Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket with Paid Ads?

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket"—it's one of the oldest rules in investing.

We've all heard it and applied it to our personal finances and business decisions. Yet when it comes to paid advertising, even experienced marketers make this classic mistake.

The TikTok ban scare was a perfect example. Overnight, creators and brands that generated 90% of their revenue from TikTok faced potential disaster. The ban never happened, but the panic was real—and it showed how vulnerable even successful businesses can become when they rely too heavily on one channel.

The bigger your business, the higher the stakes. Small companies can pivot quickly, but larger organizations spending hundreds of thousands monthly on one main channel face serious problems if something goes wrong—especially with employees, offices, and investors counting on steady performance.

Here's what many don't realize: you don't need 90% exposure to be at risk. Even a 60-70% dependency on one channel puts your business in a dangerous position.

And it's not just government bans you need to worry about. Account suspensions, algorithm changes, payment issues, or even competitor bidding wars can hurt your numbers fast.

The good news?

You can diversify without pulling money from your best-performing campaigns. Smart diversification usually means optimizing what you already have while testing new opportunities.

Look at your marketing mix and where conversions come from. It might look something like this:

This setup is risky because if something happens to your Google Ads account, it could seriously hurt your business.

When you dig deeper, you'll usually find opportunities to improve things.

Your Google Ads probably include some campaigns that never performed well, while others got pushed too hard and now have high costs without good results. When you clean these up, optimize bidding, and pause the poor performers, you'll often find extra budget to work with.

Maybe your TV ads aren't showing clear results, so you could test that budget elsewhere. You might try Microsoft Ads—you can import your Google campaigns easily and start getting traffic from Bing with minimal effort.

You could also improve your Meta ads with more effective creative content and smarter budget allocation. Meta works great for retargeting, so you might be able to scale those campaigns more efficiently.

Then look at the most frequently asked questions from your customers and consider creating a Facebook group where they can help each other while you share updates and answer them specifically. Some people might join and engage.

You can also improve your SEO strategy, build better referral programs, and maybe add a small affiliate program.

And that email campaign you keep postponing? Launch it. Use your existing customer data to offer additional products, discounts, and build stronger relationships.

After these changes, your conversion mix might look like this:

Every business is different, but the point is clear: Google is still important, but now you're much more diversified and less dependent on any single channel. You have more ways to reach customers, a stronger brand presence, and if one channel has problems, it won't devastate your business.

Important: This doesn't mean Google gets less traffic. I used percentages because your total traffic and conversions can actually grow while you diversify—you're expanding the whole pie, not just redistributing slices.

It's important to double down on what works, but there's a point where diversification makes your business more stable long-term.

Use this framework to evaluate whether you're too dependent on one platform:

Even if you don't make changes right away, thinking through these scenarios helps you prepare for future opportunities and challenges.

Smart budget allocation means knowing when to diversify and when to double down. Sometimes we get too comfortable with channels that work well and forget about other options that might be smaller but provide more stability over time.

In an unpredictable world, building a resilient marketing strategy matters. And channel diversification gives you precisely that—not by abandoning what works, but by creating a safety net around it.

The goal isn't perfect diversification; it's building a marketing mix that can handle whatever comes next.