Paid search or paid social: which consultancy do you need first?

Paid search and paid social are often bought as a pair, from the same agency, under the same retainer. They do quite different jobs. Search answers demand that already exists: someone types what they want, and your ad appears at the moment of intent. Social creates demand: it puts a product in front of people who were not looking for it, and gives them a reason to care.

That difference decides where specialist help is worth paying for first, and what good looks like in each channel.

On Google and Microsoft Ads, the auction does a lot of the work. The levers that separate a strong account from an average one are mostly commercial and structural:

• What the bidding optimises towards: revenue, margin, new customers or simply conversions.
• How the budget is split between brand, generic and shopping traffic, and whether brand spend is buying sales you would have had anyway.
• The quality of the product feed, which decides what Shopping and Performance Max can show.
• Which search terms deserve investment, and which are quietly absorbing spend.
• Whether the conversion data the bidding learns from is accurate.

A good paid search consultant spends most of their time on those decisions, not on writing more ad variations.

On Meta, TikTok and similar platforms, the targeting is now largely automated. The algorithm finds the audience, so the biggest lever left in your hands is the creative. That changes the job:

• Building a steady supply of creative, with distinct angles rather than small edits of one idea.
• Testing with a clear question, so each round teaches you something about the customer.
• Reading results across the whole business, because social often drives sales that appear in search, direct and email.
• Watching how much spend reaches new customers rather than people who would have bought anyway.

A good paid social consultant is as much a creative strategist as a media buyer.

Start with search when

• Customers already search for what you sell, and you are not yet capturing that demand profitably.
• Your range is large and product-led, so the feed and Shopping campaigns carry most of the revenue.
• Search spend is significant, but nobody can say how much of it is brand traffic that would have converted anyway.

Start with social when

• Your product is new, visual or needs explaining, so few people know to search for it yet.
• Growth depends on reaching new customers rather than converting existing demand.
• Creative output is the bottleneck: the same few ads have been running for months.

Look at both together when

• Search brand volume moves when social spend changes, which usually means social is creating demand that search then captures.
• Each platform claims credit for the same sales, and the totals add up to more than the business sold.

In that last situation, the most valuable work is not inside either channel. It is the measurement that shows what each one is really contributing, so budget can move between them on evidence.

Specialists bring depth: a paid social consultant who lives in creative testing, a paid search consultant who knows feeds and bidding inside out. One partner covering both brings a single view of how the channels affect each other. Either can work. What matters is that someone owns the joined-up picture, because channel teams that report separately will each, quite reasonably, make the case for their own budget.

Ask how they would decide whether the next £1,000 should go to search or social. A strong answer talks about incrementality, margin and new customers, and admits what cannot be measured precisely. A weak answer points to platform ROAS.