We cut ad spend 65% and conversions went up. Here's what we removed.

Most underperforming ad accounts are not underfunded. They are unstructured. The budget is doing work, just not the work anyone intended.

When I took over paid acquisition at ACE Money Transfer, the account had the familiar shape: high spend, flat conversions, and a monthly report that described activity rather than outcomes. Compared to the January–February average, we ended up cutting spend by 65% — and both conversions and successful transactions rose.

Nothing about that required a clever hack. It required deleting things.

The analysis that changed the budget

We ran a three-layer breakdown — by country, by channel, and by campaign objective. Aggregate numbers hide everything interesting; the moment you split them, the waste becomes obvious.

What came back was a genuine tension:

• Meta delivered excellent match rates. Audiences were found, creative was served, the top of the funnel looked healthy.
• Meta's cost per acquisition was materially worse than Google's.
• Google converted more cheaply and more predictably, but was under-funded relative to its efficiency.

Read separately, each of those is a reasonable observation. Read together, they are a budget instruction.

What we did about it

We moved Meta to retargeting only. Not off — retargeting is where its match-rate advantage actually pays, and turning a channel off entirely because its blended CAC looks bad is how people accidentally kill their own remarketing.

Incremental spend went to Google and TikTok, where cost-to-conversion justified it.

Blended CAC fell. Conversion volume rose. The account stopped being a high-spend, low-return machine and became something that could be scaled deliberately.

The part people skip

The reason this worked is not that Google is better than Meta. It isn't, universally. It was better for this business, in these corridors, against this objective, at that moment.

An agency that arrives with a fixed opinion about which platform wins has stopped doing analysis and started doing ideology. The channel split is an output of the data, not an input.

What to check in your own account

Three questions, in order:

1. Split your CAC by country and by objective, not just by channel. A channel that looks expensive in aggregate is often carrying one terrible segment and several good ones.
2. Ask what each channel is uniquely good at. Match rate, intent capture, cheap reach — these are different jobs. Budget should follow the job, not the logo.
3. Look at what you would cut if the budget halved tomorrow. Then ask why you are still funding it today.

If the answer to the third question is uncomfortable, that is usually the money.