Social to Search

Social to Search campaigns are very similar to Native to Search. The search feed provider gives you a search feed link, that you add to your social campaigns (Facebook). When clicked on Facebook ads, this same ad will open a search page result that can be powered by Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other well-known browser search feed, with a needed query already typed in and searched. When a user clicks on one of the search feed results, both the search feed provider and the “distributor” earn money and actual user clicking is taken to advertisers page.

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The majority of these advertisements use a direct-link flow, which means they don't need a landing page or other pre-sell information. As an advertiser, when promoting search feed links, we're essentially pushing result feeds for certain keywords that someone else is bidding on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

There are two ways of doing social to search: When the visitor is supplied straight to the search page result with the promoted keyworthis is known as a 1-Click Flow. 2-Click Flow & 3 Click Flow – The visitor will be sent to the promotional intermediary page (like a prelander) with related search page listing that can lead to another search page result or Social to Search arbitrage is very similar to the Native to Search arbitrage since social media advertising is considered a native platform.

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How do you create social to search campaigns?

Well, the process of creating new campaigns is fairly simple. If you’ve ever worked in any type of online advertising, you will recognize similar patterns. First off, we do keyword research, using keyword research tools, to find out what terms are most commonly used and searched, and what is their average CPC bid.

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Once we determine which keywords we want to use, we start creating campaigns on Facebook ads manager. As for the objective of the campaign, it is common practice to use traffic or conversions. Here are some campaign setting recommendations from advertising experts: Audience - broad (some people prefer to target by interests, see what's best for your campaign) Geo-targeting - choose the location you want to target with your campaigns BidCap strategy - find CPCs that are as low as possible (some other people use only strategies such as Bid Cap to control the bids) After you finish these campaign setup steps, the only thing that's left is to write your headlines, descriptions, and landing page (if needed), and to put in search feed links that lead to the search page.

How it works

Sites like Info.com for example, buy up cheap clicks from Google on a broad variety of keywords. The landing page is basically just another search results page with Google Ads at the top...just like the original Google Search (screenshot below). Info gets paid when users click those ads.

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Above is an example of a landing page that clicking on the ad leads to. It is almost identical to the original Google search results page. The ads at the top are in fact Google Ads. Note: Search page results can be powered with other search page results like Yahoo and Bing.

Why does Google allow this?

These advertisers behind these sites are basically buying up the cheap clicks with low bids, and trying to get the users to click on the more expensive "brand" searches that they show at the top of their pages. If Google bought up their own cheap ads and showed people the more expensive ads again on a new page, this would probably be a massive conflict of interest. They are happy to outsource it to a few trusted partners.