Social Media Marketing: Foundations to Practice · Paid Social Advertising
Budgeting, Bidding, and Testing
Paid social budgets are most often wasted not through bad targeting, but through undisciplined testing practices. This chapter covers how to test rigorously without wasting spend.
A common budgeting mistake is allocating spend disproportionately toward bottom-of-funnel conversion campaigns without sufficient investment in the awareness and consideration campaigns that build the audience those conversion campaigns eventually draw from, which tends to produce a shrinking, increasingly expensive pool of ready-to-convert prospects over time as the top of the funnel is neglected.
Key Takeaways
- Over-allocating budget to bottom-of-funnel conversion campaigns without top-of-funnel investment shrinks the prospect pool over time.
- Automated bidding generally suits advertisers without deep platform expertise; manual bidding offers more control for experienced advertisers.
- Paid social A/B tests should change one variable at a time and avoid calling a winner during the volatile learning phase.
- Changing multiple variables simultaneously makes it impossible to attribute performance changes to any specific variable, wasting the test's value.