Did you know that the average internet user is exposed to 4000 to 10,000 ads every day?
When you have set a budget, you need to ensure your campaign cuts through and grabs the attention. So how do you improve your pay-per-click performance?
There are several ways you can boost its efficiency, but one option is to leverage other channels to boost your PPC performance. Let's talk about how you can use paid social to boost your PPC campaigns.
So. Why are we talking about Paid Social when I want to hear about PPC?
Ah, if I had a nickel for every time I had the emphasize the importance of an omnichannel approach, I would have a lot of nickels. Probably enough to Scrooge McDuck an Olympic-sized pool.
But, no one is giving me nickels. I am however open to giving my 2 cents on this topic and happy to share the wealth!
Usually, we look at paid search and paid social as completely different channels. Paid search is a channel typically associated with being driven by user intent, whereas paid social is typically seen as being driven by demographics and user behavior. If we really look at the platforms, both channels can reach users in all stages of the funnel.
YouTube, display or Google Discovery ads are great ways to reach users higher in the funnel than search ads. Facebook's retargeting options allow businesses to reach users further down the funnel by showing already viewed products or relevant creative.
While both platforms can play a part in all parts of the user journey, they still have very specific channel needs. While following the platforms' best practices, you also need to follow what works for your marketing funnel.
Let's talk about the key differences between the platforms:
Inspire vs Answer: Paid social can be used to inspire or catch users before they have even considered a purchase. Paid social should be used to pave the way for other marketing activities as you introduce more users to your brand and why they should pay attention. Paid search can be used to provide users with answers to their questions and push them to purchase.
Targeting: While Google does offer some interesting targeting in terms of combined, in-market, and affinity audiences, PPC's true strength comes from keyword targeting. Paid Social's strength comes from its very intricate demographic, interest, and behavior-based targeting.
Creative: Social media is very visual and plays in very saturated feeds. Your ad needs to stand out while not being obtrusive. PPC on the other hand relies on conveying a business' value to a user within a few short lines of text.
Data Analytics: Both channels are part of paid media strategy, but their analytics can look very different. There are several ways to look at the analytics behind PPC and paid social, but that's a different rabbit hole for another day! So wave goodbye to that topic and we'll save it for a rainy day!
PPC Benefits
PPC will always be my first love. With PPC, it's easy (and quick) to launch tests, make optimizations and measure performance. There are fewer PPC channels available, but you'll find the most volume (and competition) on Google Ads. Because of the nature of PPC, you will typically find better ROAS and conversion performance.
Paid Social Benefits
Paid Social is a great addition to any marketing strategy. There are plenty of channels to choose from so it's easy to find one to suit your audience and marketing message. Meta (Facebook), Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, WeChat....the list could go on forever!
Now that we've chatted a bit about PPC and Paid Social, let's get into the how part of the question. How can you use Paid social to optimize PPC?
1. Integrate your PPC and Paid Social
If you search for "does social impact how users search," you'll find quite a few articles discussing how social could inform how users searched, especially on mobile.
Back in 2018, Facebook released a study about how social can inform how and when people search. The study reviews data provided by an annual Forrester study and a Curalate Consumer survey from 2017. According to the Curalate Consumer Survey in 2017, 76% of US consumers purchased a product they saw in a brand’s social media post, with 11% buying online immediately and 44% buying online at a later time.
You can read the full report here. It may be a few years old, but considering the impacts Covid and TikTok have had on online retail, we can only assume that the number of users purchasing after seeing a product on social media has grown significantly.
What do you do with this information? Make sure your flights on paid social and paid search correspond with another. Making a big push on paid social to raise brand awareness? Make sure your PPC budget is there and covers related search terms that may come in.
2. Improve PPC Copy
Having strong PPC copy can be the "make it or break it" point of a campaign succeeding. It's your first moment getting in front of a user, so you need to put your best foot forward. However, PPC character headcounts can be a bit limiting! This is where we can turn to paid social since the character count allowed is higher and you can look through user comments to get feedback on ads or better understand their needs.
If a user says in the comments "Wow, I wish I knew about the great return policy before I ordered!" Include that as a call-out or in the description of your copy!
Are users on paid social engaging more with the fact-driven copy or the more emotional copy? These are great insights that you can apply to an A/B test in PPC.
3. Learn About Your Audience
Remember how we talked about how paid social's strength is in its rich targeting? Use it! Thanks to paid social, we can really understand key learnings about our audiences. Apply these learnings to your campaigns on Google Ads to help narrow in on your key demographic.
4. Use Remarketing
You've already done all the prospecting work, but now it's time to make your remarketing pick up the slack! Users that keep engaging with your paid social ads are already more interested in your product and brand than a user who has yet to engage. Add these audiences to your RLSA campaigns in Google Ads to get the most out of your paid social remarketing audiences.
Final Thoughts
So what should you take from this post? PPC does not live as a separate channel from Paid social. In today's world, a user is hitting several different digital and offline touchpoints prior to hitting the purchase button. If you're looking at PPC without considering the other channels, you're missing out on possible learnings and growth opportunities.
Need some help getting your Paid Social strategy to be the perfect harmony to your PPC? Let us help you put the perfect chords together!
Who is the next marketing rockstar? We'll have you singing "it's gonna be me!"
Comments