Paid Search vs. Paid Social

When it comes to online marketing, PPC advertising is one of the most powerful tools you can use. Year after year, it gets easier and easier to reach your target market on Facebook Ads, Google Ads and like.

Unfortunately, with all of the features and options we now have available, it can be overwhelming to find the right way to market your business. Even on a single platform like Google Ads, you have options for manual ads, automated text ads, click-to-call ads, banner ads, video ads and much, much more. Then, throw in half-a-dozen or more additional platforms and it can simply be too much to wrap your head around.

While the array of marketing opportunities at your disposal may be dizzying, most of them can be placed in one of two categories: paid search and paid social. There are a few other options, like display ads, but since paid search and paid social are the powerhouses of PPC, I’m going to focus on them here.

When you look at your PPC advertising options this way, it becomes a lot easier to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and where they fit into your marketing strategy. So, in this article, I’m going to compare these two marketing channels and tell you what you need to know to make better marketing decisions for your business.

Paid search advertising platforms show ads in response to search queries. Google Ads is the best-known paid search platform, but most search engines (Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.) offer paid search advertising options. What makes paid search great is the fact that it is intent-based advertising. People see your ads because they are actively looking for a solution to a problem. This sort of audience is usually ready (or almost ready) to make a purchase, which is good news for you and your business.

In contrast, paid social ads show up when people are on a social media platform like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or even Reddit. Unlike paid search, your audience isn’t actively looking for a solution to a problem. In fact, they may not even realize that they have a problem. On the surface, paid social advertising is a lot like many classic forms of advertising such as radio ads, billboards or TV commercials. Instead of waiting for customers to come to you, you are highlighting a need and offering your business as the solution.

The hope is that people will resonate with your message and decide to buy from you, but that can be a bit of an uphill battle. Fortunately, unlike radio or TV ads, you can actually track the performance of your paid social ads. This makes it much easier to determine how people are responding and adjust your messaging or targeting. If you can get your paid social campaigns dialed in, you can drive business from a very large group of people, many of whom may never have bought from you otherwise.

In an ideal world, you’d market everywhere, on every platform, all of the time. However, for most companies, that isn’t very practical. Time and financial limitations make it hard to take advantage of every advertising opportunity. With that in mind, let’s take a look at these two marketing channels and ask the question: should you focus on paid search or paid social? The right answer for your business depends on what you’re trying to market, who you’re trying to market to, and what your marketing goals are. So, let’s take a look at three different scenarios to help you decide on the right marketing channel for you.

Fast Results - When you’re starved for sales and need to get leads in or merchandise out, paid search is hard to beat. Your audience may not be huge, but you’re targeting a market that is ready to buy, so running paid search ads is a great way to get at people who already at the bottom of your marketing funnel. Most of the time, paid search really isn’t a long-term play. People see your ad and they either click…or they don’t. If they click, they either convert…or they don’t. Retargeting can help you capture some lost sales, but most of the time, people who click on your paid search ads are very close to making a purchase.

The good news is, most paid search platforms are well-designed to help facilitate rapid decision-making. After all, that’s the whole point of paid search advertising: to get in front of a high-intent audience and convince them to convert before that intent fades. In contrast, because paid social is advertiser-initiated, rather than user-initiated, the intent is much lower and it can often take longer to see results. Now, that’s not to say that you can’t get a good return on a paid social campaign, but it doesn’t always happen right away.

Lower Costs - We all know that you have to spend money to make money, but some of us have more money to spend than others. If funds are tight, it’s natural to want to look for the cheaper advertising option. If you look at things purely in terms of cost-per-click (CPC), paid social is a lot more accessible than paid search. As a general rule, the lower in the funnel a click is, the more you can expect to pay for it. And, as we’ve just discussed, clicks don’t get much lower-funnel than paid search. So, if all you care about is CPC, paid social is the easy winner.

Awareness - As important as sales and profitability are, there are only so many people conducting online searches that are relevant to your business at any given time. To grow beyond that point, you have to start building awareness. This is where paid social really shines. If you are selling something that people don’t realize that they need, paid social can be a great way to build awareness for that need.

Alternatively, if you are trying to build a loyal following so that people will buy from you when they have a problem instead of searching online, paid social is a great way to build awareness for your brand. In either of these cases, you’re trying to target people further up the funnel than paid search can reach. With paid social ads, you can tell a product or brand story using imagery, reviews or video content that gets people excited about your business, products and vision. So, whether you’re trying to sell something people have never heard of before, want to bulk out your sales funnel, or simply want to build a loyal following online, when it comes to building awareness, it’s hard to beat paid social advertising.

So, should you advertise on paid search or paid social? Obviously, it’s ideal to use both of these marketing channels, but most businesses find that emphasizing a specific channel works better for their business. The right channel for your business depends a lot on the products or services you’re marketing, your business model, and the audience you’re trying to reach and what your marketing goals are. That’s why it’s so important to understand how each marketing channel works, its strengths and weaknesses and what it can do for your business.

At this point, it should hopefully be obvious what channel you should be emphasizing in your marketing. You’ll still need to test and figure things out, of course, but picking the right marketing channel is the first step on the road to PPC advertising success.

PPC changes 2018 and their impact on advertisers in 2019

Major changes in SEM made waves throughout 2018 and are redefining nearly every aspect of paid search marketing. There were a number of momentous shifts, nearly all with a common thread of more automation and machine learning.

Google Ads: New brand name, new UI – The name change from AdWords to Google Ads is indicative of the fact that keyword selection plays a lesser role in paid search marketing than even a year ago, but more broadly the name change reflects the platform’s growth from one created for text ads to one that now includes dozens of ad formats across Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and a network of partner sites and apps. With the new interface, we lost some things such as Display Planner and gained a YouTube reach planner, notes and the ability to make changes from the Overview page in addition to other new features.

