Set your total monthly digital budget, then allocate it across SEO, PPC, social, content, and email with live sliders. See the exact dollars per channel and keep your mix at 100%.
Results update live as you slide
Your allocations total 100% — perfectly balanced.
Each channel's spend = total budget × its percentage. Aim for a combined total of 100% for a clean allocation.
A balanced starting split is roughly 30% SEO, 30% PPC, 20% social, 10% content, 10% email.
Lean into PPC and social when you need leads fast; weight SEO and content for durable, compounding traffic.
Rebalance monthly based on cost per lead and ROAS — move spend to what actually converts.
How to divide spend across channels — and when to shift the mix.
Start from your goals: weight channels that match your sales cycle and audience, then test, measure, and rebalance toward what converts.
SEO is a compounding investment that lowers cost per visit over time. Budget for content, technical work, and links — results build over months.
PPC buys immediate, controllable traffic and fast data. Fund enough to gather conversions, then scale the campaigns that hit your target cost per lead.
Social drives demand and brand, especially for visual products. Split between paid ads and creative, and let performance decide which platforms grow.
Content fuels every channel and email delivers the highest ROI per dollar. They are small line items with outsized leverage across the funnel.
Treat your allocation as a living plan. Review channel ROAS each month, shift budget to winners, and adjust for seasonality and rising ad costs.
The split matters more than the total, and most splits are inherited rather than chosen.
Once you have a digital budget, the allocation question is harder than the sizing question. Channels differ not just in efficiency but in what they do: some harvest demand that already exists, others create it. A budget entirely in the first category looks efficient right up until growth stalls, because nothing is refilling the top of the funnel.
A workable starting split for most Canadian small businesses is roughly half to demand capture, a third to demand creation, and the remainder to retention and testing — then adjusted hard based on what your own data shows.
| Channel | Typical share | Role in the mix |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search (non-brand) | 25% – 40% | Captures existing intent. The workhorse for most service businesses. |
| SEO / content | 15% – 30% | Slow, compounding demand capture. Lowers paid dependence over time. |
| Meta / social ads | 15% – 30% | Creates demand and retargets. Cheaper reach, colder intent. |
| Email / CRM | 5% – 10% | Highest return per dollar, but only works with an existing list. |
| Brand search | 5% – 10% | Defensive. Cheap, high ROI, and creates almost no new demand. |
| Testing reserve | 10% – 15% | The budget line that keeps the other five from decaying. |
Brand search will always report the best return in the account. Funding it from the growth budget is how businesses end up with excellent reported metrics and flat revenue.
Search captures demand; social and video create it. Judge them on different timeframes and different metrics, or you will defund the one that feeds the other.
Equal allocation feels balanced and performs poorly. Fund by evidence, with a deliberate reserve for things you have not tested yet.
Each channel has a floor below which it cannot gather enough data to optimise. Three underfunded channels lose to one properly funded one.
It consistently posts the strongest return and rarely gets a proportionate share, because it has no media invoice to make it visible in the budget.
Reallocating constantly keeps everything in a learning phase. Review quarterly with enough data to justify the move.
Creative, photography and landing pages are part of the digital budget. Plans that fund only media stall when the creative wears out.
Last-click credits the final touch, which is nearly always demand capture. Follow it faithfully and you will cut the channels creating the demand.
The instinct when growth slows is to add a platform. Usually the existing channel had more headroom and the new one just splits attention.
Auction dynamics, seasonality and competitors all shift. An allocation set in January and untouched in September is out of date by definition.
Fully committed budgets cannot respond to opportunity. The reserve is what stops the plan calcifying around what worked last year.
A useful stress test: assume your single best-performing channel becomes twice as expensive next quarter. If that scenario collapses the plan, the allocation is too concentrated regardless of how good the current numbers look. Diversification in media is not about hedging — it is about not being one auction change away from having no acquisition strategy.
We build and manage digital channel plans across SEO, PPC, social, and email for businesses across Canada.