Making PPC & Social Media Work Together Seamlessly

You’ve read time and time again about how social media can fuel SEO and even vice versa, but where does PPC fit into this equation? The answer is in retargeting also known as AdWords remarketing. If you’re not familiar with the concept of remarketing, I’d recommend you read this step by step AdWords remarketing guide.

I’ve written many times on using social media to promote linkbait-style content for traffic and virality and how to reap the benefits of that social media traffic. Sometimes you can do a social promotion, of a piece of content, and get a lot of traffic from social media but not a whole lot of benefit if social shares, links, pageviews, etc fall flat.

Fortunately, there’s a way to capitalize on that seemingly lost and sometimes perceived “useless” traffic.

Another conundrum I’ve run into is that clients want to work their sales pitches into linkbait so badly, as they fear the social promotion alone won’t reap enough benefit to them.

They sometimes have a hard time putting informational, resourceful, entertaining, or educational material out there without a direct tie-in to sales or leads. As it is free to users, it can be costly to a publisher or client to create and develop.

While there are many things wrong with that thought process, using remarketing can be the missing element a client is looking for from turning educational content into commercialized advertising.

Remarketing allows you to follow the visitors of your informational content with a transactional message across the Web with ads to attempt to bring back. It’s a way go beyond the benefits of traffic, brand recognition, links, social shares, CPM ad revenue, virality, etc and help contribute to bottom line a bit more by tapping into reciprocity a bit.

If you’ve provided someone a valuable resource they are bound to trust, you have become more of an authority in your vertical. And if you remind them of what you’ve provided them, while asking for a call-to-action, then the chances of them clicking through and paying attention are much higher.

The best way to demonstrate this concept is by an example. Here, I have a linkbait article on The Controversial History of Xvid (Xvid is video software). By setting up retargeting on this page, by cookie or pixel, any users coming to this page can then be followed across media partner networks with ads.

After a successful social media promotion, I now have a very large group of people that I know are interested in Xvid enough to read about it to target transactional ads to in attempt to get them to convert and download the Xvid software from the same site they read the linkbait on.

While this isn’t the perfect ad, to give you an idea, the ad might looks something like this:

Then for the results, hopefully the ad reminds them of the content and sparks their interest into checking it out from you. While this isn’t the best example this concept can be used many different ways.

Ultimately, the social media promotion provides you a large group of fairly targeted users, that have already broke the interest barrier, to advertise to. The obvious key here is making this profitable and not a large loss of ad spend. Have fun experimenting with this concept and let me know what kind of results you had in the comments here.