• What is paid media?  Any paid promotion of content or offer.  This type of media can include native advertising, text ads, paid influencers, display ads...anything that requires a cost to air. (More on the difference between earned, paid and owned media)
• Paid Media vs Organic:
  • Search Engines Paid Media vs Organic: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about optimizing your website to rank higher in the search results in places like Google or Bing.  Paid Media in this case is also widely known as PPC advertising which involves paying those search engines to display your ads at the top of the search results or in their networks. Should you do one or another? Search engines are very crowded spaces, even after your best efforts applying your best SEO efforts (and we all should apply them), your website may still be in page 10 of search results. Paid Media gives you a "leg up." It helps place your company, product or special promotion in front of the audience you are looking for. This doesn't mean you can neglect SEO, because a well optimized website is needed for potential customers to find you, or even for returning customers if they have only a bit of information to go on and look for you on a search engine.
  • Social Media Paid Social vs Organic: Facebook defines organic reach as "how many people you can reach for free on Facebook by posting to your Page." This definition can be equally applied to every social channel. Paid Social Media is the moment you start giving that social channel any money, even if all you are doing is "boosting" your post. Should you do one or another? We think you should do both. Organic reach is decreasing and you may only be reaching 4% of your audience for free right now. If you really need to reach all of your followers (who are probably your best target audience), you will need to pay for 96% of your followers to get that very important post.

• Paid media metrics: The importance of each metric you want to look will vary depending on your goals. If your goal is to increase awareness then good metrics to look at include impressions, reach, frequency and engagement (likes, shares, views and comments). If the goal is to generate leads then the metrics we would focus on are clicks, CPC, leads, CPL and CTR (Click Through Rate). Finally, if the goal is sales, we would definitely look at Orders, CPO, average sale conversion rate and lifetime value of customer.  (Here are some term definitions to get you started)
• How to optimize paid media: Simple…the A/B Test. Try A, then try B. Test different pictures, different text, different call to action (CTA), different buttons, different formats and even bidding strategies. Test everything in a methodical way and once you have determined your most optimal ad, test again.

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By Naira Perez