Paid Social Strategy

Social advertising reaches people before they search — building awareness, generating demand, and retargeting visitors who did not convert the first time. But each platform has different strengths, audiences, and formats. Running the same campaign everywhere wastes budget. StarkRank builds platform-specific strategies that complement your search campaigns and move users through the funnel.

Which social advertising platform is right for your business?

The answer depends on who you are trying to reach and what you want them to do:

• Meta (Facebook & Instagram) — The broadest reach and most sophisticated targeting. Meta’s Advantage+ automated campaigns use AI to optimise creative, audience, and placement simultaneously — reducing cost per result while scaling. We configure Advantage+ with appropriate guardrails and feed it high-quality first-party data through Meta’s Conversion API (CAPI) for accurate attribution, even with iOS privacy restrictions (SKAdNetwork).
• LinkedIn — The only platform where you can target by job title, company size, industry, and seniority. Essential for B2B lead generation, recruitment marketing, and professional services. Higher cost per click, but significantly higher lead quality for the right business. LinkedIn’s AI-powered audience expansion helps scale without sacrificing targeting precision.
• TikTok — Fastest-growing platform for reaching younger demographics (18–34). Video-first format requires different creative than other platforms, but cost per impression is currently lower than Meta. TikTok Shop enables in-app checkout with conversion rates significantly higher than standard ad campaigns. TikTok Search Ads capture users actively looking for products and tutorials — a hybrid of social and search advertising.

Most clients benefit from two platforms: one for demand generation (Meta or TikTok) and one for high-intent targeting (LinkedIn for B2B, or Meta retargeting for B2C). We advise against spreading budget across every platform — better to dominate two than underperform on four.

How do you build audiences for social advertising?

Targeting is what makes social advertising profitable. We build audiences in layers:

1. Custom audiences — Your existing data: website visitors, email lists, CRM contacts, video viewers. These are your warmest prospects and the foundation of retargeting.
2. Lookalike audiences — Platform-generated audiences that mirror your best customers. We create lookalikes from converters, high-value purchasers, and engaged email subscribers — not just all website visitors.
3. Interest and behaviour targeting — Broader audiences based on platform data. Used for top-of-funnel awareness campaigns where the goal is reaching new people who match your customer profile.
4. Exclusion lists — Equally important: we exclude existing customers, recent purchasers, and irrelevant segments to prevent wasted impressions.

For a deeper dive into audience research, our Audience Persona Mapping service defines who your ideal customers are before we build targeting around them.

What does the campaign structure look like?

We structure paid social campaigns around the buyer journey, not around platform defaults:

• Awareness — Video and carousel ads introducing your brand to cold audiences. Optimised for reach and video views at lowest cost. Creative focuses on the problem you solve, not the product itself.
• Consideration — Targeted ads to people who have engaged with awareness content or visited your site. Educational content, case studies, and social proof. Optimised for landing page views and engagement.
• Conversion — Retargeting ads to warm audiences with direct offers, lead forms, or purchase incentives. Optimised for conversions with tight frequency caps to avoid ad fatigue.

Each stage uses different creative, different audiences, and different optimisation goals. This prevents the common mistake of running conversion-optimised campaigns to cold audiences who have never heard of you.

How does paid social work with Google Ads?

The strongest results come from integrating paid social with search campaigns. A typical combined strategy:

1. Social ads build awareness and drive site visits from your target audience
2. Google remarketing lists capture those visitors when they search later
3. Google Search campaigns capture high-intent demand generated by social exposure
4. Social retargeting re-engages users who searched but did not convert

We manage this integration through our Performance Ads Management service, with unified reporting through ROI Reporting so you see the full cross-channel picture.

How do you measure paid social performance?

Social advertising metrics can be misleading. We focus on the ones that matter:

• Cost per acquisition (CPA) — What does it actually cost to generate a lead or sale? Not clicks, not impressions — conversions.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS) — For e-commerce: revenue generated per dollar spent.
• Frequency — How often the same person sees your ad. Too high means ad fatigue and wasted budget.
• Thumb-stop rate — For video: the percentage of people who stopped scrolling to watch. The best proxy for creative effectiveness.
• Assisted conversions — Social campaigns often assist conversions that happen later through search or direct. We track the full attribution path, not just last-click.

Accurate measurement on social platforms requires server-side tracking infrastructure. Browser-based pixels miss conversions due to ad blockers and iOS privacy restrictions. We implement Meta’s Conversion API (CAPI), TikTok’s Events API, and LinkedIn’s Conversions API to ensure your data is complete — feeding the platform algorithms the signals they need to optimise effectively. For the full tracking setup, see our Google Analytics Consultancy service.