Advertising in 2026 is not about being everywhere at once; it’s about knowing where your budget delivers the greatest impact. Too often, brands split budgets between Google, Meta, and TikTok without a clear strategy. This results in overspending on campaigns that look good in platform dashboards but don’t drive real growth.
The good news is that budget fluidity can be fixed easily. With the right approach, your ad spend becomes an engine of efficiency rather than a source of waste. Here’s how to get it right in today’s landscape.
1. Start with attribution, not platforms
Before you decide where to spend, you must know what’s working. This is where most advertisers fall short. Advertisers must recognise that platform reports are often misleading: Google, Meta, and TikTok each claim credit for conversions where they can. The truth is that your customer journey rarely starts and ends on the same platform.
For example, a customer may first see your brand on TikTok, research on Google, and finally purchase after seeing a Meta retargeting ad. If you optimise using platform reports alone, you’ll end up double (or triple) counting and diverting spend into the wrong channels.
The fix: invest in a tool that serves as your single source of conversion tracking and attribution. Whether through advanced analytics or an independent measurement platform, unify your data so every click and conversion is seen in context. Once you know the true path to purchase, you can stop rewarding the wrong platform and start investing where your money genuinely works.
UK adspend rose 8% year-on-year in Q1 2025 to £10.6bn, with search up by 12.3% and online display by 10.1% [1]. This growth highlights how quickly spend shifts across formats, and why a clear attribution model is essential to avoid misallocating budget.
2. Use each platform for its true role
When you see the customer journey clearly, it becomes obvious that each platform can play a unique role:
- Google Search: The Intent Driver
Google search captures users who are actively searching for a solution. Spend here should focus on high-intent, bottom-of-funnel activities such as Search and Shopping Ads. These campaigns are typically closest to conversion, but also the most competitive.
- Meta: The Engagement Builder
Meta excels at nurturing audiences, generating demand, and retargeting warm leads. This is where you build relationships, educate users, and reinforce brand value until they’re ready to buy.
- TikTok: The Discovery Engine
TikTok thrives on virality and top-of-funnel engagement. It’s a space for experimentation, creative testing, and sparking interest with audiences who may not yet be in-market but will convert later through other platforms.
The key insight: stop treating platforms as rivals. While all of the above-mentioned platforms have products that are really good at raising awareness, driving consideration and delivering sales, each one has its strengths and offers specific solutions and ad formats for those objectives. View them as interconnected stages of a funnel that guides customers from first impression to final purchase.
3. Ditch fixed budgets for dynamic allocation
Static budgets are outdated. Setting £10,000 for Google, £5,000 for Meta, and £3,000 for TikTok at the start of the quarter is a recipe for waste and missed opportunities. Consumer behaviour shifts with trends – at times quite rapidly, platform algorithms evolve constantly, and yesterday’s winning campaign may underperform tomorrow.
The best-performing advertisers move budgets dynamically. If costs spike on Google, spend should shift to a better-performing Meta or TikTok campaign. If TikTok is driving cheaper top-of-funnel conversions, your system should recognise this and reallocate budget in real-time, ensuring no opportunity is missed.
With the UK ad market forecast to reach £45.4 billion in 2025 and continue growing into 2026 (~£48.0 billion) [2], static budget allocation risks wasting money on underperforming campaigns instead of capturing these new growth opportunities.
4. Why execution is the hard part
The challenge is not understanding what to do but managing the complexity of doing it. Data teams in large organisations dedicate hours to modelling spend and outcomes, identifying trends within the business, and working with marketing to improve efficiency. However, unifying attribution, understanding platform roles, and shifting spend dynamically requires constant analysis and decisions. For most teams, this quickly becomes overwhelming.
This is exactly where technology steps in. By using the right tools, you can make smarter decisions faster and let your team focus on strategy rather than endless spreadsheets.
Smarter allocation, made simple
Managing attribution, understanding the role of each platform, and shifting spend dynamically is tough to do at scale. Most teams either burn hours in spreadsheets or leave performance on the table by sticking with static budgets.
This is the gap Unyte was built to close. Instead of asking advertisers to keep up with constant changes themselves, Unyte provides a single, independent view of performance and adjusts spend across ad campaigns and platforms in near real-time.
For advertisers, that means less wasted spend, more confident decisions, and campaigns that are always working at their best.
At the end of the day, your job isn’t to wrestle with dashboards or chase yesterday’s numbers… it’s to build strategies and ideas that move your brand forward. The right tools should take care of the rest.