The Ultimate Guide to Digital Paid Media

Paid media is the a-train to reaching quality results for your brand. It works quickly, and every brand ought to weigh it’s costs and benefits.

If you’re brand new to paid media, or looking for a refresher on the state of digital advertising, this is the guide for you. As a paid advertising agency, we at Single Grain have assembled all our perspectives and expertise on digital paid media as a whole, and it’s here to aid both rookie and veteran advertisers in their quest to conquer the digital market of their industry.

While this guide won’t venture too deep into the core fundamentals of PPC and paid media, it will give you a holistic viewpoint of the different channels and advertising formats that you ought to evaluate for your brand. After all, the only way to find the perfect paid media strategy is to turn over every stone available to you.

So, let’s start flipping stones.

What is Digital Paid Media?

Digital paid media refers to any form of online advertising where businesses pay to reach specific audiences, and convert those audiences into paying customers.

Unlike owned media (content you create and control) or earned media (publicity gained through promotional efforts), paid media involves purchasing ad space to communicate directly with your target audience. This includes a wide range of platforms and formats, from traditional channels like television to modern digital channels such as search engine ads, and social media advertisements.

The main types of paid media you’ll see include:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) ads
• Social media ads
• Display ads
• Shopping Ads
• Video ads
• Affiliate Marketing
• Programmatic advertising
• Native advertising.

Each type has its unique benefits and cost structures, allowing businesses to choose the most suitable option based on their objectives, value offer, and target audience. We’ll cover each in more depth very shortly. Before that, let’s briefly run through the main ways paid media ads are, well, paid for.

Types of Payment Models in Digital Paid Media

Various payment models exist in digital paid media, each catering to different campaign goals and budgets.

Here’s a quick rundown:

• Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions (CPM): You pay for every thousand times your ad is shown, regardless of clicks. Great for boosting brand awareness.
• Flat Rate: You pay a fixed fee to display your ad, typically used for banner ads on specific websites. You’ll also often find influencers deal in flat rates for content, and while that is technically a valid type of paid media, the scope of this guide is intentionally more focused on paid ads. However, if you’d like to learn more about influencer marketing, check out this influencer strategy guide over here.
• Cost-Per-Click (CPC): Often linked with PPC advertising, this model charges you only when someone clicks on your ad. It’s all about performance—you’re paying for actual engagement. This payment structure is often the most favored among advertisers, making up 40% of paid media ad spend. It’s also why you’ll hear people use the terms “PPC” and “CPC” ads synonymously, even though they’re technically different (but similar) things.
• Cost-Per-Lead (CPL): This model is all about generating tangible results like form submissions.
• Cost-Per-Sale (CPS): Common in affiliate marketing, you pay only when a sale is completed.

 

Each of these models fits different campaign objectives. CPC and CPL are more performance-driven, while CPM is your go-to for increasing brand awareness. Different types of cost structures will appear here and there with different platforms, but they all tend to be derivative of these main five.

Key Takeaway: Digital paid media lets businesses pay to reach their target audience on platforms like search engines and social media, with the goal of turning users into customers. Different payment models like CPC and CPM fit different campaign goals, so picking the right one depends on how you want to manage your budget and strategy.

And with the preamble out of the way, let’s go through some of the major benefits brands seek from paid media advertising.

Benefits of Paid Media Advertising

Paid media advertising offers immediate results, making it a go-to choice for marketers aiming for quick visibility and conversions. Unlike SEO, which takes time to yield results, paid ads can drive traffic and generate leads almost instantly. The expediency is why advertisers like to complement organic growth methods with PPC ads to generate qualified traffic sooner.

Here’s some of the core reasons brands invest in paid media:

• Precise Targeting: You can target ads to specific audiences based on demographics, interests, or behavior, making sure your message reaches the right people.
• Boost Brand Awareness: Paid ads expand your brand’s reach, exposing you to new audiences (thus growing new customer acquisition) through social media and display networks. Additionally, paid media strategies can significantly reinforce brand credibility and expand brand exposure to new audiences.
• Drive Traffic: Ads on search engines or social platforms bring qualified traffic to your site, giving you more opportunities to convert visitors into customers.
• Measurable Conversion Lift: Paid media offers valuable tracking capabilities, allowing you to measure the overall lift in conversions across campaigns, even with challenges like last-click attribution and privacy updates. This gives you a more accurate understanding of the true impact of your marketing efforts, ensuring smarter optimizations and improved long-term ROI.
• Retargeting for Conversions: You can retarget users who’ve already shown interest in your brand, keeping your business top of mind and increasing conversion rates.
• Flexible Budgets: Paid media fits any budget, whether it’s a small test campaign or a large-scale effort. You can easily adjust spend as you go.

