Paid Social

What paid social is good at

Paid social earns its place when you understand what it does well and what it does not. Unlike search, where people type a query because they already want something, social platforms show ads to people who are not actively looking. That single difference shapes every sensible decision about how to use the channel.

The useful way to frame it is demand creation versus demand capture.

• Demand creation is paid social's natural strength. You put a relevant message in front of people who fit your customer profile but have not yet thought about your category. Done well, it builds awareness, interest and consideration that did not exist before.
• Demand capture is what search does best. People with active intent are easier to convert there, because they have already declared what they want.

This matters because expecting paid social to behave like search is the most common reason it disappoints. If you judge a cold prospecting campaign purely on last-click sales in week one, you will conclude it failed even when it is doing exactly what it should: introducing your business to people who will buy later. Paid social tends to fill and warm the funnel; the conversion is often credited elsewhere.

Choosing platforms by audience and offer

The right platform depends on who you are trying to reach and what you are asking them to do, not on which network is currently popular. Each has a different audience, format and cost profile.

• Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has the broadest reach and the most mature advertising tools. It suits most consumer products and many local services, and its targeting and creative formats give it the widest range of uses.
• LinkedIn is built for professional and business-to-business audiences. Its targeting by job title, seniority, industry and company is unmatched for reaching decision-makers, but the cost per click is high, so it rewards considered offers with real deal value rather than low-margin sales.
• TikTok favours native, entertaining video and reaches younger audiences well. It can work strongly for the right product, but it demands creative made for the platform rather than ads borrowed from elsewhere.
• Pinterest sits closer to planning and discovery, which suits visual, considered-purchase categories such as home, fashion, food and weddings.

The offer matters as much as the audience. A low-priced impulse product and a high-value professional service belong on different platforms with different expectations, because the buying journey and the economics behind each are not the same.

Why creative is the biggest lever

On paid social, creative is usually the single largest driver of results. Targeting and bidding still matter, but the platforms have automated much of that work, and their systems are good at finding the right people once they know which ad resonates. What you cannot automate is the message and the way it is delivered. That is where most of the difference between a campaign that works and one that does not now lives.

A few things follow from this:

• The hook decides everything. People scroll quickly, so the first frame or line determines whether the rest of the ad is ever seen.
• Volume and variety beat polish in isolation. Testing several distinct angles teaches you what your audience responds to faster than perfecting a single execution.
• Native formats outperform repurposed ads. Content that suits the platform tends to be cheaper to run because the systems reward relevance with lower costs.
• Creative fatigues. Even a strong ad loses efficiency as the same people see it repeatedly, so a steady supply of fresh creative is part of the ongoing work, not a one-off.

Treating creative as a continuous programme rather than a fixed asset is what keeps a paid social account healthy over time.

Structuring prospecting and retargeting

A coherent account separates the job of reaching new people from the job of converting people who already know you, because the two need different messages, audiences and measures of success.

• Prospecting targets cold audiences who have not engaged with you. The goal is reach and interest, the creative does more explaining, and success is measured by how efficiently you bring qualified new people into the funnel.
• Retargeting speaks to people who have visited your site, watched your videos or engaged with your profile. They already have context, so the message can be more direct, the audiences are smaller, and the cost per conversion is usually lower.

The trap is judging the whole account by retargeting numbers. Retargeting looks efficient precisely because prospecting did the harder work of creating the audience first. Funding only the channel that looks cheapest eventually starves the top of the funnel and the cheap conversions dry up. We balance the two so the account keeps feeding itself.

Measurement and attribution after privacy changes

Paid social measurement is genuinely harder than it used to be. Changes to how browsers and operating systems handle tracking, particularly on Apple devices, mean platforms see less of what happens after a click. Reported conversions are now partly modelled rather than fully observed, and the numbers inside each platform tend to differ from what your own analytics and sales records show.

We deal with this honestly rather than pretending the old certainty still exists.

• Server-side tracking is set up where appropriate to recover signal that browser-based tracking loses.
• Platform numbers are treated as directional, not gospel, and are read alongside your own analytics and actual revenue.
• We watch the trend that matters, which is whether total enquiries or sales rise as spend rises, rather than chasing a single attributed figure.
• Incrementality thinking guides the bigger calls: the real question is what the spend added, not simply what the platform claimed.

The honest position is that paid social cannot be measured to the decimal point. It can be measured well enough to make sound decisions, provided you read several sources together.

How paid social fits with search and the funnel

Paid social and paid search are complementary, not competing. Search captures intent that already exists; social creates the interest that intent grows from. Run together, social introduces your business and search is there when those people later go looking. A rise in branded searches after a social campaign is often a sign the channel is working, even when the platform itself takes little direct credit. We plan the two as parts of one journey, so the channel that creates demand and the channel that captures it reinforce each other rather than being judged alone.