Multichannel PPC Strategies: Reaching Audiences Across Platforms

If you’ve ever felt your ads are working brilliantly, but not as a team, you’re not alone. With so many platforms now involved in PPC, things can quickly become siloed, with search doing one thing, social doing another, and display picking up whatever is left over.

The result: missed opportunities, data that you can’t actually trace across the entire conversion journey, and messaging that doesn’t quite feel aligned.

Multichannel PPC strategy is the answer to these concerns, and it’s a highly effective way of bringing your marketing efforts together as one unit, while still making the most of what every platform is best at.

Let’s dive in and discover just how to execute the best multichannel strategy.

Benefits of integrated strategies

It’s not just about creating more diverse campaigns; multichannel PPC can bring in a wide variety of benefits across your marketing.

Improved attribution insights
If you’re creating PPC campaigns for multiple ad types, you’re also collecting data from a wider variety of sources. The benefit? You get to see not just how one platform is performing, but how its performance directly relates to the metrics of another platform, where you’re running another campaign. 

Multi-channel funnel reports show how paid search, display and social etc combine to drive a conversion (not just last click or any other single attribution). These have just been rolled out within UK Google Ads for Performance Max campaigns, so it’s a great opportunity to discover the latest offering from Google.

In short, custom channel groupings reveal hidden cross-overs between channels. 

Greater efficiency in budget use
Shifting your budget dynamically based on cross-channel performance can result in better ROI. It means you can push more budget towards channels that are really working, and prevent overspending on channels that aren’t producing results. Sometimes, well-performing platforms can surprise you, so it’s nice to have flexibility in your budget to accommodate pleasant surprises.

This strategy also avoids overbidding on top channels while ignoring supporting ones, too. As you can see where certain touchpoints are really adding value in the chain, even if they’re not directly bringing in conversions as end-of-funnel touchpoints. You’ll have data to back up why it’s worth spending more to keep secondary (but no less vital) channels running your ads.

Amplified reach and layering
Search captures high-intent users, while social and display build awareness and push mid-funnel. If you’re running campaigns across multiple channels, you get to benefit from the specifics of each platform’s most engaged audience demographics within the funnel, so there’s no need for restriction of reach.

Retargeting across channels reinforces your messaging without feeling repetitive, because you’re serving the same message through very different mediums. This reduces ad fatigue and can help your brand maintain engagement over a longer period of time.

Consistency in brand and messaging
If you’re splitting your marketing across more than just search alone, your integrated strategy can help solidify your brand “voice” and identity. Users respond to what they know and trust, and being a presence on more than one channel can be the difference between being remembered, and being forgotten.

Key platforms

Let’s dig into what each platform does best, so you can conscientiously pick the right platforms to engage with your audience in your next multichannel campaign. We’ve also included some tips on how you can get the best out of each platform.

Search

• Search remains one of the most integral platforms for capturing active intent within your audience.

• Use coordinated keyword strategies across channels to avoid internal competition.

• Implement negative keywords across channels to reduce overlap and waste. No-one wants to be paying twice for the same keyword!

• Use broad, phrase, and exact match targeting to cover stages of intent. This prevents overspending in the middle stages of the funnel, freeing up your budget for when it really counts.

Social

• The youngest of the PPC platforms, social is ideal for awareness and interest stages, with each social media app targeting a different demographic type.

• Use lookalike and interest targeting to seed audiences via AI-enhanced suggestions.

• Retarget site visitors with dynamic ads, reaching an already engaged audience.

• Tailor your creative assets to each social platform’s context (e.g. video, carousel).

Display

• Display is one of the most highly engaged-with channels in PPC today, with many users preferring to interact with video and image content.

• It’s a channel that favours reach, early-funnel users and remarketing especially well.

• Use contextual targeting and placement targeting to maintain controlled ad exposure whilst still inviting in new audiences.

• Apply frequency capping to avoid overexposure. Ad fatigue is rarely appreciated.

• Employ cross-channel smart bidding to unify targeting logic, especially when working with AI-enhanced bidding strategies.

Shopping (product listing ads, etc.)

• Shopping ads stand out visually in search results and are experiencing some of their highest levels of engagement ever right now.

• This channel is responsible for 76.4% of all Google Ads searches and spending in the US (Google).

• Segment product feeds into campaign groups for tighter control and detail in your campaigns.

• Automate feed syncing and monitor your feed health frequently to avoid missing any important warning signs in your data.

• Adjust bids by hour or day to capitalise on peak times and prevent wasted ad spend.

• Combine with branded search to ensure presence across multiple SERP formats.

Messaging consistency & measurement

The challenge with splitting your campaigns over multiple contrasting channels comes in maintaining a recognisable brand identity. While it might be easy to represent your brand in a search ad, would users be able to pick out your brand specifically in a shopping, display or search ad?

Welcome to your next challenge. Here’s how to approach it head-on:

Consistent messaging and creative
Your first step is to establish brand guidelines (tone, visual identity and core value propositions) across channels. If you keep it simple, and boil it down to the key elements, you avoid building things out to the point where they become only useful to one channel.

Ensure all your headlines, offers, and promotions are aligned across search, social, display, and shopping. Adapt formats per channel but preserve that core message and brand identity throughout. By keeping simplicity in mind, you only have to worry about a few key elements in each ad to maintain that brand recognition.

Top tip: vary your calls to action in line with the funnel stage (e.g. awareness vs. conversion). THis way you can keep your ad copy reasonably similar, but still target the right audience.

Measurement and attribution
As with any PPC campaign, success is in the data, and how you’re able to use it to further optimise your campaigns. Use Multi-Channel Funnel reports in Google Analytics to understand assisted conversions and each path to purchase. Customers are jumping from device and platform across their conversion journey, so it pays to understand their  preferred routes.

Set up “channel groupings” so all your marketing channels are organised in the same way. This makes it easier to compare their performance and gives you a single, consistent way to decide which channels deserve more budget.

Finally, avoid double attribution by organising suppressions and exclusions across campaigns, or splitting your campaign into different funnel stages that are exclusive to certain platforms. Again, simplicity tends to win-out here.

Examples of successful campaigns
To finish up, here are some examples of how you can curate a multi-channel campaign that matches your audience intent, industry niche and marketing goals.

Cross-platform lead generation: Start awareness on LinkedIn, retarget via Facebook and search to drive lead conversions.

E-commerce seller using search, shopping, and display retargeting: Search captures intent, shopping presents product imagery, remarketing display brings back users who are yet to make a purchase.

B2B long-cycle campaign: Introduce your audience to your brand initially via social, then search remarketing over several weeks, then retargeted display pushing a trial or demo.

Brand halo example: This is the Taylor Swift of marketing; where everyone knows your name, regardless of where they hang out online. Interwoven campaigns boosting brand perception and conversion lift across channels. This is a highly flexible approach that requires a hefty budget, but can produce staggering results.

Closing Notes

The best multichannel strategies don’t start with channels alone, they keep the focus on your audience; the people behind the conversions. Understanding your specific customer journey, where their touchpoints retain the most value, and how best to meet them where they already are, is the best approach to a cohesive multichannel approach.

Keep your messaging consistent across platforms, bring your reports together to see data as less siloed and more as a unit, and discover where the strongest overlaps are. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about being absolutely everywhere online, just everywhere that matters to your customers.