Would Your Agency Tell You to Kill a Channel?
A while ago I was working with a Swiss watch brand running both Google and Meta. The numbers were clear: Meta was dramatically outperforming Google on every metric that mattered. CPA, ROAS, new customer volume.
So I told them: let's cut Google to almost zero and shift 90% of budget to Meta.
The founder told me that no agency had ever recommended turning off a channel before. Every previous agency had always argued for "keeping both for diversification."
I get why agencies say that. Diversification sounds smart. It feels responsible. And frankly, managing two channels means a bigger retainer than managing one.
But here's the reality: when one channel is clearly winning and another is clearly losing, "diversification" is just a polite word for "wasting money on the loser so the invoice stays the same."
After the shift, their results improved meaningfully. We concentrated budget where it was actually working, gave Meta enough spend to optimize properly, and stopped splitting budget across a channel that was just collecting brand searches and calling it performance.
The One Question to Ask Your Agency
Here's the question I'd ask any agency managing your ads:
"Under what conditions would you recommend we turn off one of our channels entirely?"
If the answer is "we'd never do that, diversification is important," that tells you something. It tells you their incentive is to maintain scope, not to maximize your results.
A good agency should have a clear answer. Something like: "If Channel A is producing new customers at 2x the efficiency of Channel B for 60 days straight and there's no strategic reason to keep B running (brand defense, specific audience segment), we'd recommend reallocating."
That's a real answer. It has conditions, a timeframe, and a decision rule. It means they're thinking about your P&L, not their retainer.
When Diversification Actually Matters
I want to be fair here. There are legitimate reasons to run multiple channels even when one outperforms the other.
If you're spending $200k+ per month on Meta, you're going to hit diminishing returns. At that scale, opening a second channel gives you incremental reach you can't get from Meta alone.
If one channel is your acquisition engine and another is your brand defense (running branded search to prevent competitors from bidding on your name), both serve different purposes.
If you're entering a new market and need to test which channel works before committing budget, running both makes sense for a defined test period.
But at $15 to $50k per month in total ad spend, splitting budget evenly across two channels usually means neither channel gets enough spend to optimize properly. You end up with two mediocre channels instead of one strong one.
Your Gut Check
If you're working with an agency right now, think about the last time they recommended cutting something. Cutting a channel, cutting a campaign type, cutting a creative that was underperforming.
If the answer is "never," ask yourself why. It might be because everything is genuinely working. But it might be because recommending less scope means a smaller contract. And that incentive is worth being aware of.
I run an agency myself, so I realize the irony of writing this. But the best client relationships I've had all started with me telling them to spend less somewhere. Trust gets built when you recommend the thing that costs you money.
Why agencies never recommend less.
The incentive structure behind this pattern has a name: the Agency Incentive Problem. We wrote the full argument and built our model around fixing it. Or see what advice with no retainer attached looks like: the Profit Clarity Audit.