"Pull" channels and "push" channels

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Why Google + Meta is a 1 + 1 = 3 situation

You’ve probably heard the advice that consumer brands should start out by focusing their paid marketing on Google and Meta, before expanding to other channels. This approach allows you to do two key things:

1. Nail the fundamentals. These two channels have the most advanced ad-serving algorithms, and afford you the most scale — by far. For most consumer products, it doesn’t make sense to focus on other channels until you feel comfortable with your performance on these two.

2. Create a growth feedback loop. Meta is the channel that allows you to create demand by spreading your message to new audiences — the “push” channel — whereas Google helps you capture that demand by grabbing the folks actively looking — the “pull” channel.

More on nailing the fundamentals can be found at the top of this post, but for today, we’ll focus on the growth feedback loop portion.

A push and a pull

Meta

Meta is a “push” channel — it enables you to push your message out to as many eyeballs and potential customers as you’re willing to pay for. While granular targeting on the platform has been rendered virtually useless, the Meta algorithm has gotten incredibly smart at helping advertisers balance scale with getting in front of “the right” audience.

But there’s one big catch to the virtually unlimited scale you can achieve on Meta — none of the people seeing your ad have specifically raised their hand to hear from you.

You also might be catching them at a bad time. Marketers are probably the only people who open Facebook or Instagram to look for ads — everyone else is checking their notifications, scrolling through the latest updates, or looking for entertainment.

In this way, Meta ads are like the modern-day billboards of the advertising world, albeit way more sophisticated and with slightly better attribution. You can absolutely drive conversions directly from Meta (and you should always be setting up your campaigns to optimize for a desired action, rather than a goal like awareness), but making sure you have Google — your pull channel — set up properly will prevent leaky points in your funnel.

Google

Google, on the other hand, is a “pull” channel — it pulls in the people that are specifically looking for either your brand, or exactly what it is you offer, even if they don’t yet know your brand.

Before you think that sounds to good to be true, know that there are a few caveats:

For one, your targeted and blocked keywords need to be super buttoned up. Do not let Google auto-apply any recommendations, especially not the one to run all broad-match keywords, or you’ll waste a bunch of your budget on searches that just aren’t relevant to you.

Secondly, since Google is pulling in demand, that demand needs to come from somewhere. Either you’re in an industry where plenty of demand already exists and you’ll be facing competition and high costs, or there’s not much existing demand, but you can harness it from a channel like Meta.

(Side note: I don’t really believe in the concept of “demand generation.” Your product, and the way you tell the story around it, both need to be good enough to harness demand, but trying to generate demand where there is none is a losing game.)

Tying it all together

Running Google and Meta together is a situation where the outcome is greater than the sum of its parts.

Because of the massive reach you can achieve on Meta, you start to build awareness as a bonus byproduct of pushing out your message to new, but passive audiences. Not all of these people are going to remember your brand or product, and not all of the ones that do will be ready to learn more or buy.

But some will — and because you’re constantly increasing the pool of interested potential customers on Meta, you’ll have more search volume to pull in than if you were to rely on Google alone.

Rather than thinking of Meta as an exclusively upper-funnel channel and Google as an exclusively lower-funnel channel, think of the two as complementary parts of the non-linear user journey.

Ultimately, the best converters are the ones that raise their hand for your product, and the push-and-pull approach ensures you capture the largest number of hand raisers possible.

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