Paid media is a complex and ever-changing beast that can make success on social particularly difficult. Especially if you don’t take note of the regular adaptations to features, functions and most importantly algorithms – recently there have been some big changes. Understanding algorithms is key for knowing what you need to do with your content and crucially, what you do with your execution across paid social.

With that in mind, we’ve looked into the key considerations for navigating paid social through these changes.

Don’t make it costly…

Social media is very different from any other forms of media available out there. You simply cannot treat paid social as you would other paid media forms. Firstly, social media is built on an array of algorithms that connect us as individuals that index our content but more importantly, algorithms that are framed around the ad goals that you are buying and deploying, and they differ through the whole journey. The other area of difference is how costs run on social media. Unlike other forms of paid media, you cannot switch on paid social and just let it run. If you do that, you’ll see the estimated CPC rise very quickly, making ads expensive and inefficient. In the tech world, you can expect to see a CPC on LI of around £9. Let it run without any optimisation and you could be looking at a CPC of £25. Post covid, when budgets are being scrutinised, businesses won’t be able to throw millions at the 0.2%. And getting the most out of the media spend will be a high priority.

Single ads don’t work…

Serving single ads could see you join a race for the bottom line. Platforms really don’t like this, and your conversions will end up being really low. Recently, LI came out and said that the success rate for conversion on single ads was just 0.2%. They’re now advocating an approach which IF have been deploying for around 6 years now, ‘nudge nurture’. This involves building content aligned to the customer journey, walking people through the awareness stage, consideration stage and then the conversion stage. If you are not getting success because you’ve done single ad sets, social media hasn’t failed you, you failed to exploit the competitive advantage available within social media.

Applying filters is key…

The content you serve on paid social must be aligned to the customer journey and you must apply a filter around who you are targeting and why. Everything must be relevant to the messages you want to land, and the business goals you want to achieve. This means when you go right back to the ideation stage, you must be filtering your creativity through the brief and not your unfiltered ideas. Stay on topic, stay focused on the filter and ensure everything aligns with the customer journey.