Hitting paid search budget goals can be surprisingly difficult for certain clients, and certain campaigns. When initial volume isn’t there, you try everything you can think of: search query analyses, keyword expansions, increasing bids, etc. No matter what you do, your campaigns won’t spend and generate the level of performance that your client needs to hit their goals. We know this can be frustrating. Our suggestion? Look for the answer outside of just paid search!
Multi-channel marketing: Improving paid search campaigns with paid social
“Multi-Channel Strategy” is an industry buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. Like all buzzwords, it’s true meaning can be a bit ambiguous. Fortunately, not all multi-channel strategies have to be complex, they can be effective just by being complementary.
We recently ran into this issue of struggling to meet expected search volume for a group of campaigns promoting a specific product for one of our clients. The end of the quarter was creeping closer and closer, and we weren’t pacing to goal yet, despite all of the optimizations that we had made. This is when we decided to take full advantage of the multi-channel strategy we had in place.
Time to expand
These product campaigns were running across search, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. A key component to any multi-channel strategy was ensuring that our messaging was aligned across all platforms. With our messaging aligned, we were able to increase budgets and spend on these social platforms, which have far greater reach than paid search.
These social campaigns had a greater reach because they were using persona targeting targeting to reach new prospective customers, where the search campaigns were limited to the volume of keyword related searches occurring everyday. Therefore, increasing spend on these social platforms allowed us to expose the client’s product to a much larger audience than what we had been seeing on search. Increasing spend on social actually helped to increase volume and spend for our search campaigns as well.
Let’s dive into the data
Prior to increasing spend on social, our search campaigns were not limited by budget. This meant that increasing daily budgets for these campaigns would have no effect on performance. We could have an unlimited budget, but there was a finite number of daily searches relating to this product. With the potential to expand our reach on social, we began leveraging the opportunity there.
We started by increasing budgets on all social channels around the beginning of September. As you can see in the chart below, the search and social spend lines seem to correlate with one another. More specifically, they have a moderately positive correlation, with a correlation coefficient of 0.57. This means that there is some connection between the two. While this chart seems to show some areas of inconsistency, they actually point to events of deeper connection.
On September 23rd (grey arrow), social spend falls sharply and remains low for a few days (which was intentional), while search spend remains relatively flat. That is, until search spend also falls sharply on September 26th and remains at this decreased level for a few days. This pattern is exhibited again, as social spend decreases on September 28th, with search spend following suit on October 1st.
There is also a similar effect between search impressions and social spend, outlined in the graph below.
Here we see similar correlation between the two metrics. The correlation coefficient here is actually slightly stronger at 0.59, indicating that increases in social impressions had a moderately positive impact on search volume for this product.
This scenario proves that even simple multi-channel marketing strategies can be effective in improving overall performance. It’s important to consider cross-channel optimizations and strategies when looking to improve performance in search or social campaigns.
Leveraging paid social and paid search together
Reach out to the Seer team if you’d like to learn more about running paid search and social advertising together to achieve your client’s goals! Contact us today.