Why Cutting the ‘Expensive’ Marketing Channel Could Be the Most Expensive Mistake You Make

When the data tells the wrong story

We turned on Meta Advantage+ lead ads for a client. Other channels were already running, search, display, email, all ticking along as usual.

At first glance, the results from Meta were damning. Conversions flatlined. The platform made it look like dead spend.

But almost immediately, search performance took off. Leads doubled. Cost per acquisition fell. The dashboard made search look like the hero of the hour. Coincidence? That was the easy answer.

So Meta was paused. If it was not producing results, why keep paying for it?

And then search collapsed back to where it had always been. Same creative. Same bidding. Same targeting. Nothing had changed except the so called failing channel was not running.

Meta was not a waste. It was the engine. The invisible driver behind the apparent efficiency of search.

If you had taken the siloed data at face value, you would have cut the very thing holding the system together.

The lure of neat numbers

Leaders love clarity. Investors love clarity. A dashboard that says this works, that does not, feels like truth.

But customers do not behave in clean lines.

They see you in a Facebook ad, ignore you, see you again on LinkedIn, forget about you, then search your brand three weeks later when the need becomes urgent. They click a paid search ad and convert.

Who gets the credit? Search. Every time. Because it owns the last click.

The intent was created elsewhere. The report just does not show it.

The problem with models

Attribution models try to fix this. Last click, first click, linear, time decay, data driven.

None of them are neutral. None of them tell the whole story.

Last click makes the closer look like the creator.

First click ignores the long road between introduction and action.

Linear spreads credit equally, which does not reflect reality.

Data driven models only ever work with the slices of data the platform can see.

And do not forget: every platform has its own scoreboard. Google, Meta, LinkedIn, all of them bend the data to make themselves look like the star player.

So the reports you trust are rarely truth. They are competing sales pitches.

Expensive versus cheap

This is where most businesses get burned.

Search often looks cheap. Meta often looks expensive. Or the reverse. The reflex is to cut the expensive channel and double down on the cheap one.

But cheap is not a property of a channel. It is a property of the system.

It is football. The striker scores. But without the midfielder there is nothing to finish. Fire the midfielder and, for a short while, the striker still shines. Then the goals dry up.

The stats do not capture that truth.

The psychology of false clarity

Why do leaders fall for it? Because neat numbers feel safe.

It is easier to tell a boardroom:

• Search delivered 200 leads at £50 each.
• Meta delivered 10 at £250 each.

That is a story you can defend. It feels rational.

But it is also misleading. It ignores the invisible connections between channels. It rewards what is easy to measure and punishes what is not. And it sets you up to make the wrong calls.

Cut the wrong thing. Fund the wrong thing. Wonder why growth gets harder.

The uneasy case for brand awareness

Nothing sparks debate in a boardroom like the line item marked brand awareness.

It does not produce clean conversion reports. It does not generate tidy cost per lead numbers. It just sits there as a cost, hard to justify when every other channel is screaming for ROI.

But here is the paradox: brand awareness is often the quiet difference between efficiency and waste.

Think about it. If someone has never heard of you, every click you buy is harder to win. Every conversion is slower. Every lead is more expensive. When you invest in awareness, you lower the resistance everywhere else in the funnel.

The numbers do not show it neatly, but the effect is real:

• Search ads convert more easily when the brand name is familiar.
• Sales calls land better when the prospect has already seen you in the market.
• Even referrals work harder when your brand feels present.

Cut brand awareness because it “does not convert,” and you end up paying more for every lead you thought you had saved money on. Keep it running, and the rest of your channels suddenly look smarter.

It is not just a cost. It is a lever that changes the economics of the whole system.

The argument for global attribution

This is why I argue for global attribution as the anchor.

Not “what did Meta do?” or “how cheap was search?” but:

• What did the total spend deliver?
• How many leads and sales came in across the system?
• What is our blended cost of acquisition?

Those questions pull you out of the silo mindset. They stop the endless arguments about who deserves credit. They put the focus back where it belongs: on efficiency of the system as a whole.

And when you think globally, the conversations shift. It is no longer about defending channels. It is about pulling levers to make the whole machine more efficient.

A painful case

I will never forget one client who cut Meta after months of “poor performance.” Within six weeks, their search CPL doubled. Blended CAC rose forty per cent.

Panic set in. Fingers were pointed. Teams fought over why search had “stopped working.”

But search had not stopped working. Meta had stopped fuelling it.

It took months, and a lot of lost revenue, to undo a decision that was made in a single meeting, based on numbers that looked neat but were not true.

Where the value really is

Attribution feels like clarity, but most of the time it is a mirage.

If you run your budgets on siloed reports, you will cut the channels that make your system efficient and reward the ones that only look efficient because of unseen support.

The real clarity comes from zooming out. Seeing the funnel as one system. Tracking the global number, total spend against total return, and making your decisions from there.

That is where the value lies.

Not in crowning winners and losers, but in asking: how do we bring the blended cost down while keeping growth up? How do we optimise the team, not just the striker? How do we make the system work harder, not just the silos?

How we approach it at PRISM⁵⁵

This is why, for all of our fractional CMO clients, we do not let siloed reports dictate strategy. They are fine for day to day tweaks, changing bids, testing copy, tightening targeting, but they are dangerous when treated as the big picture.

Our answer to that problem is simple: integrated dashboards that bring everything together.

And they are not the kind of reports agencies manipulate to make themselves look good. They are tools that you, us, anyone, can interrogate. Transparent, connected data that blends search, social, CRM, and revenue into one source of truth. On top of that, we use an AI toolset that interprets the patterns, so you do not need to be a marketing veteran to see what is happening.

That is how you solve the attribution mirage. Instead of treating channels as rivals, you see the system as one machine. Instead of debating which channel is “expensive” or “cheap,” you see how each one influences the others. Instead of making cuts that quietly sabotage growth, you make changes that lower the blended cost of acquisition.

And the trust goes deeper than the numbers. Because when you can see the same unmanipulated truth we see, you know we are not hiding behind vanity metrics. You can trust that we feel as accountable to your business and its growth as you do.

It is not just a way to look at the data. It is the fix to the very problem this article describes: the false clarity of silos, replaced with the real clarity of the system.