The Channel Mix Slide Nobody Updates After Q1
Scott Schnaars
Most channel mix slides get built once a year and defended the rest of the time. That's backwards, because the LinkedIn-versus-Google math shifts depending on deal size, sales cycle, and how saturated your ICP already is on each platform.
The industry split for 2026 sits around 41% LinkedIn, 46% Google Network, with the rest scattered across Meta and emerging channels. That's a reasonable starting point, not a rule. Stackmatix's comparison data shows the gap between the two channels narrows or widens fast depending on ACV: short sales cycles and lower ACV tend to favor Google's intent capture, while longer enterprise cycles with multiple buying committee members tend to favor LinkedIn's reach into accounts before they're in-market.
Building this into your operating system means treating the channel mix slide as a living document tied to your segment strategy, reviewed quarterly against actual pipeline data, not annually against a benchmark deck. The question to bring to that review isn't "what's our CPL by channel," it's "what's our cost per company influenced by channel," since that's the number that actually maps to how enterprise buying committees behave.
This is the same shift we wrote about in Three Signals That Say You Should Move Budget Off LinkedIn: the right move is rarely "abandon a channel," it's "rebalance based on what the account-level data is actually telling you this quarter." If your reporting can't answer cost per company influenced today, that's the gap to close before the next budget cycle, and Yirla's pricing page shows what closing it actually looks like.
Update the slide every quarter, not every January, and the argument about LinkedIn versus Google mostly takes care of itself.
