“We keep pausing our Paid Social activity because it isn’t driving conversions but every time we do we see our paid and organic search performance drop off”
This is a challenge I hear from performance marketers all the time and the truth is, it’s because their measurement of paid social is rubbish. It’s not their fault, the tools we’ve all been given are broken. They’re built primarily for click-based advertising and while social can certainly drive traffic, the power to build positive associations with your brand and product through a potential customer just viewing your ad can be an even more impactful driver of sales from the channel.
The interesting thing is most of the teams we speak to know of the mythical “halo effect” of paid social, but can’t find the proof to justify it to their bosses, boards and CFOs. For many, a Media Mix Model is too expensive or too abstract, as one of my favourite clients put it – “the thing with a media mix model is – I’m never going to know enough about how it works to trust what data scientists tell me to invest in”.
This is where we wanted to help – we partnered with Meta to run a series of 17 incrementality studies for our clients to lift the lid on the halo effect of Meta advertising on paid search and turn the mythic into the scientific.
The Method
We used Meta’s conversion lift testing, where Meta will take your target audience and split it into two groups. One sees your ads (the test group), and one doesn’t (the control group). You then measure the subsequent difference in behaviour between them. In this test, as well as measuring the lift in conversions for those that had seen our ads, we also tracked the amount of traffic that was landing on site from search engines, whether paid or organic. The results could then help to quantify the amount of search visits to sites that only occurred in the population with Meta Ad exposure.
Across 17 studies for 12 different advertisers, here’s what we found:
Social is a driver of Search
Across our studies, we found that Meta Ads had driven 19% more search visits to site than were found in the population excluded from seeing Meta Ads. These incremental search visits came in at a cost $6.78, with 71% of these through organic search and 29% through paid search ads. These are search visits that:
- Were truly incremental i.e. would not have happened without meta ad exposure
- Were not being represented in any reporting as being driven by paid social
This alone makes the halo effect tangible, traditional reporting is unable to see a huge volume of customers that only have this interaction with your brand, product and website because of the ads they saw on Meta, so naturally the impact of your ads is being underrepresented to the business.
With this insight, the question then is – how does paid social drive this change? To get a closer look, some of our studies were more granular, looking at breakdowns within the paid search traffic, to identify changes to Brand and Non-Brand queries. The data from these experiments gave us two routes by which Paid Social is driving this incremental demand
- Paid Social Creates New Searches
Across the 9 studies that allowed for a breakdown between brand and non-brand searches, we found that 31% of the incremental search traffic was coming from Branded search terms. This suggests that users, having seen an ad, were then searching for the brand directly.
- Paid Social Increases Propensity to Select Your Brand
The impact wasn’t just from brand searches, 69% of paid search traffic coming through non-branded terms. On a non-branded SERP (search engine results page), you’re appearing with many listings from competitors so, while the traffic rise may be in part explained by net new searches, there is also an effect of becoming the preferred choice for existing searches through the mere exposure effect. This is the finding that repeated exposure to your brand drives favourability and in this context, it is evident that the familiarity built through social ad exposure makes users more likely to choose your brand’s listing, whether paid or organic, amongst the competition.
Combined, we can see there is a direct response between paid social and search, i.e. searching for your brand after seeing an ad, but also a passive relationship, in which those that have been exposed to your ad will favour your brand. In both options, a click from Meta to site is unlikely to have happened first and so, in both instances, Paid Social is not given credit for the conversion in any click-based attribution model.
Social Strategy Impacts Search Outcomes
In analysing our data, we found that not all social campaigns were equal in terms of the impact they were having on Paid Search. In particular, two key factors were prevalent in predicting what would drive the most efficient cost per incremental search visit to site.
- Utilise Reach Campaigns in your Performance Activity
We noticed there was a correlation between the studies with the most effective cost per incremental search and the campaigns that had the largest reach. We wanted to put this to the test so for two of our studies, we ran a multi-cell conversion lift test, where 50% of the group was exposed to conversion-optimised campaigns, and 50% of the group was exposed to both conversion-optimised campaigns and reach-optimised campaigns. In these studies, we found that we were able to drive a 20% increase in search visits to site for only a 2% increase in cost per incremental search visit. This showcases further the need to increase the reach of your Meta advertising in order to incremental outcomes and provides a route for brands to invest in a tactic that is not beholden to the diminishing returns they may see when increasing their investment in search or conversion-optimised social.
- Use diverse creative concepts
One of the strongest correlations we found between incremental search visits to site and campaign, was creative diversity. We already know that diverse creative drives results on Paid Social, but we found a correlation coefficient of -0.85 between the number of creative variants in a campaign, and the cost per incremental search lift. Effectively, the more creative variants in a campaign, the more cost effectively we were driving incremental search visits to the site. This suggests to us that by communicating broadly about your brand, you’re more likely to find the right message on a user by user basis, to drive a connection that improved brand favourability on the SERP or triggered a search for the brand or product.
To sum up: click-based tracking hides true value
If your entire measurement solution relies on click-based tracking, you’re seeing a fraction of the impact of your paid social activity. Any action taken off the back of those 19% incremental searches would have been attributed to paid or organic search, even though our study shows the interaction would not have occurred without Meta ad exposure.
Through our leading partnership with Meta and our team’s expertise in platform, Brainlabs is using a scientific method to continuously uncover the hidden value of your Paid Social investment. Through this test and the many other incrementality tests we run for our clients, we’ve not only helped our clients to justify their investment, but also guide how we optimise and scale our campaigns to drive true business results, regardless of your measurement solutions.
If you’re looking to drive true value from Facebook, Instagram & Threads, you need to:
Move beyond click-based attribution solutions and run incrementality studies to understand not just conversion lift, but also the impact your ads are having on other channels
De-silo your activation, using the output of your incrementality studies to guide your output, in this case:
- Use reach and frequency to drive more incremental search visits to site
- Use diverse creative to improve cost efficiency of incremental searches