Moreover, paid media allows for precise audience targeting based on demographics, behaviors, and interests, ensuring that your ads reach the right people at the right time. And it’s this level of targeting that can enhance engagement while also improving customer retention by keeping your brand visible to both prospects and existing customers.

Key Takeaway: Paid media advertising delivers immediate results and offers precision targeting, helping brands quickly gain visibility, drive traffic, and track their ROI. Its flexibility allows advertisers to adjust their budgets and strategies in real-time for maximum effectiveness.

For us over at Single Grain, we’re obsessive about optimizing every angle of our clients’ PPC accounts, all the way from the more minute details like refining ad headlines to the most macro-level optimizations that 10x ROAS; our team thrives with PPC management.

If you’re curious how the help of a PPC agency can help scale your brand’s efforts, we invite you to reach out to us here.

Main Types of Paid Advertising and Their Primary Cost Structures

Earlier, we referenced the main types of paid media ad types that advertisers typically use. Let’s go through each of them in a bit more depth now. We’ll cover their main utility in paid ads, along with their primary cost structure.

Search Ads (PPC)

Search advertising involves placing ads in search engine result pages, primarily through platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. These ads target users actively searching for specific products or services, using a combination of broad, phrase, and exact match keywords that reflect user intent. This high level of intent leads to enhanced visibility, increased clicks, and higher conversion potential.

There are countless tools out there to help plan your keyword strategy, but the simplest and more direct method is through Google’s Keyword Planner tool.

The cost-per-click (CPC) model is the primary cost structure for search ads, where advertisers only pay when a user clicks on their ad. This model makes search advertisements highly effective for driving traffic and conversions, especially for service-based offers that require more explanation through tailored ad copy.

Ads on search are great for both goods-based and service-based offers but tend to perform the best (providing the best returns) for service-based businesses, like law firms, for instance.

Social Media Ads (varies)

Social media advertising refers to placing ads on social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, and Twitter. These platforms allow for precise audience targeting based on user interests, demographics, and online behavior, making social ads highly effective for reaching specific segments.

If you’re on Facebook, then there’s a 110% chance you’ve been served ads like these before, but here’s an example to give you an idea of what we’re referencing here.

Most social media platforms now use a combination of payment models, moving beyond traditional pay-per-click (PPC). Platforms like Meta and TikTok often charge based on cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), especially for video views or catalogue ads. These differences allow advertisers to optimize for different objectives, such as reach, engagement, or conversions.

And that’s the main trick here.

Each advertising platform charges for the way ads are consumed in different ways. It’s usually driven by the metric each given platform can drive the most of. With Facebook, it might pay more emphasis on CPC-based cost structure. That’s because more people are clicking on content on Facebook than, say, TikTok, where most of the time, people are watching videos more than they are clicking on things.

In the end, each social media platform (and this applies to all ad platforms in general) will prioritize a cost structure that will make them the most revenue for advertising spend based on how people interact with content. That might sound slightly cynical, but it’s the reality we’re all faced with.

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Display Ads (CPM)

Display ads are visual advertisements that appear across a network of websites, designed to attract user attention through image ads, graphics, animations, and videos. These ads are triggered when a user meets specific targeting criteria while browsing, ensuring relevance and enhancing engagement.

Here’s a glimpse of different display ad sizes for the same ad content:

The cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) model is commonly used for display ads, where advertisers pay for every thousand times their ad is shown, regardless of clicks. This model is particularly effective for increasing brand awareness and reaching a broader audience.

Display advertising continues to rise in use, and it coincides with advertisers continuing to pour more ad budget into display advertising, especially with the rate of efficiency display advertising is reaching through programmatic capabilities.

What makes it efficient? The fact that it’s all automated, that’s what. It’s the leading reason why 90% of display advertising is programmatic.

Paid Shopping Ads (CPC/CPM)

Paid shopping ads are product-based advertisements that appear at the top of search engine results or within dedicated shopping feeds, showcasing specific items from an advertiser’s catalog. These ads typically feature product images, pricing, and other relevant details, making them highly visual and conversion-driven.

Social platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok now offer shoppable ads, allowing users to make purchases directly from the ad. Social commerce is becoming a major trend, especially for brands targeting younger, mobile-first audiences. Shoppable posts are increasingly being integrated into platforms, allowing in-platform user shopping experiences.

For search engines, shopping ads are most often triggered based on product relevance and search queries, ensuring that users see relevant items as they browse for products. This direct alignment between search intent and product display makes shopping ads particularly effective for driving sales.

There are two main pricing models for shopping ads:

• Cost-per-click (CPC): Advertisers pay each time a user clicks on a shopping ad, allowing for direct budget control based on engagement. This model is commonly used for driving conversions.
• Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM): In some instances, especially with dynamic shopping or catalog ads across platforms like Meta or TikTok, advertisers pay for impressions, aiming to maximize visibility and brand presence.

