The 70/20/10 Meta Ads Budget Split That Stops Founders From Wasting Spend

Every account I touch needs the same three pieces. A top of funnel campaign hitting cold people who have never heard of you. A middle of funnel campaign for people who engaged with your Instagram or saw an ad. And a bottom of funnel campaign for the folks who visited your site but never bought.

This is not a phase you graduate out of. It is the permanent shape of the account.

When one of these is missing, the others stop working. Skip the top and your retargeting audience slowly dries up. Skip the bottom and you lose the cheapest conversions you will ever get.

The top of funnel is where your future customers live. Everyone in your retargeting pool was a stranger first.

That is the whole reason most of the budget sits there. You are constantly filling the bucket so the rest of the funnel has people to work with.

I keep seeing founders do the opposite. They pour spend into retargeting because the numbers look pretty, then wonder why results flatline after a few weeks. The audience got small and stale. No new blood came in.

Twenty percent to the middle of funnel sounds modest until you watch what it does. These are people who have engaged but are not ready to buy.

This is your space to handle the doubt. Show proof, answer the obvious objection, give them a reason to take you seriously.

A practical example: a brand I worked with ran a single founder-talking-to-camera video here explaining why their product cost more than competitors. It quietly carried half the conversions because it caught people mid-decision.

Bottom of funnel gets the smallest slice on purpose. The audience is tiny - just people who hit your site and left.

You do not need much money to reach them. They already know you. A reminder and a nudge is usually enough.

Spend too much here and frequency climbs fast. The same person sees your ad ten times in a week and starts to resent you. Small budget, sharp message, leave it alone.

The 70/20/10 number is where I begin, not where I stop. Some guides push more budget into the bottom, others lean heavier on cold. They are all reasonable in different situations.

My read is that the right split depends on your audience size and how known your brand already is. A household name can afford to spend less convincing strangers. A new brand cannot.

Set the split, run it for a few weeks, then read what actually happened. The structure stays fixed. The percentages bend to your numbers.