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Stop feeding donkeys: How to fund your real winners
It’s quietly stealing your budget every single day.
Kody Nordquist
August 16, 2025
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The Budget Allocation Science: Why Equal Spend Across Campaigns Is Killing Your Growth
Not to alarm any of you, but there might be a lurker in your ad accounts.
It’s not the platform glitching. It’s not a shady competitor clicking your ads.
It’s something way sneakier:
The way you split your budget.
Most advertisers divvy up spend like they’re cutting slices of pizza. Equal portions for everyone, whether they earned it or not.
The problem:
Your best campaigns are stuck with crumbs, while the weak ones are getting fat off your dollars.
In this email, we’ll cover:
Why “equal spend” is slowing your best performers
How to calculate budgets using conversion probability, audience size, and profit margins
The formula that shows exactly where each dollar should go to maximize ROAS
By the end, you’ll know exactly how to starve the losers, feed the winners, and grow faster without increasing spend.
Let’s dive in:
PostPilot here to interrupt this paid media budget allocation lesson…
With a direct mail budget allocation lesson.
TLDR: PostPilot = Meta + Klaviyo but for direct mail. Prospect, retarget, retain. Test, optimize, and scale budget on winning campaigns based on ROAS.
The Less TLDR: With PostPilot, you can track real-time metrics (e.g., revenue and ROAS) in dashboards for any campaign through the funnel—as with a paid campaign and in your ESP.
Prospecting example: As part of a full-funnel program, you can take your initial prospecting test budget and target a few different lookalike models (via own lookalike builder), potentially with different postcard creatives. After a few weeks, the winners on an ROAS basis will be clear—at that point, we can dial in, scale, and automate those with greater budget.
The same principle applies to retargeting and retention.
You can set up anonymous browser retargeting with a pixel (we call it SiteMatch) based on time spent on site—start with a few different parameters, like time spent on site and pages viewed, and A/B test some postcards. Automate what drives the highest returns.
And that’s just the tip of the ROIceberg. Scale email list and abandoned cart retargeting. Drive silly-high ROIs from RFM segments. (And more.)
Oh, and we’ll plan and design all your direct mail campaigns.
But wait, there's more... Get a ridiculously good deal that we’re only offering through Q3: we’ll match 10% of your TOTAL Q3 postcard sends in Q4.
That's an offer you can't refuse.
The Problem With Equal Splits
Here’s the typical scenario:
Campaign A is delivering $5 for every $1 spent.
Campaign B is barely breaking even.
Campaign C is a new test that’s not converting yet.
Instead of adjusting based on performance, each campaign gets the same budget.
Why? Because “it’s fair” or “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
The result:
Winners don’t have enough budget to scale
Weak performers waste money that could be reinvested in stronger campaigns
Your account-level ROAS takes a hit, even if individual campaigns look fine
It’s like running a stable with three horses, two thoroughbreds and one donkey, and feeding them all the same.
You can be nice to the donkey, but it’s never going to win you the race.
The fix starts with funding campaigns proportionally to their true potential.
That means measuring 3 key factors:
Conversion Probability – How consistently this campaign turns clicks into purchases.
Audience Size – How much scale you have left before you saturate the segment.
Profit Margins – How much you actually make from each sale after costs.
Example:
A remarketing campaign with a 9% conversion rate, a small audience, and high margins might deserve more budget than you think, even if it can’t spend $50K a day.
A prospecting campaign with massive reach but a 2% conversion rate might get less budget until you improve the creative and targeting.
The principle: fund your winners according to the math, not your mood.
The Budget Optimization Formula in Action
Here’s how to use it without spreadsheets that make your eyes bleed:
Step 1: Assign each campaign a score for conversion probability, audience size, and margin.
Step 2: Multiply those three numbers to get a “weighted value” for each campaign.
Step 3: Divide each campaign’s weighted value by the total of all campaigns’ values. That percentage is your budget share.
Example:
Your top prospecting campaign scores 5× bigger than your worst performer → it should get 5× the budget.
Your mid-tier campaign scores about half of your top one → it gets half the budget, not an equal slice.
It’s not about “fair.” It’s about making sure every dollar you spend is doing its part to grow the account.
Want $10,000 to test the next big thing in performance marketing?
Marpipe is giving away $10,000 in free ad spend to qualifying brands so you can be among the first to try it.
Yes, you read that right. Ten thousand dollars. Free.
The opportunity: Catalog ads on Connected TV.
If you're already running catalog ads/dynamic product ads on Meta, Pinterest, or Snap, you know they work. Higher ROAS. Better performance, consistent results.
The problem? You've been stuck on small screens.
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Final Thoughts
Budget allocation doesn’t get the flashy case studies, but it’s one of the fastest ways to compound growth without spending more.
Shifting even 10–15% of your budget toward campaigns with the highest potential can create a 20–30% lift in profit almost instantly.
So feed your winners, put the underperformers on a diet, and if there’s a lurker in your ad account quietly stealing budget… It’s time to show them the door.
Performance Creatives Now Available for Select Brands
If your brand is spending $50k+ per month on Meta ads but already have a media buyer, agency or are not ready to commit to a full-service agency; this might be the perfect fit for you.
We’ve been quietly rolling out a new service behind the scenes, performance-focused creative support for brands and agencies that already have strong media buying in place but need help keeping up with creative demand.
Over the past 6 months, we’ve tested this with a few brands.
Our creatives consistently ranked in the top 5% of spend in accounts, driving conversions at scale without sacrificing brand quality.
We’re opening up a few more spots for high-growth partners who are ready to take their ad performance to the next level.
This is perfect for you if:
You’re running aggressive Meta spend but struggling to keep creatives fresh
Your media buyers are solid but you need consistent creative production
You want a team that’s obsessed with performance, not fluff
Spots are limited:
If you're ready for ads that actually convert. » book a call here «
Let’s turn creative into your biggest growth lever.
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Thank you for reading! I appreciate you.
Until Next Time ✌️
- Kody