Shopping ads are ideal for e-commerce brands looking to get their products in front of high-intent shoppers. The rise of dynamic feed ads, which allow real-time updates of product information and pricing, further enhances the impact and reach of paid shopping campaigns, particularly as Performance Max and catalog ads on platforms like Meta and TikTok continue to grow in popularity.

Video Ads (CPV)

Video advertising positions engaging content to promote brands and products, often yielding higher retention rates than static ads. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Meta ads are popular choices for running video campaigns, offering tools to target ads by topics, keywords, and audience interests. After all, over 100 million hours of video content is consumed on Facebook every day. For YouTube, it’s over 1 billion hours.

What does that mean? It means that these two platforms alone are brimming with opportunity for advertisers to access their audience with video content.

The cost-per-view (CPV) model is the most common cost structure for video ads, where advertisers pay only when a user watches a certain portion of the video. YouTube is great for this due to its skippable ads. That’s because advertisers are only charged for a view if the user actually completes the video or interacts with the ad through the call to action.

And for the portion of viewers that do complete a video, a big chunk of them are highly likely to engage with the offer presented in the video ad.

Affiliate Marketing (varies)

Affiliate marketing (also influencer marketing) is a performance-based model where brands partner with individuals or other businesses (affiliates) to promote their products or services. Affiliates earn commissions based on specific actions, such as sales, clicks, or leads, making it a low-risk, high-reward strategy for businesses looking to expand their reach.

Several cost structures are used in affiliate marketing, including:

• Cost-per-sale (CPS): Affiliates earn a commission when a sale is made. This is the most common model, as it directly ties the affiliate’s efforts to revenue generation. Brands benefit from only paying when a conversion occurs.
• Cost-per-lead (CPL): Affiliates earn a commission for each lead generated, such as a completed form or a sign-up. This model is effective for businesses focused on lead generation, ensuring they only pay for qualified prospects.
• Cost-per-click (CPC): Affiliates earn a commission for every click they generate to the brand’s website. While less common in affiliate marketing, this model can be useful for campaigns aiming to drive traffic rather than immediate conversions.
• Flat-rate commissions: Affiliates are paid a fixed amount per sale or lead, regardless of the value of the transaction. This model simplifies commission structures and is often used for products with similar pricing or low variance in customer lifetime value.

Affiliate marketing offers flexibility in cost structures, allowing brands to choose a model that aligns with their goals, whether that’s driving sales, generating leads, or boosting website traffic. It’s a particularly effective strategy for e-commerce businesses and subscription-based services, where affiliates can tap into niche audiences to amplify brand reach. As the market for influencers and content creators grows, affiliate marketing continues to be a strong component of the digital marketing mix.

Programmatic Advertising (varies)

Programmatic advertising uses automated real-time bidding processes to place paid ads across multiple channels, optimizing cost and targeting. This approach increases the efficiency of ad spend by ensuring ads reach the right audience at the right time.

Programmatic platforms typically operate on a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) basis but can also offer cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) models depending on campaign goals.

Some of the best programmatic partners we recommend (and use) at Single Grain are:

• The Trade Desk: A demand-side platform (DSP) that enables real-time bidding and data-driven targeting across multiple ad formats and channels, focusing on maximizing reach and performance.
• Outbrain: A native advertising platform that helps advertisers promote content across premium publisher websites, enhancing brand awareness through sponsored articles and recommendations.
• Criteo: A performance marketing platform known for its retargeting capabilities, leveraging data to drive personalized ads and optimize for conversions across various channels.
• StackAdapt: A programmatic advertising platform specializing in native, video, and display ads, offering AI-powered solutions to optimize ad targeting and performance across the web.

Some other examples of programmatic advertising include Microsoft’s and Google’s Performance Max campaigns, as well as Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns, which attempt to utilize every part of their respective ad inventories. However, we’d be undercutting these to say they’re just programmatic ads. While they utilize functions of programmatic placement, they’re so much more than that as well.

Native Advertising (varies)

Native advertising blends with organic content, offering a less intrusive way to engage users. These ads often appear as “sponsored content” on publisher sites and social feeds, mimicking the content style of the platform to improve engagement.

Cost structures for native ads include cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), similar to other digital ad formats. The cost can vary based on the platform and audience targeting criteria, but the seamless integration with content makes native ads highly effective.

Native ads also offer the advantage of being less likely to be blocked by ad blockers, ensuring that your message reaches a wider audience. This form of paid advertising can be particularly effective for storytelling and content marketing strategies, as it allows brands to engage users in a more natural and engaging manner.

