Paid Search & Social Social creates the demand. Search catches it.

Advertising is paying to put a message in front of people who didn't ask for it, in a place they're already looking: a search results page, a social feed, a video, a billboard, a podcast. An ad, an advert, an advertisement, all the same thing: the message itself, the listing above the organic results, the image and caption in the feed, the thirty seconds before the video. Advertising is one part of marketing, the paid-reach part. The rest of marketing is the unpaid parts: rankings, content, the email list, word of mouth, the product being good.

Two things changed when advertising went digital, and both change how you should run it. It's bought by auction instead of rate card, so the price depends on who else wants that audience at that moment, which means your cost is set by your competitors' desperation as much as by your own. And it's measurable down to the individual click, so "did it work" has an answer, or at least a number that looks like one. Most of what I do for a living is deciding which of those numbers to believe. The platforms produce all of them, and every platform's number says the platform is working.

Advertising is rented attention, priced by auction, measured by the landlord.

To advertise a business, first decide whether your customers are already looking for what you sell or need to be shown it, because that one question picks the channel. People who are searching get reached by search ads: Google, Microsoft, Amazon if you sell there. People who aren't searching yet get reached by social and video: Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest. Nearly every business needs some of both, and the mix follows the demand, not the sales rep.

The sequence that doesn't burn the first ten thousand dollars:

1. Measurement before the first dollar. Conversion tracking on the site: a Google tag, a Meta pixel with the Conversions API behind it, GA4 with key events. An ad you can't measure is a donation to the platform. I've watched companies spend six figures before anyone checked whether the purchase event fired.
2. Start with the channel closest to the purchase. For most businesses that's search, because the intent is explicit. Branded search first, non-branded second. Yes, branded, even though "they were going to find us anyway"; you'll learn more about your own funnel from a $300 brand campaign than from any report.
3. Start small and specific. One campaign, one audience or keyword group, a daily budget you can afford to learn with. Broad targeting on day one buys expensive lessons from the algorithm.
4. Give it enough volume to read. Fifty or more conversions in a campaign before you judge it. The platform's bidding needs that many to optimize, and so do you. Judging a campaign on eight conversions is reading tea leaves with a spreadsheet.
5. Change one thing at a time and write down what and when. The campaign log is the most valuable document in paid media, and almost nobody keeps one. Without it, every result is a story.
6. Expand into the next channel only once the first one has a cost per acquisition you can live with. Not before.

Advertising your company as a whole, including the routes that don't involve buying anything, is on the marketing reference. Advertising on Amazon specifically, which has its own physics, is on the Amazon reference.

Measure, then search, then small, then wait for fifty. Every expensive paid media mistake is one of those four skipped.

PPC is pay-per-click: you pay when someone clicks the ad, not when it's shown. Search ads on Google and Microsoft are PPC. So are shopping ads, and so are most Meta, LinkedIn and Amazon campaigns when they're billed by click rather than by impression. "PPC marketing" and "PPC advertising" mean the same thing, and in practice people say PPC when they mean paid search.

Cost per click, CPC, is the price of one click, and it's set by an auction that runs every time your ad could appear. Each advertiser bids a maximum; the platform combines the bid with a quality estimate (expected click-through rate, relevance, landing page experience) to rank the ads; the winner pays roughly the minimum needed to beat the next ad down, not the full bid. CPCs run from cents to over a hundred dollars depending on how much the click is worth to someone: insurance quote and personal injury lawyer at the top, "what is a marketing funnel" at the bottom. Your category's CPC is a measure of how badly your competitors want that click. It's a fact about them.

What makes PPC different from the other half of search, SEO, is the on-off switch. Paying for clicks buys position for exactly as long as you keep paying. Ranking organically takes months and then keeps paying out. Run well, PPC also produces the fastest honest evidence you'll ever get of which queries convert, which is the list of queries worth ranking for. That's the relationship between the two: paid tells you where to dig; organic is the well.

You pay per click, the auction sets the price, and the price is a measurement of your competitors' appetite.

Google Ads is Google's advertising platform: ads on Google Search, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and the Display Network of partner sites. It was AdWords from 2000 until July 2018, when Google renamed it; AdWords and Google Ads are the same product, and anyone still saying AdWords in 2026 has been doing this a long time or is reading from an old deck. Search engine marketing, SEM, is the general term for buying ads on search engines, which in practice means Google Ads plus Microsoft Advertising.

How it works, for search: you choose keywords, the queries you want your ad to show for, and write ads for them. When someone searches, an auction runs among every advertiser whose keywords match. Each ad gets an Ad Rank from bid times Quality Score (Google's 1-to-10 estimate of expected click-through rate, relevance to the query, and landing page experience) plus the effect of ad extensions. Higher Ad Rank gets the higher spot; the winner pays just enough to beat the ad below. Keywords carry a match type, broad, phrase or exact, that controls how loosely the query may match, and broad match is where budgets go to die when nobody's reading the search terms report. "AdWords keywords" are just the keywords in a campaign, with their match types and bids.

