The Halo Effect: How Social Media Can Supercharge Paid Search

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Lauren Leone: Hey, everyone, welcome back to Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I am here with Alex Kemp, our Director of Applied Analytics. Today we’re talking about a topic that I think has been super popular. We’ve been talking about all the changes with Meta. Let’s talk about something more fun related to Meta, which is how can extending some of your budget into social have a halo effect on paid search? Alex, thank you for joining us.

Alex Kemp: Thanks so much for having me.

Lauren: One of the things that I want to talk about related to this topic is how do you know that you should be considering social as part of your mix? Then we’ll get into how to measure it, what does it look like, what does a good testing roadmap look like, but how do you even know if that’s a place that you should be going with your dollars?

Alex: For most businesses, they’re probably going to be in a situation where they have a paid search program in place. The answer to that question is what is your current market share and your ability to capture the available impressions out there within your search campaign?

The answer basically is when you start getting to a point where you are hitting diminishing returns on search, where every click is costing that much more, and therefore. your conversion rates are going down because you’re having to bid on other keywords that are potentially not as high converting, that’s a signal. When your impression share loss of budget starts going down to zero and you’re then getting that diminishing return, that’s a time to maybe consider diversifying the channel mix because you’re more likely to find a lower incremental cost per lead from another channel compared to search.

Lauren: I think some other things I’ve heard when you’re struggling with quality out of your search campaigns, maybe reaching the right audience, that can be another signal too. I like that concept. I heard something really funny today. I was on an interview and we were talking about PPC and how everyone just loves it and they can’t seem to get away from it. We use the analogy that PPC is like the Ozempic of digital media; you’re going to get results really fast and you’re going to be able to track them, but that diminishing return is going to come. If you don’t build the muscle, eat right, and go to the gym, that is the halo around it. You’re probably going to gain all that weight back. I thought that was a funny one that made me chuckle today. Shout out to Rick for bringing that one to my attention.

We’ve seen some of the signals. We know that we want to test into social, and the measurement piece of social gets tricky. The easy thing that happens often is I go into social, I just want it to perform as good as, if not better than my paid search dollars. If it doesn’t, “Oh, social didn’t work for me, I’m done with it.” How should groups be thinking about the measurement framework for social before they even put a dollar into it?

Alex: Great question. I think the mistake that a lot of people make is they take their paid search program and try to do a copy and paste on the paid social and say, “Okay, I’m now going to be using paid social to be driving traffic to my website that is going to be converting at the same rate of search, maybe the cost per click is going to be lower, but then therefore the conversion rate can be lower.” Either way, you’re asking paid social to do the same thing that paid search is doing, which is driving traffic to your website and last-click actions on your website.

For anyone who’s maybe potentially run social before, what you end up seeing is the traffic, it’s just comparing apples to oranges. It is not paid–

Lauren: Apples to watermelon.

Alex: It’s not even two fruit, It’s two completely different categories. When you try to ask paid social to do something that it’s not really meant to do, you’re not going to have the results that you want to see. You have to, therefore, change the way that you’re looking at it. That doesn’t mean necessarily you have to change your strategy. Your strategy could be fine if you’re targeting the right people, you’re getting to your website, but you have to reframe the way you’re looking at success for paid social. What we are going to potentially get into is when you’re looking at it from the siloed-off, like, “This is my paid search investment, I’m getting this many leads. This is my paid social investment, I’m getting this many leads.” You’re not seeing the whole picture. You have to zoom out a little bit. Instead of thinking about it channel versus channel, you’re thinking about the incremental value that layering on paid social generated for your entire channel.

Lauren: Channel plus channel plus channel plus channel.

Alex: Correct. Yes.

Lauren: What exactly are those metrics, just for anybody listening? I am running social, and it’s not just what I’m getting out of the Facebook platform on how I perform. What specific metrics are you looking at in other platforms?

Alex: One of the easier places to look is you’re already measuring this channel is paid search. If you’re bidding on your branded terms, you can see, “Am I getting more available impressions in the platform?” Meaning more people are searching for your brand. “Am I getting a higher click-through rate on my branded terms, but also my non-branded terms too, as well?” If I was introduced to a brand on social and then I did more of a category search or more generic search, and then I see a brand that I’ve already been exposed to, we’ve seen situations where once we layer on social, we actually see higher non-brand click-through rates after that. We layer that on. That’s one place to start is paid search.

I think another one that a lot of people miss out on is organic search. We have to remember that I think the average click-through rate on our keywords are maybe going to be 3 to 5%, meaning there’s still 95% of people who are not clicking on–

Lauren: Clicking somewhere else.

Alex: Clicking somewhere else. There’s some percentage of those 95% that are clicking, potentially on your organic listing somewhere else. This is particularly prevalent for brands. Another place that you can be looking at is in Google Search Console to see, “Are my branded queries going up?” Again, “Am I seeing a higher click-through rate on my non-branded queries as well?” Same principle applies that we were talking about with paid search.

Lauren: Google Business as well, right? That whole map section.

Alex: For sure.

Lauren: I know you’ve got a few specific examples of how we’ve seen this. Let’s dive into one in the PT space in particular that I think we’ve done some testing here. Talk me through the setup, although I think it’s pretty similar to what we’ve just walked through. Any specific nuance, and then how did it shift the overall channel mix and the way that they were thinking about media?

Alex: In this situation, they started out with their paid search program, which, again, is what we would recommend, but they got to a certain place–

Lauren: Physical therapist near me, just super, high intent, “Get the user in quickly.”

