Split Your Ad Budget by Buying Stage, Not by Campaign Type

When a brand asks me how to split its ad budget, what it's expecting back is a percentage. 70% Meta, 20% Google, 10% for the rest. A clean little table. Except I don't think that way. And more importantly, people don't buy that way.

People buy in stages. They stumble onto something, it sticks in their head, they compare two or three options, and one day they check out. And your budget, if you want it to actually do something, needs to match moments in your customer's head, not platforms or formats.

Google put a name on this, the TEEP. Four stages, trigger, exploration, evaluation, purchase. I use it because it's the only framework that forces you to think in terms of intent instead of channel. Here's exactly how I use it to make budget calls, in practice.

Margin first, otherwise everything below is wrong

Before we talk split, where do you start from. Because I see brands diving into their Meta/Google breakdown before they even know how much they can put into ads. That's backwards.

The first exercise we run with a new client is never the platform choice. It's the P&L. Take a 100 euro order, strip out your product cost and your logistics, and what's left is what you can invest in acquisition. You see a 4 ROAS on your dashboard, you think great, I put in 1 and get 4 back. Except once you run the math, you realize you actually need a ROAS of 5 just to be profitable and hit your margin target.

So before you read anything about the TEEP, go run that calculation. I laid it out in how to set an ad budget based on your margin. Without it, you're splitting a budget you can't afford to spend.

The four stages, translated into real creative

Each TEEP stage maps to a concrete type of content you produce and push, it's not some slide-deck concept. Here's how it plays out inside an account.

Trigger, stop the scroll

The spark stage. Your prospect doesn't know you, they're scrolling, and you need to break the pattern. The creatives that work here are the ones that point at a problem the person lives with but has never put into words. You name the common mistake, the annoying thing everyone does, and the person feels seen before you've even mentioned your product.

This is pure acquisition, cold traffic. At this stage you're not chasing the sale, just stopping the thumb.

Exploration, let them picture the product in their life

Here you move into broader education, at the lifestyle level, not the product level. Lifestyle content. Day-in-the-life formats, videos of someone getting ready, aesthetic content that lets the customer picture your product in their day-to-day.

The point is to spark a connection. Hitting them with a product page now is too soon. The prospect starts thinking, hey, this thing could have a place in my life.

Evaluation, kill the skepticism

The stage where the person compares. They're torn between you and two other brands. Your creatives have to answer the hard objections. Us-versus-them comparisons, honest creator reviews, demos that prove your product holds up against the alternative on the market.

This is the stage brands neglect the most and it's often where things stall. The person wants to buy but there's a doubt hanging around. If you don't clear it, they go elsewhere.

Purchase, remove the last friction

The intent is there, all that's left is to unlock the action. A zero-risk founder guarantee. A bundle along the lines of the more you buy the more you save. Or a low-stock alert. In short, anything that releases that last bit of friction.

Watch out, this is the trap stage. If you dump too much budget here, your performance is going to look gorgeous. High return on investment, a ROAS that shines. Of course, you're talking to people who are already hot. Except the whole point of acquisition is to acquire new customers, not to harvest the ones who were going to buy anyway.

How I arbitrate between the four

That leaves the crux of it, how much goes where.

The bulk of the budget goes top of funnel, on trigger and exploration. That's where you go find people who don't know you. If 66% of your spend goes to audiences that already know you, that's way too much. You're lying to yourself about your growth, spinning in circles on your own pool.

Evaluation, you feed it the moment you see people digging in but not converting. You can read it in your funnel, high add-to-cart but low conversion means the doubt hasn't been cleared.

Purchase, you keep tight. It's the final nudge. The engine is elsewhere, at the top of the funnel. Put in the minimum needed to close, no more.

And think acquisition versus repeat split in parallel. Roughly, we run around 80% of the budget on acquisition, 20% on repeat. But repeat, real retention, happens mostly through CRM, not through ads. Confuse the two and you end up paying for ads to retain people your email would have brought back for free. I cover this in why you need to wall off your acquisition and repeat budgets.

The scaling engine, stop fragmenting

The classic reflex when you structure an account is to create ten retargeting pools, one per audience, one per stage. Result, you've got tiny audiences, the algo has nothing to chew on, and your costs blow up.

Run the four stages year-round inside broad ad sets. You let the algo deliver the right creative to the right person depending on where they are. You feed the winning creatives, you can silo them or not, that depends on how you scale. But you stop splintering your budget into micro-pockets.

And check your funnel metrics every 14 and 30 days. Not daily, you'd be making decisions on noise. Every 14 days to adjust, every 30 to make the call.

One detail a lot of people forget, all this machinery stops dead if your site doesn't keep up. You can have the cleanest ad funnel in the world, if the person clicks and lands on a page that kills the energy, you paid for nothing. That's the whole point of your site killing the energy your ads just created.

The real health test for your account

Forget raw ROAS for a second. The real test is whether your account turns strangers into repeat buyers every 90 days. If yes, it's healthy. If not, your performance holds up because you're rebuying your own customers, and that's going to catch up with you.

So you start from your margin to know how much to spend, then you load the top of the funnel (trigger and exploration) while keeping purchase tight. Evaluation, you push it the moment doubt blocks conversion, all of it in broad ad sets reviewed every 14 and 30 days.

The TEEP won't hand you your Meta percentage. It just tells you at which point in the decision your money actually works. That's already a lot more useful.