Paid search intercepts demand that already exists. Social media speaks to someone who was not looking for anything, which is both its value and its difficulty: you have to give them a reason to stop first.
Clio Goldbrenner
Cost per purchase on the Meta retargeting campaign, against the previous period on the same channel.
Return on ad spend over the same period. The cost per purchase falls and the average basket rises: the two effects add up.
Source — Meta Ads Manager.
Our Google Ads page says a search campaign has nothing to intercept when nobody is yet looking for what you sell. That is exactly the gap social media fills. You do not wait for demand there, you go and find it among people who do not know you, picked on what they do rather than on what they type.
That shifts the whole job. On a search engine, the intention is already there and the ad only has to make itself credible. In a feed, it first has to earn the stop, which puts the message and the image ahead of the keyword. One offer therefore needs several versions, and it is the comparison between them that brings the cost of an enquiry down, not the targeting settings alone.
The learning period is also longer than people tend to say. A platform needs enough volume before it knows who to show what to, and cutting before that threshold means paying for the learning without collecting the benefit. That is why we advise against trials of a few hundred euros over two weeks: they buy a false conclusion, and that conclusion often costs more than the campaign.
Tracking is not optional here either. A click from a feed costs less than a click from a search engine, which makes the reports flattering and the conclusions fragile: only the count of enquiries received says whether the channel is worth its budget. The measuring results page explains how it is set up.
The two paid channels complement each other better than they replace each other. Social media makes an offer known to people who had no idea it existed, and some of them will later look for it by name. That is the moment Google Ads and organic search harvest, and it is why the three are looked at together rather than one at a time.