On top of offering programmatic advertising options, Criteo, Stack Adapt, and Outbrain also support native advertising as well.

Key Takeaway: There are multiple types of paid advertising—such as search ads, social media ads, display ads, and video ads—each with distinct strengths and cost structures like CPC and CPM. The right ad format depends on your audience, campaign goals, and the desired outcome.

Cross-Network Campaigns

A big part of PPC advertising is running different ad formats simultaneously and learning how each contributes to your overarching paid media initiative. Cross-network paid campaigns do exactly that. They integrate various ad formats to create a unified marketing approach.

When you look at data in Google Ads by network, you’ll see a “cross-network” option, but this only appears if you’re using the new goal-based ecommerce PPC campaigns. If you’re not running these, there won’t be any data under that network—though this might change if Google rolls out more automated campaign types.

(Image Source: Optmyzr)

Google Ads has six networks:

• Google Search,
• Search Partners,
• Google Display Network,
• YouTube Search,
• YouTube Videos,
• and Cross-network

Networks are where ads appear, while campaign types (like Search or Shopping) refer to the kind of ads. Ads from a single campaign type can show on multiple networks.

For instance, a Search campaign can display ads on Google Search, Search Partners, YouTube Search, and sometimes even the Display Network if you’re using the search display select feature.

Understanding the difference between PPC networks and campaign types is key when managing different campaigns.

Instead of relying on just one platform, cross-network advertising lets you reach different types of users where they’re spending time. People use different platforms for different reasons, so hitting them in various places (like when they’re searching on Google, browsing Facebook, or watching videos on YouTube) increases the chances that your ad gets seen and sticks in their minds.

This, in effect, will cause your brand to show up virtually everywhere they go online, making your brand hard to ignore. And the neatest part is identifying and leaning on each platform’s own strengths.

Google Ads, for instance, are great for people actively searching for something, while Instagram is more visual and can be ideal for showcasing your brand through eye-catching images or videos.

And since all these platforms give you data, you can compare performance across networks, see which one’s working best, and shift your budget to whichever one is apt to render the highest returns.

Accruing and Leveraging PPC Data Across Platforms

Correlating data across platforms is essential for refining audience targeting and optimizing campaign performance, but it’s also crucial to recognize that each paid advertising channel can bring in customers with varying lifetime value (LTV) and different acquisition costs.

LTV will usually impact service-based B2B industries more noticeably than B2C brands, but it can apply to both, and certainly modulates per channel.

(Image Source: ProductPlan)

For example, customers acquired through Google Ads might have a higher LTV than those gained through Instagram Ads. This variation means that the amount you can spend to acquire customers differs per platform. Many marketers mistakenly apply a single LTV across all channels, but since each channel can attract a different quality of customer, it’s important to tailor spending accordingly.

Google Ads may yield higher-value customers, allowing you to justify spending more per lead. Conversely, social media channels like Instagram or TikTok may drive leads with lower LTV, meaning your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) must be lower to maintain profitability.

Using unified reporting and analytics, paired with insights into LTV per platform, you can adjust your bids and budget allocation for better overall performance.

At Single Grain, we do this using good ol’ Google Analytics. It’s still the most clear and true (and free) system out there, capable of unifying all paid media metrics which can help advertisers understand the true CPAs of each advertising channel. It might not be the most glamorous, or even the most intuitive at times, but it’s more reliable than most other solutions.

Key Takeaway: Cross-network campaigns let you reach your audience across different platforms, like search engines and social media, making sure your brand gets seen everywhere. Plus, using PPC data across these platforms helps fine-tune targeting, figure out customer value on each channel, and make smarter budget choices.

Now, let’s take a quick look at how to structure a PPC strategy.

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Building a Paid Media Strategy

A well-developed paid advertising campaign strategy helps align advertising efforts with business goals for desired results. As a starting point, we recommend using tools like the Ads Launch Assistant app or Neil Patel’s Ads Grader to simplify and coordinate the management of Google Ads campaigns.

 

1) Be SMART About It

The first step is to identify your goals using SMART criteria:

• Specific: the outcome should be clear
• Measurable: it needs to be quantifiable
• Achievable: it has to be reasonably attainable, given your talents and resources
• Relevant: it needs to matter
• Time-bound: it has to be contained within a specific timeframe

When you structure your paid media campaigns this way (and, frankly, any business project for that matter), you’ll have a much easier time knowing whether or not your inputs coalesce into a positive outcome.

2) Define Audience Personas of Paid Placements

Understanding your target audience is a huge element of building out your PPC channels. You ought to consider:

• Audience demographics: Demographics cover the basic, factual information about your audience, such as age, gender, income, education, and location.
• Audience behaviors: This refers to how your audience interacts with your brand or similar brands online.
• Psychographic information: Psychographics dive deeper into your audience’s attitudes, values, interests, and lifestyle choices.
• Their dream outcome (à la Alex Hormozi): This is the ultimate result or transformation that your audience desires — something your ad offer should aim to satisfy.

