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# Budget Allocation at Scale: Building an ML Optimization System for Paid Marketing

**[Atlassian](https://daily.dev/sources/atlassian)** · 8 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Atlassian's performance marketing team built a two-stage ML system to optimize paid advertising budget allocation at scale. The system uses a LightGBM-based payout model to predict business outcomes as a function of spend (capturing diminishing returns), paired with a Bayesian Optimization-based budget optimizer that allocates a fixed total budget across hundreds of channels, markets, and products to maximize ROI under real-world constraints. A Cross-Entropy method serves as an independent validator. Online experiments using a pre-and-post design across 3 marketing channels and 2 products showed a double-digit percent reduction in cost per business metric at equivalent spend levels, with no budget increase required. Future work includes better extrapolation handling with hybrid tree-parametric models, uncertainty-aware exploration-exploitation, and richer lag and interaction features.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.atlassian.com/blog/how-we-build/budget-allocation-at-scale-building-ml-optimization-system>

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---

Tags: [#machine-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/machine-learning), [#data-science](https://daily.dev/tags/data-science)

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