How to Get Paid Social Advertising Right
Buying placements in social feeds, where targeting, creative and the landing experience all interact.
Samir Haddad
The key figures
- Targeting
- audience based rather than query based
- Creative fatigue
- performance declines as an audience sees an asset repeatedly
- Format
- native formats generally outperform adapted ones
- Measurement
- platform-reported conversions are modeled and may not reconcile
- Privacy changes
- have reduced targeting and measurement precision
Why this is worth getting right
Paid social is bought against audiences rather than intent, which makes creative and targeting matter more than they do in search.
Do this, not that
Do
- Produce creative specifically for the placement and ratio
- Refresh creative before performance declines
- Reconcile platform-reported conversions against your own data
- Test creative more than you test targeting
- Keep the landing experience consistent with the ad
Don’t
- Repurposing a horizontal video for a vertical placement
- Running one creative until it collapses
- Treating platform-reported conversions as measured fact
- Optimizing targeting while creative is the constraint
When to bring in help
Our advice Bring in help when platform and internal numbers disagree, when performance has declined without a change, or when creative production cannot keep up with fatigue.
Where this comes from
- LinkedIn Marketing Solutions — Advertising guidance
- TikTok for Business — Creative best practice
- Google Ads Help — Measurement and modeling
The figures and practices above come from the sources listed.
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Where to go next
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