Paid social

But it has become increasingly difficult to reach users, especially new users on social media. Fortunately, there's a solution: you only have to pay at checkout number one. If you're willing to pay, you can get all the exposure you want on social media.

So when you hear an agency or vendor talk about paid social, it refers to the visitors that come from social media and where you have paid for the advertising.

Most online shops have their own Facebook page, but find that it's difficult to reach their users. Therefore, they often supplement with paid advertising.

Examples of paid social

There are a myriad of different advertising options on social media. A classic is retargeting visitors who have placed a product in the shopping cart on your webshop but did not complete the order anyway. Now you can pursue the user with ads for the exact product they had in their basket. For webshops, this is the most obvious advertising option and for many, it's completely standard to have set up.

In addition, there are sponsored posts and some of your organic posts that you boost on social media and, of course, regular ads on social media. You can choose different placements, formats, etc. for these ads and they can of course also be split tested so that you show an ad with e.g. a puppy to half of your visitors and an ad with a kitten to the other half of your visitors. Once you've shown enough ads, you may find that people would rather click on the puppy than the kitten - or vice versa. Or you might realize there's no difference. But if you're running paid advertising, you should always split test your ads in the hope of getting more bang for your buck.