RTG Score — Room To Grow

Why most marketing budgets are arbitrary

Budget is the gasoline for your car. The destination is your marketing goal. But most budget allocations we see are set by habit, by whoever argued loudest in the last planning meeting, or by "let's keep the same split as last year." None of those methods tell you where the next €1,000 will have the most impact.

The RTG framework creates Directional Confidence — not certainty (there are no absolutes in marketing), but a defensible, data-driven direction. It does this by answering two questions: how efficiently is each channel converting traffic into customers, and how close is each channel to its point of diminishing returns?

Framework credit — Johnathan Dane ↓

1️⃣

Rebalance Equations

Normalise visits-per-customer across channels for true comparison.

2️⃣

Score RTG Saturation

Paid Search = Impression Share. Paid Social = reach × frequency blend.

3️⃣

Rank by Priority

Lowest RTG Score = most room left = highest priority for more budget.

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How the RTG Score is calculated

Paid Search — Impression Share

If your Google Ads Impression Share is 72%, you're already capturing 72% of available queries. The RTG Score is 72 — meaning only 28 points of headroom remain before you hit the ceiling. High IS = high saturation = lower priority for more budget (unless you expand keywords or geographies first).

Paid Social — Reach × Frequency blend

Social saturation comes from two directions: audience penetration (what % of your target audience have you reached?) and frequency (how many times has the average reached person seen your ads?). Reaching 80% of your audience at 6× frequency is a very different situation from reaching 20% at 1.5×. The RTG Score blends both signals: 50% weight on reach saturation, 50% on frequency saturation (capped at 7× as full saturation).

Framework credit

Originally by Johnathan Dane

The RTG Score / Directional Confidence framework was shared by Johnathan Dane on LinkedIn. This tool is an interactive implementation of his framework. All conceptual credit goes to him.

Frequently asked questions

Should I move budget to the lowest RTG channel even if the cost/customer is higher?

Not automatically. The RTG Score answers "where is there room to scale?" — but low cost/customer is a prerequisite for getting budget, as the framework states. Prioritise channels that have both acceptable economics AND a low RTG Score. A channel with great economics but high saturation will show diminishing returns quickly.

My customer journeys are multi-touch. How do I handle attribution?

The framework acknowledges this directly: customer journeys are not linear, but you need a simplified model to create directional confidence. Use last-click or data-driven attribution consistently across all channels. The goal is comparability, not perfection — whichever attribution model you use, apply it everywhere.

What counts as "customers" vs conversions?

Use whichever metric represents real revenue to your business. For ecommerce: orders. For B2B: qualified leads, SQL meetings, or closed deals depending on your attribution window. The key is using the same definition across all channels — that is the entire point of the apples-to-apples comparison.

How often should I recalculate?

Monthly, aligned to your budget review cycle. Impression Share and social reach/frequency fluctuate with seasonality and competition, so a one-time snapshot is directional but not permanent. Build this as a monthly check-in rather than a one-off calculation.

What is a "good" RTG Score?

There is no universal threshold — it is relative across your own channels. A channel at RTG 40 has more room to grow than a channel at RTG 75, regardless of the absolute numbers. The ranking matters more than the absolute score. If all your channels score 70+, the real question is whether to expand your channel mix rather than reallocating within it.