It’s also important to note that different advertising channels offer unique opportunities for targeting your audience. Depending on what you know about your target audience, your media mix might vary across platforms like Google Ads, Meta, or LinkedIn, each offering distinct targeting criteria that can better align with your audience’s behaviors and preferences per platform.

From there, you can start to fuel the criteria of your targeting, so your advertising efforts are reaching the most qualified prospects.

If want our help getting you started with this, check out the Buyer Persona template below. It should get you going with building your audience details.

3) Determine Your Budget

Set your budget based on campaign goals and platform performance. Start small, test different platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, and scale up on the ones with the best ROI. For example, use CPC or CPA models for direct sales, and CPM for brand awareness.

Balance your budget across the sales funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Make sure you’re allocating resources to top-of-funnel brand awareness as well as bottom-of-funnel retargeting.

Something to keep in mind is that certain platforms do have barriers to entry with how much you need to spend if you want to advertise. This means that if you want your ads to break into the ecosystem of those platforms, you need to be willing to spend a certain amount of budget. Here’s a quick rundown of the minimums usually needed to participate in the major ad platforms:

• Facebook: Starts at $1/day for ad sets targeting impressions, and $5/day or more for other campaign goals.
• Instagram: Minimum of $1/day for impression-based ad sets, $5/day or more for other objectives.
• LinkedIn: Requires $10/day or a $100 lifetime budget for campaigns.
• Twitter/X: No minimum spend requirement.
• Pinterest: Minimum of $2/day.
• TikTok: Campaigns require at least $50/day, with $20/day for ad groups.
• YouTube: Starts at $10/day.
• Microsoft Advertising: Minimum of $2/day.
• Snapchat: Requires a minimum of $20/day.
• Reddit: Starts at $5/day.
• Quora: Minimum of $5/day.
• Spotify: Requires $15/day.
• Programmatic: Typically $5,000 per month (not technically a requirement, but definitely advisable).
• Amazon Ads: Starts at $10/day.

Finally, and this is a big one, analyze and adjust your budget in real-time based on performance metrics like ROAS and conversion rates to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

4) Craft Killer Ad Copy and Creatives

Crafting scroll-stopping ad copy and creatives is perhaps the single most important aspect of PPC advertising, given how much AI has automated PPC advertising. The one thing AI hasn’t been able to do too much of yet is creating truly original and ingenious ad creatives (though it’s well on its way to doing so with tools like Sora AI).

Understanding your audience guides the creation of high-converting messaging, ensuring that your ads resonate with their needs and preferences.

Here’s a high-level overview of how you should attack the creatives for each ad type:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) ads: Creatives should be minimal and focused on keywords that match user intent. Headlines should be direct, offering a solution or benefit with a clear call-to-action (CTA).
• Social media ads: Visuals should grab attention in a busy feed, with bold, engaging imagery. Keep the copy conversational and action-oriented, using a clear CTA to drive engagement. Video ads tend to perform best on social media. In fact, 67.55% of advertisers reported that video produced more clicks than static ads, according to a Databox survey.
• Display ads: Display ads are visual-first, so keep the design simple but attention-grabbing. Use bold headlines and strong branding with minimal text to get your message across quickly. While the guideline varies slightly from platform to platform, the rule of thumb is have no more than 20% of an image contain text. For that reason, you need to make your copy short and snappy.
• Video ads: Focus on hooking the viewer in the first few seconds. The visuals and messaging should be dynamic, with concise copy that tells a compelling story aligned with your product or service. When building your video advertisements, try to prioritize humor over other emotions, as these tend to perform better than anything else.
• Programmatic advertising: Creatives should be adaptable for various audiences, using dynamic visuals and personalized messaging based on user data. Focus on relevance to maximize engagement.
• Native advertising: These ads should blend fluidly with the platforms they’re placed in, providing helpful content that feels like part of the user experience, rather than intrusive advertising.

One of the key roles of ad creatives is to filter out the right audience. Your creative messaging helps weed out people who aren’t in-market, while resonating with those who are. As your campaign runs, the more people interact with your ad, the better the platform’s algorithm learns to identify and target your ideal audience.

For example, if you’re advertising a veterans loan, you might start with a broad audience targeting anyone searching for a home loan. Using veterans-specific messaging in your creative will help filter out those not interested, while honing in on the veterans market. Over time, as the algorithm gathers data, it becomes more intelligent and refines your targeting—starting broad in the first week or so and becoming more precise by the third or fourth weeks, as the platform learns who your true audience is.