Alex: Exactly. They have different locations with different needs, different locations have different levels of demand. For certain places, we were reaching that point of diminishing returns that we were talking about, and we were having to consider, “Okay, our next lead on paid search is going to cost X. Is there a way that we can layer in paid social? If we get last select leads from paid social, that’s like the cherry on top, but it’s more about what if we layer on paid social and how does that affect our paid search program specifically?” That was what we sought out to do was say, “Okay, we know the next lead is going to cost more. Is there a way that we can generate more branded impressions that we can capture and/or make our non-branded queries that much more efficient in terms of capturing them [unintelligible 00:06:56].”

Lauren: Assuming that’s what went down?

Alex: Yes. Again, you have to think about it from a testing framework. You can’t just throw it out there everywhere, or else you don’t have a control to compare to. In the very strategic and specific places that we’ve launched it, we did see lifts in our paid search branded queries, which then we were able to see more traffic from those campaigns. Again, some moderate lifts in terms of our non-brand performance as well. People were more likely to click on our ad, and then they’re also more likely to convert because they had already been exposed to our brand before they searched “Physical therapist near me.”

Lauren: Did you get any of that cherry on top as well, any directly attributable from social as well?

Alex: Yes, we did. Like I said, that’s the cherry on top. The important thing is beforehand, if you’re only looking at those, then paid social would have been a bust. You’re looking at both. You’re like, “Okay, here’s the direct leads I can tie back to social, but also let’s zoom out here and be a little bit more nuanced with how we’re measuring it.”

Lauren: After y’all ran the tests, you’re picking certain markets, you have controlled markets, areas where you’re not running it. Then you have obviously the data prior to launching it in the same markets as well. Is that something that you’ve rolled out universally? Do you take a test like that and just say, “Put it everywhere?” or is it still specific use cases for when and where that’s appropriate?

Alex: It depends on the capacity at which you first tested it. Those situations, it was a handful of locations. We generally saw the overarching trend for each location was that we saw better performance from a paid search perspective. Therefore, with both paid search and paid social being in the mix, we saw a lift. Again, you don’t necessarily want to assume that’s going to be true for every single location. I think we always say testing is the way to go. I think that it is still a systematic process of saying, “Okay, we know there’s potential here. Let’s go find the other locations where it does work. If it doesn’t work for a location, then we’ll know.”

Lauren: It won’t be part of the piece.

Alex. Then we can turn it off.

Lauren: Yes. I think that’s key. It’s not a small test, massive rollout. Sometimes it’s a constant test. You’re never done testing. I think this concept of “I tested it and then I decided” is not true in the digital landscape. Alex, in the scenarios we talked about, I think, then, you’ve got a question of how do I configure my mix across those two channels? Should I be moving more spend over to social? Should I be adding more? How much more could I spend on social to have a continued effect on paid search? Once you’re in-market, not the, “Let’s test into it,” but you’re in-market, you’ve confirmed you have a social play in your playbook, what are some other ongoing data points to validate that this mix is right to make sure that it’s continuing to positively impact search?

Alex: Like you said, once you’re in-market and you actually have the data and you have all the data points that we talked about, not just how much you’re spending on paid social on a daily basis, but your non-brand click-through rate, your branded queries, your branded click-through rate, organic impressions, all that stuff, what you can do with that data then is understand, “Okay, on days where I’m spending more on social, do I tend to also see higher click-through rates on non-brand search versus days where I spend fewer dollars on social?”

Basically, you’re running a regression to see the relationship between daily spend on social, and then those same metrics. Seeing on a per-day basis, what does that relationship look like? Then, basically what you can see is, “Okay, I have days where I spend a lot, but my click-through rate is just the same as when I spent maybe an average amount.” Maybe that’s where my diminishing return is in terms of affecting that variable is saying, “Okay, when I spend more than $1,000 a day, my non-brand click-through rate doesn’t up.”

Lauren: There’s a breaking point at which it doesn’t keep going, yes. I think in the world where everybody would love MTA, multi-touch attribution, to be perfect, you’ve got the Meta landscape where just those metrics exist in that walled garden and they’re not going to translate out, not without some serious work in tech. This ability to understand the correlation between the two and what happens when I pull lever A to lever B is a really good starting point.

Alex: Yes, absolutely. The trouble with MTA is that usually when people talk about MTA, they’re talking about click-based MTA, which is fairly straightforward, GA4, Mixpanel, these other platforms can do it. The issue is that we’re not just wanting to measure the clicks, we’re wanting to measure the exposures, the impressions, because we know through our testing, that we’ve been talking about, that there is value. When you do these control tests, we’ve seen significant deviations from an experiment group to a controlled group.

Lauren: The viewability on social is so high, and so much of the engagement is just stopping your scroll to look at something and then continuing to scroll. That exposure is really hard to measure.

Alex: Yes. Then you think about click-through rate on social, it’s [inaudible 00:11:28] 1%. The impressions are really what you’re trying to measure. Like you said, Meta, that walled garden, you then have to think of other ways to measure the lift that it’s driving.

Lauren: If you guys are listening and you’re experiencing challenges with scaling your paid search, you’re hitting some of those impression share loss to budget peaks, you are struggling with quality, or you’re just generally wondering, “How am I going to scale beyond paid search? I need more. I don’t feel confident that I can get it from this channel alone,” would highly recommend in a methodical testing fashion that y’all consider social, consider setting it up both to track what it produces for you in a last-click basis, but also think about the bigger ecosystem. Thanks for joining us, Alex. Thanks for tuning into Ignite. We’ll see you guys next time.

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