Planning 2025 budget allocation across Apple, Meta and Google
A way to split a 2025 paid budget by the job each channel does, with a reserve for testing and explicit rules for when to move money.
Budget planning goes wrong when it starts from a pie chart of last year's spend. The split gets passed down with small edits, and each channel is defended by its own dashboard. A better approach starts with what each channel is for, sets a floor for the parts of the business that depend on it, and keeps a portion unallocated for evidence you will not have until spring.
The numbers below are hypothetical. Use them to see the structure, not as a benchmark.
Assign each channel a job before assigning dollars
Apple Search Ads, Meta and Google do different things for an app advertiser.
- Apple Search Ads captures existing intent inside the App Store. Its ceiling is set by search volume for your brand, category and competitors, not by how much you are willing to spend. Past a point, extra budget buys lower-quality taps.
- Meta creates demand. It finds people who were not looking, so its results depend on creative volume and the quality of the conversion signal you send. Its ceiling is set by your creative production and by how far your value signal can be trusted.
- Google spans both. Search captures intent, and formats such as Demand Gen, which replaced Discovery campaigns, sit on YouTube, Discover and Gmail and create demand. Treat these as separate lines with separate targets.
If you give all three a single cost-per-install target, you will starve the channel that creates demand and overfeed the ones that harvest it.
Use three layers instead of one split
Consider a hypothetical annual budget of $1,000,000. A structure we would propose:
- Base, about 60%. Spend on campaigns with a proven return at your payback target, such as brand and category terms in Apple Search Ads and your best-performing Meta and Google campaigns. Fund them at last year's run rate adjusted for growth, and review monthly.
- Growth, about 30%. Money for scaling what is working, released in steps. Move it only when a channel's marginal return stays above target after you raise spend, not when its average looks good.
- Reserve, about 10%. Unassigned until a defined date or trigger. This is for tests and for surprises, and it is the part most plans skip.
The exact shares matter less than the discipline. The base protects revenue, the growth layer rewards evidence, and the reserve admits that you do not know everything yet.
Write the rules for moving money
A plan without rules becomes a negotiation each month. Write them down in advance:
- Shift growth money to a channel only if its return at the margin beats target for a set number of consecutive weeks, with the window long enough to cover your conversion delay.
- Cut a campaign only after a defined period below target, measured on mature cohorts rather than on the first week.
- Do not move more than a fixed share of a channel's budget in one month, so that an unusual month does not rearrange the plan.
Fund measurement as a line item
Give measurement a budget. Incrementality tests such as geo holdouts cost media spend and analyst time, and they are the only way to check platform-reported numbers against something independent. If you plan to build a marketing mix model, Google has said in announcing Meridian that it supports calibration with incrementality experiments. A model without a test to calibrate it is an opinion. Reserve some of the 10% for these tests, and pick the largest channel first.
Name the uncertainties and what you will do about them
Three things are unsettled as 2025 planning begins, and each should have an owner and a trigger.
- Search results are changing. Google announced in May that it would test Search and Shopping ads in AI Overviews. If your informational queries lose clicks or gain new placements, you will want to move money between query groups. Track click-through rate by group so you can see it.
- Chrome's cookie plan has changed. In July, Google said it would offer users a choice in Chrome and not phase out third-party cookies. The details are still under discussion with regulators, so keep first-party measurement work on the plan with a modest budget and avoid overinvesting in either outcome.
- Attribution on Apple platforms is evolving. Apple introduced AdAttributionKit in June as a framework that works with SKAdNetwork. Ask your networks and your measurement partner about support, and leave room to rework your conversion value mapping.
Practical takeaway
Before the year closes, write one page: each channel's job, its base budget, its growth trigger, its margin of safety on ROAS, and the date you will release the reserve. Share it with finance now, so that changing course in March is a scheduled decision and not a surprise.