(Image Source: Military VA Loan)

5) Tracking and Measuring Success

Continuous improvement relies on tracking and measuring paid media campaign success. Key performance indicators (KPIs) like click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS) are essential metrics for evaluating campaign effectiveness. PPC tracking and audit tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics can help analyze campaign performance and track traffic effectively.

Bi-weekly campaign performance reviews help identify areas for improvement and strategy adjustments.

You can calculate the ROAS of your advertising campaigns using the formula ROAS = total ad campaign revenue divided by total ad campaign spend. This should be one of the most important, leading metrics you use to gauge the efficacy of your advertising per ad channel.

In addition to ROAS, another valuable metric to consider is your Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER), which is calculated as total marketing revenue divided by total marketing spend. MER provides a broader view of overall marketing performance, helping you understand how top-of-funnel campaigns (like those driving awareness or video views) impact bottom-of-funnel conversions. You can get a more detailed breakdown of the differences between MER and ROAS here.

It’s a useful metric to gauge the “halo effect” of campaigns that might not be directly conversion-focused but still contribute to overall brand growth and revenue.

If you’re looking for a paid media partner who can scale your PPC output in a way that will actually maximize your ROAS, reach out to us at Single Grain, and we’ll get you connected with our paid media director for a free consultation.

Advanced Tactics for Paid Media Success

Advanced tactics can elevate the success of your paid media campaigns, offering deeper insights and greater efficiency. These tactics include sophisticated budgeting and bidding strategies, leveraging PPC automation and AI, implementing retargeting strategies, and conducting A/B testing.

1) Concentrated Budgeting and Bidding Strategies

Getting the most out of your budget starts with testing smaller amounts and scaling up once you see what works. This approach lets you test different platforms without burning through your whole budget early on. Once you’ve identified the top performers, put more money where you’re seeing the best returns.

• Automated bidding: bidding tools like Google’s Target CPA or Target ROAS can optimize bids for you, making sure you’re not overspending where you don’t need to.
• Focus your spend: When one advertising platform is outperforming others, direct more budget there to maximize efficiency.
• Manual vs. automated: While manual bidding gives you control, automated bidding often saves time and can react faster to market changes. It also takes into account all of Google’s AI and learnings. We recommend for 99% of our clients that they use automated bidding as it helps them learn more about their customers and make adjustments to their strategies in real time.

The takeaway: Start small, scale what works, and let automation take care of the heavy lifting for better returns.

2) PPC Automation and AI

PPC automation and AI have revolutionized paid media management by automating repetitive tasks and optimizing campaigns in real-time. AI features like Google’s Smart Bidding and Facebook’s Automated Rules adjust bids based on user behavior, increasing efficiency and reducing manual effort.

AI-driven optimization analyzes patterns and predicts which users are most likely to convert, allowing you to deliver more personalized ads and refine strategies continuously.

Main Benefits:

• Increased efficiency: Less manual work with real-time optimizations.
• Smarter targeting: AI uses data to show ads to the most relevant users.
• Better ROI: Automation leads to more precise spending and higher conversion rates.

AI-driven bidding and optimization features in Google, Microsoft and social platforms can dramatically improve campaign efficiency, when your accounts are ready for them. Most platforms with disclaim this, but automated bid strategies usually ca’nt work well until your ad campaigns have enough data in them to inform automated algorithms how to be successful.

In other words, an ad campaign first needs sample data from your campaigns to understand what users to go after. In these cases, these automated bid strategies will look for common denominators in all of your conversions and seek to replicate those results at scale.

However, if you fail to acquire sufficient data, it can confuse these automated solutions and can lead to flagrant ad spend with low-quality results. And to make matters worse, once a campaign is trained on these bad-quality conversations, it can be tricky to train it again. For that reason, it’s wise to hold off on these types of strategies until your ad campaigns are generating consistently valuable leads or sales.

3) Retargeting Strategies

Retargeting (which is similar but different from remarketing) is all about bringing people back who’ve already shown interest in your brand but didn’t take action the first time. Whether they visited a product page or added something to their cart, retargeting ads remind them you’re there. This can be super effective for driving conversions.

• Dynamic retargeting: Show tailored ads featuring products users have already checked out.
• Segment your audience: Not everyone who visited your site should see the same retargeting ad. Segment users by behavior—like those who viewed your pricing page vs. those who just browsed.

(Image Source: Retargeter)

A well-executed retargeting campaign keeps your brand top-of-mind and helps nudge people toward a purchase. Just remember to position your retargeting messaging correctly to address users at the appropriate stage in the marketing funnel. This means you want to have different retargeting ads for each audience group for their respective stage of the marketing funnel.

