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Determine Optimal Marketing Budget Allocation for Maximum Profit

OneMain FinancialData Scientist · Online Assessment
MediumData ScientistOnline AssessmentAnalytics & Experimentation

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This interview question evaluates metric design, causal reasoning, experiment setup, diagnostics, SQL/statistical checks, and recommendations in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Determine Optimal Marketing Budget Allocation for Maximum Profit states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

Scenario

Onemain Financial must decide how to allocate marketing budget across three acquisition channels—Phone Calls, Social Media Ads, and Email Blasts—whose click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue-per-cost values are provided in an Excel sheet.

Question

Given a total budget B, calculate the expected net profit for each channel. 2. Using the conversion rate, estimate the average cost and the average profit generated by a single inbound phone call. 3. Each channel has an individual spend cap. With a fixed overall budget, determine the spending allocation that maximizes total profit and explain your reasoning.

Hints

Compute unit profit (revenue – cost) first, then apply budget constraints and simple greedy/linear optimization to maximize profit.