The Ecommerce Advertising Framework: Meta, Google, TikTok Unified

Running ads on three platforms feels like you're playing three different games with three different rule sets. Meta rewards creative velocity and audience insight. Google rewards intent matching and conversion tracking. TikTok rewards cultural resonance and authentic-feeling content. Most brands treat them as separate channels — which is why they're leaking money on all three.

The smartest ecommerce brands aren't running three different campaigns. They're running one strategy across three platforms, with platform-specific execution underneath. The difference is enormous. One approach scales profitably. The other burns budget trying to crack each platform separately.

This is the framework we use to manage over A$20M in annual ad spend across Meta, Google, and TikTok. It starts with one unified definition of your customer and one clear growth model — then branches into platform-specific mechanisms that all feed the same goal.

One Customer Definition, Three Stages of Intent

Before you open a single platform, you need to know exactly who you're selling to and what problem you're solving for them.

Most brands define their customer too broadly. "Women aged 25–45 interested in skincare." That could be someone buying a face wash from the supermarket or someone spending A$200 on a serum. They're not the same customer.

Instead, define your customer by the purchase decision, not just demographics. A supplement brand we worked with spent months creating audiences around "health interested women" — until we reframed it: what separates a customer who actually buys from someone who just reads about health?

The answer: they're experiencing a specific problem (poor sleep, low energy, joint pain) at a specific moment (tonight, before a workout, after scrolling their phone at 2am).

That one shift changed everything. Instead of running ads to an audience, we ran ads to people at the moment they were most likely to solve their problem.

Here's how the framework works:

Awareness stage. Your customer doesn't yet know your product exists. They're searching for solutions to their problem (or not searching at all — they just feel the friction). This is where TikTok and Meta audience-based prospecting lives. You're reaching people based on interest signals, behaviours, or lookalike audiences.

Consideration stage. Your customer now knows a category of solutions exists. They're comparing options: ecommerce supplements vs prescription, founder-led skincare vs Sephora brands, home gym equipment vs gym membership. This is where Google search and smart bidding enters. They're typing searches. You need to win the intent moment.

Conversion stage. Your customer has narrowed it down. They're probably on your site, checking reviews, comparing prices, reading your brand story. This is where retargeting on Meta and Google and first-party email lives. They're decision-ready — you just need to remove the last objection.

Most brands spend 70% of budget in awareness, 20% in consideration, 10% in conversion. The smart ones do 40/35/25 — because the conversion-ready traffic is the cheapest and most profitable.

The Platform Assignment

Each platform has a natural job within this framework. Stop fighting their strengths.

Meta Ads (Facebook, Instagram, Threads): Awareness and consideration. Meta is the best platform in the world for reaching people based on interest and behaviour at scale. Its algorithm excels at showing ads to people who haven't decided to buy yet but match your customer profile. Creative matters most — a hook, a story, a reason to pause the scroll.

Google Ads (Search, Shopping, Performance Max): Consideration and conversion. Google owns the moment when your customer is actively searching for a solution. They've moved past "I'm interested in health" and landed on "I want to buy something that solves my sleep problem." The intent is explicit. Google's job is to show up in front of that search and convince them you're the answer.

TikTok Ads: Awareness and cultural resonance. TikTok's users aren't in buying mode when they open the app — they're bored, scrolling, looking for entertainment or education. TikTok ads that work feel less like ads and more like content. The best-performing TikTok ads on ecommerce accounts are founder stories, before/after transformations, problem-solution shorts. It's where cultural relevance beats targeting precision.

This doesn't mean each platform only does one thing — it means that's their primary job. Retargeting on Google still works. Conversion campaigns on Meta still matter. But if you're splitting budget equally across three platforms, you're probably wasting money on the wrong channels for the wrong audience segments.

The Unified Budget Allocation Model

Here's what we see work consistently across brands spending A$50K–A$500K/month:

Meta: 45–55% of budget. Primary awareness and creative testing ground. This is where you build the creative velocity system that makes the other two channels profitable.

Google: 30–40% of budget. Intent capture (search) and retargeting. High ROAS but lower volume than Meta. Scales reliably once you have profitable conversion paths.

TikTok: 10–20% of budget. Cultural reach and trend-jacking. Lower volume than the other two, but acquisition cost can be 20–40% cheaper than Meta if your creative lands right. Best used for younger audiences (under 40) and brands with strong visual/narrative hooks.

This ratio changes based on:

• Product: beauty and fashion skew Meta. B2B SaaS and tech skew Google. Lifestyle and food skew TikTok.

• Audience age: under 35? TikTok budget goes up. Over 45? Google budget goes up. Meta stays relatively consistent.

• Conversion window: short (subscription boxes, food orders)? TikTok works. Long (fitness equipment, high-ticket skincare)? Google and Meta retargeting win.

• CAC tolerance: if your margin supports A$80+ CAC, Google and TikTok win. If you need A$40–60 CAC, Meta prospecting is your workhorse.

The key: this isn't "what platform is best overall." It's "what platform is best for this stage of the customer journey for my specific customer."

The Creative System That Powers All Three

Here's where most brands fail: they treat creative as platform-specific. A beautiful carousel ad on Meta doesn't translate to Google Shopping. A TikTok trend doesn't make sense on Facebook. So they create separately for each channel, which means three creative production cycles instead of one.

The smarter approach: create one "core creative asset" — the core idea, the hook, the problem-solution insight. Then adapt it for each platform's format and audience expectations.

Example: A supplement brand we work with created a campaign around "the sleep problem nobody talks about" — the way coffee at 2pm wakes you up at 3am.