It might feel an extra layer of effort needed to make retargeting work, and that’s because it is. The devil is in the details with retargeting. It’s not just enough to access your audience a second, third, or fourth time with your message. Your offer should change with the prospect as their awareness and view of your offer matures. Show them ads that directly call attention to what stage of the funnel they’re in (not literally, of course) make a nod to the action they did and sweeten the deal for them.

Here’s a great example of a retargeting ad from Bonobos with copy aimed at people who browsed their inventory, but didn’t make a purchase yet:

4) A/B Testing

A/B testing is your best friend when it comes to optimizing paid ads. It’s about experimenting with one element of your ad at a time, like changing the headline or call-to-action, to see which version performs better. Testing gives you real data on what your audience prefers, which helps you make smarter decisions.

• Test one thing at a time: Keep it simple. Test a headline or image, but not both at once, so you can pinpoint what’s making the impact.
• Pay attention to key metrics: Focus on metrics that matter like conversion rate or cost-per-conversion, not just click-through rate.

A/B testing helps you optimize your ads for better engagement and conversions, letting you continually improve your campaigns based on real results.

Pro tip: After you’ve gotten the hang of optimizing one element at a time, you can begin multivariate testing with your ads and paid ad landing pages to test multiple elements at once and see which combinations of changes can achieve stronger conversion rates.

5) Prioritize Your Keyword Match Types

Selecting the right keyword match types is essential to ensuring your ads reach the most relevant audience. Instead of relying heavily on long-tail keywords, a balanced mix of broad, exact, and phrase match types allows you to steer Google’s algorithm in the right direction and optimize your campaign’s performance.

• Broad match keywords: These give Google the most flexibility in matching your ads to search queries (which is why Google is pushing broad terms so hard). By casting a wider net, broad match keywords allow Google’s AI to find the best audience, even for queries that don’t exactly match your keyword. This helps capture potential customers who may be in earlier stages of the buying process or who are searching with varied terms.
• Exact match keywords: These are highly targeted, ensuring that your ad is only shown to users searching for a specific term. While this can limit the reach of your campaign, it guarantees high intent and relevance, making it ideal for driving conversions. Exact match works best when you know exactly what your audience is searching for, allowing you to serve ads to people ready to take action.
• Phrase match keywords: These offer a middle ground between broad and exact match. While your ad won’t show for just any search, phrase match allows for some variation in the queries, providing flexibility while maintaining more control. This match type is useful for targeting searchers who are exploring options but have a more defined intent than broad match users.

Using a combination of broad, exact, and phrase match keywords helps you fine-tune your audience targeting. Broad match lets Google’s AI expand your reach and find the right people, while exact and phrase match allow you to hone in on users with clearer intent. Striking the right balance can improve campaign performance and lower your cost-per-acquisition (CPA).

Pro tip: Focus on these high-intent keywords to increase relevance and reduce competition, which will lead to better performance at a lower cost.

6) Analytics and Conversion Tracking

Key metrics like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Media Efficiency Ratio (MER), and Cost per Acquisition (CPA) measure campaign success. Conversion tracking, including proper setup of goals in Google Analytics and platform-specific analytics, ensures accurate performance measurement.

Using techniques like incrementality testing and geo-testing can assess the true impact of paid media efforts, providing deeper insights into campaign effectiveness.

Key Takeaway: Advanced tactics like AI-driven automation, A/B testing, and retargeting strategies significantly improve paid media campaigns. These methods help fine-tune budget allocation, optimize bids, and deliver more personalized ad experiences for better results.

Trends We’re Keeping a Close Eye on with Digital Paid Media

The digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving, with new technologies and consumer preferences shaping trends. Maintaining a competitive edge in digital marketing paid media requires staying ahead of these trends.

AI and Machine Learning

AI helps automate ad bidding, optimize creatives, and analyze vast amounts of data to deliver highly targeted campaigns. Businesses increasingly use AI tools for predictive analytics to anticipate audience behavior and adjust accordingly.

(Image Source: Statista)

Machine learning is becoming critical in executing sophisticated ad targeting strategies that enhance return on investment. The global AI industry is expected to continue each year, which is why we’re adapting our practices here at Single Grain to welcome and wield it.

OTT and CTV Advertising

Connected TV (CTV) and Over-the-Top (OTT) platforms offer new video advertising opportunities. These platforms provide highly engaging ads and detailed data on viewership, making them ideal for brands looking to expand their video campaigns.

• Connected TV: CTV ads are particularly effective for reaching audiences who are increasingly consuming content through streaming services, offering a new avenue to increase brand awareness and engagement.
• Over-the-Top: OTT ad platforms allow advertisers to target specific demographics and interests, ensuring that their ads reach the most relevant audiences. The data provided by these platforms helps in optimizing ad spend and maximizing the return on investment.