What it costs: there's no minimum spend and no setup fee. You set a daily budget per campaign and pay per click, or per thousand impressions on video and display. You do not buy keywords; you bid for clicks on them, and the auction sets the price. In the US in 2026 the average search CPC across industries sits in the low single dollars with enormous variation: retail and ecommerce commonly $1 to $3, home services and B2B software $5 to $15, legal, insurance and finance regularly above $20. A realistic test budget for a small business is $1,000 to $3,000 a month, for long enough to accumulate conversions. Below that, the data is too thin to learn from, and you're paying for clicks you can't interpret.

Beyond search, the same account runs Shopping campaigns from a Merchant Center product feed, product ads with image and price; Performance Max, which runs across every Google surface from one campaign with Google's automation choosing where, and which reports beautifully because it grades itself; and YouTube and Demand Gen, which reach people by interest before they search. The old Google Ads certification question, which targeting option is best for brand awareness, has the textbook answer affinity audiences: people grouped by long-term interests and habits, used on Display and YouTube to reach a broad relevant audience rather than people already in market. The textbook answer is correct. It is also how a lot of awareness budget gets spent without anyone checking whether awareness moved.

You bid for clicks, Quality Score discounts the price, and the account's own reporting will always tell you it's working. Read the search terms report.

Facebook and Instagram ads are the same product. They're bought through Meta Ads Manager and run across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Meta's Audience Network from one campaign. To advertise on either you need a Facebook Page (and an Instagram account connected to it for Instagram placements), a Meta business portfolio, an ad account with a card on it, and, if you intend to measure anything, the Meta pixel on your site with the Conversions API behind it, because the pixel alone now misses a large share of conversions in browsers that block it.

Running a campaign in Ads Manager follows the three-level structure. The campaign sets the objective: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, sales. The ad set sets the audience (location, age, interests, custom audiences from your own data, lookalikes), the placements, the budget and the schedule. The ad is the creative: image or video, primary text, headline, call to action, destination. Meta's Advantage+ settings hand targeting and placement decisions to the algorithm, and in 2026 that usually beats manual targeting once the pixel has seen enough purchases to learn from. The honest implication: your audience settings matter less every year and your creative matters more, because the creative is now the targeting.

What Facebook ads cost: no fixed price, no minimum beyond a daily floor of about a dollar per ad set for impression-based campaigns and a few dollars for conversion campaigns. Pricing is by auction, billed per thousand impressions or per click. In the US in 2026, typical ecommerce CPMs run roughly $10 to $20, typical CPCs roughly $0.50 to $2.00, and cost per purchase varies so much by product and creative that any benchmark is close to meaningless. The only useful number is your own, after a few hundred dollars of testing. Costs climb hard in the fourth quarter when every retailer on earth is in the same auction.

Boosting a post is the simplified version, and I'd keep it that way. The Boost button on a Page or Instagram post turns the existing post into an ad with a small set of audience and budget choices. Fine for putting a popular post in front of more of your followers. Wrong tool for anything that needs real targeting, conversion optimization or measurement, because it hides most of Ads Manager's controls and usually optimizes for engagement, which is the metric most easily mistaken for a result. Anyone spending more than pocket money builds the campaign in Ads Manager.

The creative is the targeting now. The platform's cost-per-purchase will look better than your bank account's; believe the bank account.

Advertising on social media is buying placement in the feeds and stories of a platform, targeted by who people are and what they've shown interest in, rather than by what they're searching for. It's the demand-creation half of paid media. Search catches people who already want something; social puts something in front of people who didn't know they wanted it. Run one without the other and you're either harvesting demand you never planted or planting demand you never harvest.

Each platform has a character, and the character matters more than the targeting options. Meta (Facebook and Instagram): the largest reach, the most mature conversion optimization, the broadest demographic; the default for consumer brands, and the one that will claim credit for every sale it was anywhere near. TikTok: younger, video that has to feel native and gets stale in a week, and a Shop integration that makes it a direct sales channel in some categories. Pinterest: closer to search than to social, because people arrive planning a purchase; home, fashion, food, events. LinkedIn: expensive per click and the only reliable paid route to a defined professional audience, which is why B2B tolerates the price. YouTube: video advertising bought through Google Ads. Snapchat, Reddit and X: secondary for most advertisers, worth a test where the audience obviously lives there and not otherwise.

Two things are true on all of them, and they're the two things the platform reps won't lead with. First, creative does the targeting now: with the platforms automating audience selection, the ad itself decides who responds, so volume and variety of creative matter more than any audience setting. Second, the platform's reported results overstate its contribution, structurally, because it claims every conversion it touched and it touched most of them. Google, Meta and Amazon will each report the same purchase as theirs. Add the three together and you've counted one sale three times and congratulated three vendors. The real read comes from holdout tests and a measurement layer that sits above all of them, which is what the paid search and social service is for and the reason it exists.

Every platform grades its own homework and every platform gets an A. The sale happened once.