8 Free Marketing Budget Templates to Track ROI and Costs in 2025

1. monday.com – Best for quarterly high-level campaign tracking

monday.com’s marketing budget sheet highlights the strategic side of planning instead of focusing on tactical details. It works best for quarterly campaigns like events, paid ads, and brand initiatives, which gives managers an overview of spending across multiple quarters.

You can switch between bar chart and Gantt chart views to compare quarterly or annual budget goals. The template also lets you set up automated alerts to catch overspending early and create custom budget request forms so external partners can submit funding requests directly.

💡Tip: A marketing budget works best when paired with a foolproof strategy. Use this marketing plan template to align your spending with business goals and campaign priorities.

2. ClickUp – Best for detailed performance tracking

Unlike monday.com’s high-level budget template, ClickUp provides a more detailed approach with fields for assignee, start and due dates, campaign type, and status. Columns such as Impact and Effort allow ROI prioritization, while spend, balance, and budget tracking ensure visibility across different campaign types.

This marketing spend template is ideal for performance marketing, where teams need to identify quick wins (low effort and high impact) or manage high-investment campaigns more closely. It’s designed for marketing strategists and campaign managers who must optimize resource allocation across campaigns and demonstrate spending value to stakeholders.

3. Smartsheet – Best for budget forecasting and reconciliation

Smartsheet uses a classic spreadsheet-style breakdown of initial vs. working budgets by category and month. While it’s not designed for campaign management, it’s ideal for marketing operations managers who need to align planned and actual budgets across departments such as content, social, display, and affiliates.

This template also works for marketing teams working with finance, allowing them to manage budget requests while keeping key metrics visible throughout the year. Smartsheet’s formulas and functions let you perform calculations within a single sheet or across multiple sheets, making budget tracking much easier. It also includes a budget change request form to handle adjustments and a dashboard view for reviewing budget performance and forecasting line items.

💡Did you know? If you’re juggling multiple initiatives, structure matters. These marketing campaign templates help you organize timelines, tasks, and budgets in one place.

4. Wrike – Best for monthly reporting and accountability

Wrike’s template is less about campaign budget planning and more about monthly expense reporting and departmental accountability, a good fit for organizations with multiple budget owners. To promote transparency, it assigns owners to each entry and categorizes expenses, such as travel, professional services, and office costs, making individual spending clear.

It also features a company expenses request form where users can log category, type, date, and amount. For added organization, budgets can be grouped into custom folders like office expenses, rent, travel, and meals. A monthly budget calendar provides a color-coded view of expenses by category, allowing teams to monitor spending trends at a glance.

5. Notion – Best ROI-driven performance marketing

While many marketing budget templates focus mainly on spending, Notion’s Marketing Spend Log goes further by combining budget, spend, revenue, and ROI in a single dashboard. This is ideal for growth marketing teams that need to prove ROI, particularly in paid media, influencer campaigns, and other performance-driven channels.

This budget template for campaign advertising includes a database with built-in formulas to calculate ROI and budget progress percentages alongside campaign name, total spend, and revenue. It also features a spend log where every expense can be recorded and linked to campaigns, enabling automatic rollups and streamlined reporting.

💡Did you know? Staying on budget doesn’t always mean a project is successful. Learn the 6 ways of measuring project success to evaluate outcomes beyond cost.

6. Miro – Best for collaborative budget ideation

Miro’s signature whiteboard format transforms budget planning into a visual workspace that prioritizes brainstorming and ideation over detailed tracking. Teams can map out potential expenses, risks, and goals using drag-and-drop elements like sticky notes and connectors.

The template offers flexible customization, allowing users to add visual aids such as charts or graphs to highlight spending trends or adjust fields for income, fixed expenses, and amounts. A standout feature is the ability to export budget data into formats like images or PDFs, making it easy to share or use for further analysis and reporting.

7. Teamwork.com – Best for project-based campaign budgets

Teamwork.com provides a task list budget template designed for campaign leads who need real-time visibility into budgets alongside task execution. It’s especially useful for project-based marketing efforts like product launches or rebrands, where budget tracking must align closely with progress milestones.

Teamwork.com’s template monitors smaller work items within a project and rolls them up into the overall budget. It links budgets to project progress and issues alerts when spending approaches or exceeds limits. By assigning budgets to each task list, you can also see how different projects are performing against their allocated budgets.

8. Asana – Best for website optimization projects

The template links budget tracking to project tasks, with columns for estimated spend, actual spend, department, and approval stage. By integrating approvals, it helps teams identify bottlenecks in initiatives that require oversight from compliance, legal, or design.

💡Tip: Before committing funds, weigh the pros and cons of your initiatives. This cost-benefit analysis example shows how to evaluate potential returns against costs.

How to create and manage a marketing budget

Building a marketing budget involves making smarter decisions that connect resources to results. In fact, a recent study found that smarter resource allocation is one of the top trends in content marketing, showing how important it is to plan strategically. With the right framework, you can keep spending in check while ensuring every dollar supports your goals.

1. Define goals and KPIs. Start by clarifying what you want to achieve and how you’ll measure success. Setting clear goals and KPI ensures your budget supports outcomes like lead generation, brand awareness, or customer acquisition.

2. Distribute budget across channels. Allocate funds to the platforms and strategies that align with your audience and objectives. This prevents overspending on one channel while underfunding others that could drive better returns.

3. Separate fixed and variable costs. Identify recurring expenses like software subscriptions alongside variable costs such as ad campaigns or event sponsorships. This separation makes it easier to forecast spending and adapt to changes without breaking your budget.

4. Include a contingency buffer. Set aside 5–10% of your total budget to cover unexpected expenses. This cushion helps you stay on track when priorities shift or unplanned opportunities arise.

5. Review and adjust monthly. Regular check-ins give you visibility into what’s working and where you may be overspending. By making monthly adjustments, you ensure your budget aligns with both performance and project priorities.

Managing a marketing budget requires discipline, but the right tools make it much easier. Platforms like monday.com help with high-level planning, ClickUp adds detailed tracking and prioritization, and Wrike supports accountability through expense reporting. Using these tools, you can stay on top of spending, prove ROI, and make better strategic decisions throughout the year.

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