(Image Source: Grape Seed Media)

As more consumers shift towards streaming, leveraging OTT and CTV advertising will become increasingly important for brands aiming to stay ahead of the curve.

Pro Tip: You can run CTV ads through Microsoft, which now has direct access to serve ads on Netflix. So, if you’re core focus is to serve ads on streaming platforms like Netflix, you’ll want to create a Microsoft ad account.

Best Practices for Paid Media Optimization

Regularly analyzing data is crucial for informed decision-making in paid media campaigns. Monitoring ad placements, especially for display ads, ensures budgets are spent effectively and not wasted on irrelevant sites.

Identifying underperforming ad elements and making adjustments based on performance data are the bones of PPC optimization and can significantly improve campaign outcomes.

Best Practices for Budget Allocation

Starting with a smaller budget allows businesses to test different channels and ad formats before scaling. Using performance data to allocate more resources to high-performing platforms and campaigns ensures that budgets are used efficiently.

Avoid spreading budgets too thinly by concentrating spend on key channels where ROI is measurable, optimizing the overall effectiveness of your campaigns.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Paid Media

Avoiding common paid media mistakes saves resources and improves campaign performance. Poor audience targeting can lead to wasted ad spend by reaching people who aren’t interested in your product. Not using negative keywords in search campaigns can waste budget by showing ads to irrelevant searches.

Ensure that ads have a clear call-to-action (CTA) to guide users towards specific actions, as weak or unclear CTAs can reduce ad effectiveness. Over-reliance on automation without regular oversight can lead to missed opportunities. While AI-driven tools are helpful, balancing automation with manual strategy adjustments is crucial for optimizing performance.

Regularly optimizing bids and budgets based on performance data helps avoid overspending on underperforming ads or losing traction on top-performing campaigns.

Go Forth, and Conquer Paid Media Advertising

There we have it.

We hope this guide has helped you sculpt a vision and framework for your brand’s digital paid media strategy.

It’s a lot to take in, yes, but you don’t have to do it all at once. Depending on your resources, you should ideally try to dip your toe in the water with as many as possible, but if time, talent, and resources are not on your side, then start with one or two you believe will offer you the best results the soonest. Go after this low-hanging fruit until you feel you’ve got a good grasp on it. After you’ve mastered one channel, move on to the next one.

And a big part of paid media is not getting hung up on a channel that likely won’t deliver the results you need. Sure, a precursor to that is making sure you’re handling a channel sufficiently (from a strategic and technical perspective), but you also shouldn’t force your brand into an ad space that it isn’t fit for. If after a couple of months of attempting one, it isn’t working out, move on to another. You can always come back later to the ones that performed poorly and try to make them work again.

If you have any lingering questions on any of the topics we discussed in this guide, we invite you to check out the rest of our resource library. It’s chock full of strategy and setup guides, along with digital marketing tool recommendations galore.

If you’d like someone to help handle your PPC from top to bottom, Single Grain’s paid media experts can help!👇

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Frequently Asked Questions

• What is digital paid media?

  Digital paid media refers to any form of online advertising where businesses pay to reach specific audiences, typically through platforms like search engines, social media, and display networks. The goal is to convert these targeted users into paying customers.

• What are the main types of digital paid media ads?

  The primary types include Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, social media ads, display ads, video ads, programmatic advertising, and native advertising. Each format serves different purposes and fits specific campaign goals.

• How are paid media campaigns charged?

  Paid media can operate under various pricing models, including Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions (CPM), Cost-Per-Lead (CPL), and Cost-Per-Sale (CPS). Each model is tailored to different campaign objectives, such as generating leads or increasing brand awareness.

• What is the benefit of using paid media over organic strategies?

  Paid media offers immediate results compared to organic strategies like SEO, which can take time to generate visibility. With paid ads, you can quickly drive traffic, boost brand awareness, and convert leads.

• What is PPC automation, and how can it help?

  PPC automation uses AI-driven tools to manage and optimize ad campaigns. It helps by adjusting bids, targeting users likely to convert, and improving campaign efficiency without requiring manual oversight.

• How can businesses benefit from cross-network paid media campaigns?

  Cross-network campaigns allow businesses to target users across multiple platforms, such as search engines and social media, ensuring brand visibility wherever potential customers spend time online.

• How does A/B testing improve paid media campaigns?

  A/B testing involves testing variations of ads (e.g., headlines or call-to-action) to see which performs better. This data-driven approach helps optimize ad performance, leading to higher engagement and conversions.

• What metrics should be tracked for paid media success?

  Key metrics include Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA), and click-through rates (CTR). These metrics help measure the effectiveness of campaigns and allow businesses to adjust their strategies for better results.

If you were unable to find the answer you’ve been looking for, do not hesitate to get in touch and ask us directly.

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