Media
Performance marketing across Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube
· 7 minute read · Addmarker
When to use Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and why the landing page and the creative decide more than the bid.
Intent and discovery are different jobs
Google search is where someone already wants a thing and is trying to name it. Meta and YouTube are where a precise stranger might care if you show them the right six seconds. LinkedIn is where the buyer is a role: a title, a company size, a professional worry.
Using all four by default is how budgets become thin. Pick the job. A local service with a clear name wants search. A new product people do not know to search for wants a discovery channel and a page that can explain itself.
The creative is the lever
Account structure matters, and it is not the part most founders can see. What they can see is the ad. Performance marketing stalls when one image is asked to work for a quarter. It moves when there is a small, steady supply of variations that still sound like the same company.
That supply is a production problem. If your contract pays for bids and not for creative, you have hired half of the system. The other half will be whatever someone can export on a Thursday.
The page has to deserve the click
A disciplined media plan pointed at a confused page is an expensive way to learn that the page is confused. The promise in the ad, the headline on the page, and the thing the form asks for should be the same promise.
If you cannot say what happens after the form, do not buy the traffic yet. Fix the handoff first. It is cheaper than another month of “learning”.
Measurement without fantasy
Platform dashboards are optimistic about themselves. Use them, and also look at the conversations that arrived, the quality of those conversations, and the lag between click and revenue. Incrementality is hard for smaller budgets. Honesty about that is more useful than a model nobody trusts.
There is no universal minimum spend. There is a spend large enough, in your category and country, to leave a platform’s learning phase and still be able to read the result. Size it with someone who will also tell you if the offer is not ready.