Responsive Search Ads – RSA are part of the continuum of letting machine learning models do the work of ad creative optimization. Some of the initiatives that have come before it: dynamic search ads, automated ad suggestions and Google efforts over the past years to get advertisers to give up manual A/B testing and add at least three ads per ad group. An ad strength indicator and somewhat more extensive reporting for RSA were introduced in August. Same month, Google said it would soon roll out RSA to more languages and in the meantime extend the extra character benefits of RSA to text ads for everyone. This fall, Bing added support for the third headline and second description in text ads, including the ability to import the longer ads from Google.

Exact Match – As with ads more machine learning was injected into keyword-to-query matching in 2018 with the inclusion of same meaning words in close variants of exact match keywords. The match type lost its literal meaning and forced marketers to rethink how they use match types altogether.

AI-powered insights – Google and Bing have dedicated significant resources to developing much more robust recommendation engines in their interfaces. Bing introduced a competition tab, performance insights and location recommendations that highlight performance changes and competitive pressures, all delivered with machine learning. Google also continues to iterate on the data visualizations available from the overview page. The goal is to spend less time downloading and analyzing spreadsheets and more time focused on strategy and creative tactics.

AI-powered bidding – The manual bidding option is now buried below a growing list of machine learning driven bidding strategies, including ECPC. On the smart bidding front, Google introduced Target Impressions share, Pay for Conversions in Display Campaigns when Target CPA is the bidding strategy and rolled out Smart Bidding for search partners. Bing introduced Target CPA and Maximize Conversions bidding strategies.

Audiences: LinkedIn data for Bing, MSAN and more – Bing launched the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN) which encompasses native ad inventory on MSN.com, Microsoft Outlook and the Microsoft Edge browser, as well as syndication partner for what are now called Microsoft Audience Ads. It uses AI for ad delivery optimization and uses data from the Microsoft Graph for audience targeting, including web and search activity, demographic and consumer behavior activity and select LinkedIn profile dimensions. In October, Bing also made LinkedIn categories of company, job function and industry available for targeting in search and shopping campaigns in the US.

Universal Automation vs. Hybrid Management – Google introduced goal-optimized Shopping campaigns, Smart Campaigns for small businesses and Local campaigns for driving in-store traffic. With Smart Campaigns, everything from ad creation, audience targeting, ad delivery across Google channels and soon landing page creation are automated based on the advertiser’s goal. Goal-optimized Shopping campaigns employ machine learning to automatically optimize ad delivery to achieve the defined conversion goal value, such as revenue or return on ad spend (ROAS). It also combines dynamic remarketing and standard Shopping in one campaign to deliver an ad across Google properties and the Google Display Network. For Local campaigns, advertisers set a budget, and the ads are generated automatically based on ad creative elements from the advertiser and their location extensions. Google automatically optimizes ad delivery across Search, YouTube, Maps and websites and apps in its ad networks.

Based on the trajectory of automation in ads and exact match, this hybrid approach has the potential to spell the end of manual control of match types (except negatives), bid modifiers, geo-targeting and other tools we use for campaign management. This doesn’t mean people will be erased from the equations and certainly not in 2019 but it will require SEM specialists to adopt a very different mindset. We have to embrace machine learning as a tool that helps us find opportunities that are imperceptible through traditional techniques.

New Inventory Locations and Surfaces – There were a number of new surfaces for ad formats that opened up in 2018. Bing’s native ads extending across the Microsoft Audience Network is just one example. In November, Google made AMP Story ads available to all publishers, and there are now more than 100 ad tech vendors with AMP integrations. Hotel deals from Google Search are now featured on the Benefits tab of the new Google One cloud storage app (for Android only at this point). Expect to see more promotional opportunities. Google said more promotions from the Google Store and Google Express benefits and more will eventually be featured on the tab. Google has also been testing native ads in the Discover Feed (originally Google Now) on the front page of the Google app. It’s a limited whitelist test for now, but could open up more native inventory in a prominent location.

Connected TV advertising is growing rapidly, and YouTube says more people are streaming it on their televisions. This fall, “TV screens” became the latest device type for video and display campaigns in Google Ads. Eligible display and video campaigns are running on TV screens by default now, and can be managed with bid modifiers. Expect to continue hearing much more about connected TV advertising in 2019.

Amazon Ads – The Google - Amazon face off started with where consumers start their product searches. Now it’s extending to search and other advertising. Amazon was declared the third-largest digital ad seller in the US by eMarketer in September, (far) behind Google and Facebook. Its ad revenue is expected to increase by 50 percent per year through 2020, which would put its market share at 7.0 percent, up from 4 percent currently. In our Amazon Advertising Forecast 2019, 80 percent of Amazon advertisers said they plan to increase spends in 2019, with 30 percent saying they’ll shift some budget from search.

Google’s strategy to counter Amazon’s encroachment into product search is to partner with retailers. It debuted Shopping Actions in March to address three key challenges on the e-commerce front: (1) how to make mobile shopping from its properties like Search faster; (2) how to maintain market share for product search in a splintering mobile landscape of apps and digital assistants; and (3) how to compete against Amazon. Shopping Actions runs across Search, any Google Assistant-enabled devices, Google Express (which includes Shopping ads that now feature blue shopping tags instead of parachutes), and features a universal shopping cart and a Google-hosted checkout when users save their payment information in their Google accounts.

2018 is kind of a turning point in terms of SEM I think. “Keywords aren’t gone, but they’ve been greatly depreciated. SEM in 2019 is going to be much closer to modern programmatic than it is to the ‘enhanced’ era.