We have spend targets for network (search and display) and country.
What is the optimal budget allocation?

33. Setting Constraints
We’ll use another table as references for our spend targets for each segment.
Potential spend is a sum of the current spend/impression share in the last table.
It’s only for reference to the min and max spend.

34. Calculated Metrics
We’ll put in a few formulas next to our data to gauge the results of budget
changes. K will be filled/changed by the solver. Based on K, we can use CPC to
get clicks per allocated spend then multiply by conversion rate to get the new
conversion totals.

35. Putting the Tables Together

36. Setting the Solver Part 2
Objective - The sum of
conversions.
Changing Variable Cells -
Allocated budget in K
Constraints - Spend sums
must fall within the range of
our constraint table.

37. Output
New values will be filled out the in the table and you can check the results.
If we increase our budget up to $70,000 to we’ll see around 259 conversions.

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