How to run PESO campaigns on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter

A recent blog post explored using paid media as part of an integrated PESO campaign. Here I look at how to roll out ads and promoted content from £1 per day on some of the popular platforms.

Planning and executing a paid media campaign can be daunting if you haven’t done it before. Each of the platforms provides a self-service planning and campaign tool. My tip is to learn by promoting content on a Facebook page or by targeting content on Twitter. The investment is minimal and you’ll get a good understanding of the relationship between paid and other forms of media.

How to run a paid Google campaign

Google Ads enable you to appear in search results for search terms or keywords. The ads appear at the top and bottom of search results and aside from a small ad label look almost identical to organic search results.

The benefit of a paid search campaign is that people using Google are pre-qualified. They are actively searching for information. Advertisers only pay when Google delivers a consumer to a campaign website.

To start a paid campaign on Google head to Google AdWords and hit the Start Now button at the top right-hand side of the screen. You’ll need a Google account to access the service.

There are two tool options for building a campaign. The default is a self-service tool aimed at someone with minimal experience of running Google Ads. I recommend using this in the first instance.

Once you’re logged in select the goal of your campaign. In this instance we’re going to create a campaign to drive web traffic. The next step asks for basic information about your website.

Choose the geographic campaign where you’d like the ad to be shown. This is useful for targeting a specific country or an area around your business location. Google will show the estimated audience size alongside your selection. Selecting the UK will reach approximately 60 million people.

Your next option is your business category and related keywords. Again, Google will show an estimate of the size of your audience.

Create your ad. You’ve 30 characters each for the headline and subhead, and 90 characters for a description. You can also add images.

Google serves a proposed budget within a competitive range. You can select the average per day and monthly maximum. £10 per day is a typical starting budget for a campaign. Google shows the number of impressions and clicks that your campaign will deliver for a given budget.

The final task before going live is to review your campaign and set up payment mechanism using a credit card.

Savvy users should select the experience campaign building web tool. This provides more options, including channels, keywords, bid strategy and ad networks.

How to run a paid Facebook campaign

Boosting content is the most popular way to execute a PESO campaign on Facebook.

You’ve two options for paid activity on Facebook, namely ads and promoted content to the community that follow a Facebook Page.

Ads are available in a huge variety of formats and placements. They operate in much the same way as ads on other platforms. Use Facebook Campaign Planner as your guide.

The most useful mechanic if you have a branded Facebook page is promoted content. This enables you to target who is served your content in their newsfeed.

The audience used to be a large percentage of the people that follow a Page. As we’ve discovered the organic reach of posts has been throttled so that you’ve little choice but to pay to promote content.

Facebook calls promoted content, boosted content, reflecting the fact that by paying to short cut the newsfeed you’re boosting the reach of content.

Boosting content enables you to reach an audience beyond your Page, and set variables for who will be served a post. This is defined using a subset of Facebook Campaign Planner.

Content is boosted using a button on the bottom of a post, or via the Insights tab for your Page. You can choose which posts to boost, the audience, timescale and budget.

There are three audience options for boosting a post: people who like your Page; people who like your Page and their friends; and people you select through targeting.

Targeting gives access to a variety of behaviours, interests, locations and demographics. Facebook will estimate the reach of a post based on your proposed investment. The minimum budget is £1 per day.

Any type of post can be boosted. In this way paid can be applied strategically as part of a long-term campaign, or tactically to boost a single post. Campaigns can be cut short if you meet a goal or decide to shift your focus elsewhere.

The Insights tab for a Facebook page provides a summary of the performance of boosted posts. It provides data including reach, clicks, reactions, comments and shares.

How to run a paid LinkedIn campaign

Exploring paid options on LinkedIn as part of an integrated PESO campaign.

LinkedIn has quietly become a powerful social media platform for business-to-business. The Microsoft owned platform is used by more than 500 million professionals around the world. As a result, it’s a primary platform for organic and paid marketing and public relations campaigns.

The starting place for any campaign on LinkedIn should be a company page. It’s the equivalent of your home page on the platform from where both organic and paid content is served.

Organic content formats include your company profile, updates and showcase pages to spotlight products or services. Paid media is served via a self-service platform or LinkedIn’s partner solution scheme.

The LinkedIn self-service ad platform enables campaigns to be created from £10 per day. My recommendation in the first instance would be to promote content with native ads. Its benefit is that it can be used to run a paid campaign by any organisation with a company page. Audiences can be segmented by multiple variables including company, job title, job function, seniority, skills and age.

Pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC) display and text ads are a good place to test a campaign using the self-service platform. LinkedIn recommends a combination of images and assertive ad copy. These are served in multiple locations across the LinkedIn platform.

Sponsored content is a popular paid mechanic on LinkedIn. Here content shows up in a user’s newsfeed leading to higher levels of engagement than text and image ads. It’s a good mechanic for lead generation for organisations using owned content such as surveys or white papers.

LinkedIn’s advertising partner solutions provides the same level of targeting as the self-service platform but offers a larger variety of ad placements and formats. Campaigns are developed directly with LinkedIn.

How to run a paid Twitter campaign

Promoted Twitter content integrates on the platform alongside organic content and allows a highly targeted means of paid media.

Twitter’s ads integrate into the platform alongside organic forms of content. The Twitter ad planning tools allow an advertiser to precisely target audiences.

The most common ad format is a promoted tweet but it’s also possible to promote accounts and trends.

Promoted tweets are served in the newsfeed of targeted users. It’s typically used to drive traffic to a third-party website.

Promoted accounts are used by brands to boost followers. The ad is served in Who to Follow areas of Twitter.

Promoted trends are an expensive big-ticket ad format served in the trending topic area of Twitter. Brands promote conversation around their campaigns using a sponsored hashtag.

The start point for an ad campaign is a Twitter account. Use the Twitter ad platform to identify your desired audience. There’s a huge variety of variables to target ranging from keywords to behaviours, and from demographics to interests.

The platform allows budgets to be based on automatic bids, average cost per bid, or maximum visibility.