Budget split is a strategy decision, not a slider
Most accounts split spend by habit. Here’s the framework we encode instead — intent supply on search, angle headroom on Meta, and what to do when one of them runs out.
Not a default. It’s what falls out of the framework below when search demand is high and the offer needs no education.
Ask ten accounts how they arrived at their platform split and nine will describe an accident. It was 50/50 at the start because that felt fair, then Meta got cut when a quarter went badly, then search got cut when CPCs rose. Nobody wrote the reasoning down, so nobody can revisit it.
A split is a strategy decision. It answers one question: where is the next pound most likely to become a customer this month? That depends on two supplies — how much qualified intent exists on search, and how much untapped angle headroom exists on Meta — and both are measurable before you spend anything.
Start with intent supply, not with budget
Search spend is capped by reality. If 3,000 people a month search your commercial terms in your service area, and you can realistically win a third of those clicks at your CPC, that’s the ceiling. Money above the ceiling doesn’t buy more qualified clicks — it buys looser matches and worse leads.
So the first number to compute isn’t a percentage. It’s an absolute: the monthly spend at which search saturates. Anything beyond it has to earn its place somewhere else.
Search has a ceiling set by demand. Meta has a ceiling set by how many distinct angles you can credibly run. Find both ceilings before you argue about percentages.
Then count your angles
Meta budget scales with distinct, credible angles — not with creative volume. Four angles, each with one strong concept, will out-perform forty variations of a single claim, because you’re testing hypotheses rather than crops.
In practice most single-location service businesses have three to five angles sitting on their own website: the nervous customer, the price-checker, the person in a hurry, the referral. Each one deserves a budget line, and running out of angles is a signal to stop adding spend, not to raise the daily cap.
When the offer needs education, invert it
The 70/30 split above assumes people already search for what you sell. If your product is new, renamed, or bundled in a way nobody has a word for yet, search intent doesn’t exist to be harvested — and pouring money into it just buys competitor brand terms and research queries.
In that case Meta carries the demand creation and search carries only the capture: brand terms, plus the two or three category terms that do exist. That’s often 30/70 the other way, and it should change month to month as branded search volume grows.
Write the reasoning down
The point of a framework isn’t the number it produces — it’s that next quarter you can tell whether the number was wrong or the market moved. Every campaign we build records its split alongside the reason for it, with links to the pages and queries behind the call, so the review is a five-minute read rather than an argument.
Then a human approves it. That part isn’t a formality — it’s the step where somebody who knows the business says “our capacity is twelve implant consultations a month, so don’t buy fifty leads.” No model has that number. You do.
Build a campaign and read the recommendation with sources. Nothing launches without you.