Advertisers mix paid search and social to evolve from direct response
Brands are paring back their paid search spend to pump more into social ads as they look to refocus their performance-driven strategies to cater to brand building rather than solely for direct response.
Advertisers are throwing more weight behind social media ads, partially due to pressure from Facebook on them to pay to reach their fans and the platform’s emergence as a viable performance channel. The social network is steadily proving itself as a sophisticated weapon in the advertising arsenal, offering brands real ROI – not just likes, comments and shares.
It is a shift highlighted by the growth in advertising spend on search lagging behind social media in 2014, according to Kenshoo’s study of 6,000 clients. Advertising outlay on search jumped 15 per cent quarter-on-quarter and 14 per cent year-on-year, while spend on social climbed 32 per cent quarter-on-quarter and 33 per cent year-on-year.
Paid search click-through rates rose by just 2 per cent in the quarter compared to social media’s 70 per cent spurt.
Meanwhile the days when successful paid search needed to be stuffed with keywords and include a clear call to action are in the past, according to Kenshoo research.
Kenshoo’s chief marketing officer Aaron Goldman said the “complementary nature” of search and social media means companies can eliminate wasteful impressions and display more relevant ads to those customer segments most likely to convert.
He added that “advanced marketers” are becoming smarter with their budgets, buoyed by improvements to cross-device tracking and the breadth of readily accessible expertise on search marketing.
Nissan, Quorn and Carwow are working toward this balance, eyeing strategies that can target a person who has clicked on a search ad with relevant messages based on intent. To that end, all three marketers back paid search campaigns to scale gracefully upwards in the coming months as last year’s innovations such as remarketing lists for search ads bed in.
David Parkinson, head of digital for Nissan in Africa, Middle East and India, said that the advent of social media had not lessened the value of search. The first place people still go to research their next purchase, car or otherwise is their search engine, he added. “What social has done, in the main, is allow people to ask for opinions more easily, from us, or from their friends and start having conversations”.
“We plan to increase the amount we spend on paid social. Across the board we are looking at where customers are likely to need to see us and rebalancing our spend across platforms. We do not need to generally increase the budgets for this because our media spend is mapped to consumer behaviour and we are just constantly rebalancing to where they now. The trick though is to not juts repurpose content but make sure its fresh and relevant for the new display areas – which is the hard part,” said Parkinson.
Quorn’s marketing director Peter Harrison said he saw potential for combined search and social but had reservations over the costs it would heap on smaller companies like the food maker.
“In a perfect world I would love to be able to continue to do both because I think the paid social is interesting, however it depends on your objectives and budget. The opportunity for us at the moment is using SEO and PPC to talk to people through things like recipe and healthy eating tagging so that we’re reaching those we wouldn’t necessarily have got in other avenues”, he added.
Digital media experts observe that the move to unite paid search and social is indicative of brands’ wider efforts to create seamless customer experiences. Search is not just clicks and conversations anymore, they added, and delivers influence throughout the customer journey that is ripe for brand building.
Sam Fenton, head of media at iCrossing, said: “If brands are to succeed in paid, they need to be data savvy. They need to get to grips with the information they have about their audiences and produce ads that are really relevant, not rely on generic automated versions. Only then will they successfully cut through the digital marketing noise and get the most out of their paid search budgets.
It may not all be plain sailing for the search and social media marriage. There is a risk that a lack of skills in the area of integration will stunt the growth of paid ads reaching its full potential. It is a possibility compounded by a decline in search marketing standards across the advertising industry in 2014, according to Forrester.
More than half of 337 paid search ads across six sectors and three quarters suffered from poor visibility in comparison to the same study in 2012, while most (84 per cent) were missing any call to action. For search strategies to better mimic consumer behaviour online, advertisers need to produce ads that are truly relevant and less reliant on generic automated versions, the report concluded.
Andrew Girdwood, media innovations director at DigitasLBi, warned the terms “paid social” and “paid ads” have “dangerous breadth too”.
“An ad campaign built on Twitter, entirely out of keywords and bid for clicks and follows, is a digital campaign with similarities to AdWords,” he added. “Equally, AdWords are a native advertising unit for Google’s search results. If native advertising considered a fork of paid social then should that include AdWords? Is a viral video campaign that uses a seeding network that pays bloggers on a cost-per-view basis a social ad or an extension of a display campaign? The difference is not always crystal clear.”
The changing dynamic between search and social media is playing against the backdrop of Google and Facebook’s battle for internet supremacy. While Google giant remains the undisputed king of the search and display arena, the social network is creeping up in the rush for advertising budgets having rebuilt its ad serving platform Atlas from the ground up.
The tug of war will be brought into sharp focus in the coming months when Facebook starts letting advertisers bid on highly targeted ad inventory directly off its own internal demand-side-platform.