Meta version: 15-second video showing the problem (person at 2pm reaching for coffee) and the solution (our sleep supplement in their morning routine). Hook: the problem statement in text overlay. Audience: women 30–45 interested in wellness.

Google Shopping version: Product feed highlighting "caffeine-free sleep support" in the product title. Search ads target "supplements for sleep" and "natural sleep aid." The creative here is the copy and the product image.

TikTok version: 30-second founder story showing her own 2pm coffee habit, how it wrecked her sleep, how the supplement changed that. Authentic, unpolished, personal. Audience: women 25–40 interested in wellness trends.

Same core insight. Three different executions. Same customer journey outcome.

This system only works if you have a creative pipeline. Most brands test one idea per month and pray it works. The ones scaling test four to six ideas per week across Meta (where creative testing happens fastest), kill losers by Day 5, and scale winners by Day 7. By the time Google and TikTok campaigns go live, you already know which creative concepts work.

The Targeting Clarity Principle

The biggest mistake we see: brands overthinking targeting at the wrong stage.

At awareness stage (Meta): Broad targeting wins. Reach people with the interest signal or lookalike audience, let Meta's algorithm do the audience refinement. The creative has to carry the weight. If your creative can't convert cold traffic, tighter targeting won't help.

At consideration stage (Google): Keyword targeting is everything. High-intent keywords get bid aggressively. Low-intent or competitor keywords get managed separately (or paused). The targeting is the targeting — Google's algorithm is handling the bidding, not the audience selection.

At conversion stage (retargeting): Exactness matters. Hit people who've visited your product page specifically, or added to cart, or viewed pricing. The smaller the audience, the more precise the message has to be.

This is why broad audiences on Meta often outperform narrow interests at the prospecting stage — and why tight retargeting audiences outperform broad ones on Google. The job is different. The targeting precision required is different.

The Measurement Model: MER Over ROAS

Here's where strategy breaks down for most brands: they measure each channel by ROAS (return on ad spend) independently.

Meta: 2.8x ROAS. Google: 3.5x ROAS. TikTok: 2.1x ROAS. Looks like Google is winning.

But Google is getting the easy work — people who are already problem-aware and solution-shopping. Meta is doing the harder work — awareness building and creative testing. TikTok is doing cultural reaching.

The fairest measure: Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) across all three channels combined.

MER = total revenue / total ad spend.

If you're spending A$100K across Meta, Google, and TikTok, and generating A$250K in gross revenue, your blended MER is 2.5x. That's the metric that matters for profitability. Individual ROAS numbers can mislead you into over-investing in high-ROAS channels that have hit saturation, or pulling budget from channels that seem lower-performing but are actually feeding the rest of the funnel.

A jewellery brand we manage runs A$18K/week across the three channels. Meta's at 2.6x ROAS. Google's at 3.2x. TikTok's at 2.0x. Blended MER: 2.78x. That 2.78x is the only number that matters — because that's what determines whether the business is profitable at scale.

The Testing Cadence That Scales

Month 1: Diagnostic. What works? Run broad testing on Meta (prospecting). Run high-intent keywords on Google. Run 3–4 creative concepts on TikTok. Measure everything.

Month 2: Expansion. Double spend on the top 40% of winning creative concepts from Month 1. Start layering in consideration-stage campaigns on Meta. Google gets keyword expansion. TikTok gets budget increase on winning creatives.

Month 3: Optimisation. Decrease prospecting spend, increase retargeting. Tighten audience exclusions. Test seasonal/trend hooks on TikTok. Scale winning creative to Google Shopping. This is where MER improvement happens.

Month 4+: Maintenance and refresh. Shift to keeping creative fresh (not killing winners, but layering in new concepts). Optimise bids based on real CAC data. Prepare for seasonal shifts (Q4 planning starts here).

The brands that scale predictably follow a testing cadence. The ones that don't, throw budget at everything, hope something sticks, and call it "optimisation."

The Objections You're Probably Having

"We don't have budget for three platforms." You probably do — you're just splitting it wrong. Most brands spend 80% on Meta and get diminishing returns. Cut Meta to 50%, add Google (which will probably out-ROAS Meta because it's getting easier traffic), and watch blended MER improve.

"Our product doesn't work on TikTok." Maybe. But we've seen supplement brands, fashion brands, food brands, and even B2B software brands work on TikTok. The question isn't "does the product work?" — it's "can we tell the story in a way that resonates with TikTok's culture?" Most brands never test this seriously.

"Our Google Ads are already maxed out." If Google is capped at current volume, that's actually a signal that your awareness-stage channels (Meta and TikTok) aren't feeding the funnel enough. You've hit the ceiling on search volume. The fix: invest more in awareness and consideration on Meta and TikTok, which creates more future Google customers.

"We don't have the resources to manage three platforms." You don't need three separate teams — you need one strategy with three executions. Use this framework to consolidate your thinking, then assign platform operators within the same structure. One person can manage Meta creative and retargeting. One person can manage Google search and Shopping. One person can manage TikTok. They're all executing one unified model.

The Ecom Republic Difference

We've run this framework across A$20M+ in annual ad spend. It works because it respects what each platform does best instead of forcing them into one mould.

The brands that scale aren't the ones running the smartest creative or the tightest targeting. They're the ones running one unified model across all channels — clear customer definition, defined stages, platform-specific execution, unified measurement. That's the system that compounds.

If you're running Meta, Google, and TikTok separately right now, you're leaving 30–50% of potential efficiency on the table. The framework is simple to understand. It's harder to execute — because it requires discipline, consistency, and the willingness to let each platform do its job instead of trying to make them all perform the same way.

Book your Growth Diagnostic Call — we'll walk through your current channel allocation and show you exactly where the framework applies to your business.