The question we get asked most often by Australian businesses spending between $20,000 and $200,000 a month on media is some version of "should we move budget from Meta to Google, or the other way around?" It is the wrong question, and it usually comes from looking at two dashboards that each claim credit for the same customer.
Google Ads and Meta Ads do fundamentally different jobs. Google is a harvesting mechanism: it puts you in front of people who have already decided they have a problem and are actively describing it in a search box. Meta is a manufacturing mechanism: it creates awareness and desire in people who were not looking for you at all. If you only harvest, you are limited by existing demand. If you only manufacture, you hand the closing moment to whoever is bidding on your category.
The mechanics of the handover
Watch what happens when a well-made Meta campaign goes live in a market. Within a fortnight, three things typically move in Google: branded search impressions rise, non-branded impression share becomes cheaper to hold because click-through rate improves, and conversion rate on existing search campaigns climbs. Nobody clicked from Meta to Google, and no dashboard will connect the two events. But the same people are moving through both.
This is the handover. A person sees a founder explain in ninety seconds why the usual way of doing something is broken, does not click, thinks about it for six days, then searches your category — or your name — and converts on a search ad. Meta gets no credit. Google gets all of it. Budget then moves from Meta to Google, the demand generation stops, and four to eight weeks later search volume quietly decays and cost per acquisition rises. We have watched this cycle run in dozens of accounts.
How to structure the two platforms
Google: cover the intent, in order of intent
- Brand search — cheap, high converting, and the direct beneficiary of Meta activity. Never leave it uncovered while a competitor bids on your name.
- High-intent non-branded search — the phrases that describe buying, not researching. This is where your margin usually lives.
- Research and comparison terms — worth holding when your content can actually answer the question.
- Performance Max or Shopping for ecommerce, with the conversion signal cleaned up first.
- YouTube and Demand Gen when you have real video assets — Google's own manufacturing surface.
Meta: manufacture the demand, then close the loop
- Broad prospecting carrying your strongest problem-framing creative — the job is to make people realise they have a problem worth paying to solve.
- Mid-funnel proof: case studies, results, staff and process content for people who engaged but did not act.
- Retargeting for site visitors and video viewers, with an offer rather than another argument.
- Customer exclusions applied across every prospecting campaign.
Budget: how much goes where
There is no universal split, but there is a reliable starting logic. First, fully fund search capture up to the point where impression share on your high-intent terms stops being the constraint — usually somewhere between 65% and 80% share, beyond which each extra point gets expensive. Capturing existing demand is almost always the cheapest revenue available.
Everything above that goes into demand generation, because that is what raises the ceiling. For a business with an established category and a decent search footprint, a 60/40 split favouring Google is common. For a new category, a new product, or a business whose value has to be explained before it can be searched for, the split often inverts to 30/70 favouring Meta. The signal to watch is not the split itself but whether search volume is growing.
If your branded and non-branded search volume is flat, your demand generation is not working — regardless of what Meta's dashboard reports.
Measuring a system, not two channels
Platform-reported conversions will always double count, because both platforms claim any conversion they touched inside their attribution window. Adding the two dashboards together is the single most common reporting error in paid media.
Use three layers instead. First, a CRM as the source of truth: every lead and deal carries its original source, and closed revenue is attributed there, not in the ad platforms. Second, blended efficiency: total media spend divided by total new customers, tracked as a trend. When you add demand generation, blended cost per acquisition should fall even though Meta's own cost per acquisition looks poor. Third, incrementality: hold out a region or a matched audience for three to four weeks and measure the difference in total new customers, not platform conversions. Geo holdouts are the closest most Australian advertisers can get to a clean experiment.
Creative and message continuity
The handover fails when the two platforms sound like different companies. If your Meta creative promises a fixed-price, no-obligation assessment and your search landing page opens with a generic "welcome to our website" hero, you have broken the chain at the exact moment of highest intent.
Keep one campaign narrative, expressed natively in each place: the same core promise, the same proof points, the same offer language, and landing pages that acknowledge where the visitor came from. Feed your best-performing Meta hooks into responsive search ad headlines — social creative is the fastest, cheapest message-testing lab you have, and Google is where the winning message gets monetised.
Sequencing a launch
- 01Weeks 1–2: turn on brand and high-intent search, fix tracking, get a clean baseline of demand you are already leaving on the table.
- 02Weeks 2–6: launch Meta prospecting with three to five distinct concepts, and record baseline search volumes before you start.
- 03Weeks 4–8: layer retargeting across both platforms with a coordinated frequency cap and a real offer.
- 04Weeks 8–12: read the leading indicators — branded search growth, direct traffic, view-through behaviour, blended cost per acquisition — and rebalance.
- 05Quarterly: run one geo or audience holdout to keep yourself honest about incrementality.
Run this way and the two platforms stop being rivals on a spreadsheet. Meta widens the pool of people who want what you sell; Google makes sure you are the one standing there when they act on it.
Written by
Erica Marthy Rivero
Performance Marketing Specialist
Erica runs day-to-day media buying across Meta and Google, obsessing over creative testing cadence, audience structure and the cost per qualified lead behind every dollar of spend.