How paid social differs from search advertising
Both are paid traffic, and both are billed by the platform to your card. The day-to-day work is quite different.
- Search starts with keywords; social starts with an audience.
- Search ads are mostly text; social ads lean on images and video.
- Search ads can run for months with small edits; social creative tires faster as the same people see it again.
- Search answers a query; social interrupts, so the offer has to be easy to say yes to.
- Social platforms offer native lead forms, so a response may never touch your website.
A provider managing paid social spends a lot of its time on audiences, creative refresh, frequency and the handoff of form data, and less on bid tinkering.
How a social campaign runs from week to week
Once campaigns are live, the routine settles into a pattern.
At the start of each week the manager checks delivery. Are ad sets spending, or stuck in learning? Has anything been rejected? Did lead form submissions reach the CRM, and does the count match what the platform reports?
Midweek is about creative. Frequency is checked against each audience. Ads whose click rate is sliding while frequency climbs are marked for replacement, and new variations go into the queue.
Toward the end of the week, budgets are rebalanced between ad sets if one is clearly doing better on cost per lead and lead quality, as judged by the feedback you give on the leads themselves.
Changes go into a short log you can read, and the monthly summary pulls the threads together.
Who owns the business portfolio and ad accounts
On Meta, your Facebook Page, Instagram account, ad account, pixel and customer lists live in a business portfolio, which Meta used to call Business Manager. That portfolio should belong to your business, with at least two people from your company as admins. A provider is added as a partner with the permissions it needs.
On LinkedIn, the Campaign Manager ad account and Company Page should likewise be yours, with the provider added as a user at a chosen role.
If a provider builds everything inside its own portfolio, the pixel history, audiences and lead form data may not come with you when you leave. Settle ownership in writing before setup starts, and keep billing on your own payment method.
Questions about paid social campaigns
What is a special ad category?
Meta requires it for ads about housing, employment, credit or other financial products, and social issues or politics. It restricts targeting by age, gender and ZIP code and limits lookalike audiences. Whether your offer falls in a category is your decision, ideally checked with your own counsel.
How often does ad creative need changing?
There is no fixed schedule. Creative needs refreshing when the same people have seen it often and stop responding, which shows up as a falling click rate and rising cost per lead. Small B2B audiences, especially on LinkedIn, tend to wear creative out sooner than broad ones.
How do lead form submissions reach my CRM?
Usually through an integration. HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive offer connections for Meta and LinkedIn lead forms, and connector tools can send submissions to a CRM or shared inbox. A CSV download from the platform is the fallback. The connection should be tested with a real submission after setup.
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Google and Microsoft ads
New account setup or cleanup of an existing one, then ongoing management. You keep admin access to the account the whole time.
Landing page tests
Two versions of a page run against each other once there is enough traffic, with changes logged so you can see what moved.
Tracking and CRM
Measurement and lead handling set up around the tools you already use, with access kept in your name.