Instacart today became the first retail media network to integrate directly with TikTok Ads Manager. This will allow CPG advertisers to use Instacart’s first-party retail data to target audiences, measure conversions, and drive shoppable experiences – all without leaving TikTok’s platform.
The integration marks a major step in the convergence of retail media and social commerce. By embedding Instacart’s targeting and closed-loop measurement capabilities into TikTok, brands can connect with high-intent consumers at the exact moment of inspiration and track their impact through purchase.
Why we care. For CPG advertisers, this partnership removes a friction point – tying social engagement directly to grocery purchases. It enables smarter audience targeting, more personalized creative, and real-time performance insights within TikTok’s ecosystem, where over 180 million monthly U.S. users can discover products.
The details. Advertisers can now:
Target high-intent shoppers using Instacart audience segments.
Power shoppable TikTok ads with grocery selection data from Instacart.
Measure campaign performance daily through Instacart’s closed-loop conversion data.
Omnichannel marketing is a way to make your brand feel the same everywhere: website, email, ads, social, SMS, app, and in-store. People can start on their phone, switch to a laptop, and buy later without friction.
Why is this important?
Your customer doesn’t think in channels. They see one brand. If your ads, emails, site, app, and store don’t match, money slips through the cracks. Omnichannel marketing closes those gaps and moves more people to buy.
But how many more people are buying from omnichannel campaigns versus single-channel campaigns?
A lot, actually.
An Omnisend study found the purchase rate of omnichannel marketing campaigns to be 287% higher than single-channel campaigns.
Creating a seamless experience for your customers means better brand perception and higher revenue. It’s a real win-win.
This guide walks you through omnichannel marketing strategy benefits, best practices, and examples. By the end of it, you’ll understand what goes into creating an omnichannel campaign that drives results.
Key Takeaways
Omnichannel marketing creates a seamless customer experience across every touchpoint, including website, email, ads, SMS, social, app, and in-store.
Brands using an omnichannel strategy saw purchase rates 287 percent higher than single-channel campaigns in one study.
Unlike multichannel marketing, omnichannel connects your data and messaging across platforms so everything works together, not in silos.
Benefits include better customer experiences, stronger brand recognition, more personalization, higher loyalty, and increased revenue.
To get started, map your customer journey, centralize data, integrate your channels, and follow clear brand guidelines for a consistent feel.
What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is a marketing strategy that seamlessly integrates all of a business’s marketing channels to create a cohesive shopping experience for each customer.
As customers move through the sales funnel, an omnichannel strategy ensures all touchpoints seamlessly speak to each other so that no matter where a potential customer makes contact with your business, it feels like the same channel.
Here’s how it looks in practice.
A customer might check out a product on a brand’s website. They decide they’re not yet ready to make a purchase, but then they’re met with ads for that product across different social media channels. They can easily click through and buy the product, even though it’s not the same channel they initially used to shop.
This is what omnichannel looks like on a small scale. At enterprise scale, the same idea gets bigger. Your teams share a single customer profile, so service reps, store staff, and ads all see the same context. POS and ecommerce pull from the same inventory. Loyalty rewards apply online and in-store. Buy online, pick up in store just works.
That’s an omnichannel marketing strategy: connect data and creative across channels so customers move forward, and your revenue does too.
Omnichannel Marketing vs. Multichannel Marketing
Before we dive deeper into what omnichannel looks like, let’s talk about how it differs from a similar tactic called multichannel marketing. Both obviously occur across different channels. But they work slightly differently.
Omnichannel marketing uses multiple channels, but it ensures that all channels are integrated seamlessly, creating a connected experience. Meanwhile, multichannel marketing just occurs across different channels, treating them more as separate entities than trying to build an interconnected ecosystem.
Multichannel is useful for quick reach and simple campaigns. Think one-off promos, early tests, short cycles, or when tools and data are basic.
Omnichannel is best for cross-device shoppers, syncing online and in-store experiences, and longer, more complex customer journeys.
Bottom line: start with multichannel, then shift to an omnichannel marketing strategy when you’re ready to connect data and deliver one continuous experience.
Why Omnichannel Marketing Is Important
Your buyers don’t stick to one platform. They search on Google, watch a review on YouTube, see a Reel, ask ChatGPT for a product comparison, click an email, price-check on Amazon, and walk into a store. If you only optimize for organic search, you miss the moments that push customers to act.
Omnichannel marketing lets you show up at key points in the customer journey and connects those touchpoints so the experience feels cohesive. Your ad matches the email. The site matches the app. The cart follows the customer across devices. Service and store teams see the same history. That consistency builds trust and cuts friction, which leads to more sales.
An omnichannel marketing strategy also spreads risk. If one channel slows down, you still have paid social, SMS, marketplaces, and retail working together.
It improves measurement, too. Shared data tells you which mix drives first purchases, repeat orders, and higher order values.
People discover, compare, and buy across many platforms. Brands that coordinate messages and data across those platforms win more often. If you’re serious about growth in today’s digital world, build an omnichannel marketing strategy so your brand is clear, consistent, and present at every step.
Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing has a number of benefits. These advantages can provide your business with better results and happier customers.
Think of omnichannel marketing as the glue that holds your entire shopping experience together.
Improved Customer Experience
Omnichannel marketing focuses on creating an interconnected experience no matter where your customers are interacting with your business. Because of this, it creates a seamless customer experience that’s vastly better than if the different channels couldn’t speak to each other.
Here’s what that means for customers: progress carries over (carts, wish lists, support tickets), and context follows them from device to device. If they ask a question on chat, your email workflow resurfaces it. If they browse a size in the app, your site remembers.
Abandon cart emails are great examples of omnichannel marketing in action. A customer visits your website and adds an item to their cart. They leave your site without completing the purchase. That action is sent to and triggers an ‘Abandon cart’ workflow in your email marketing platform.
They receive an automated email with the item in their cart and some encouraging words and/or a discount to get them to complete the purchase.
An omnichannel marketing strategy reduces repeats, dead ends, and mixed messages so buyers feel understood and move forward faster.
Better Brand Awareness
Creating a consistent experience across platforms (including in-store) makes it easier for customers to recognize your brand. Plus, as more people have positive omnichannel experiences with your brand, they’re more likely to share it with their friends and family, boosting word-of-mouth referrals and awareness.
Consistency is a key component of a strong brand strategy. When people see the same appearance, messaging, and offers across channels, recall and trust in your brand grows. Pair that with targeted campaigns across search, social, and marketplaces, and your brand shows up more often for relevant terms with the same look and promise.
Personalization
When your marketing channels speak to each other, you’re presented with even more opportunities for gathering customer data that can be used to personalize experiences across all channels, and not just the ones they’ve used before. This personalization is just another way to improve the overall experience with your business, making it easier for customers to work with you.
Use customer actions, like product views, cart adds, and website searches to customize messaging. Recommend items that fit past behavior, pause promos after a purchase, and nudge at the right time (not just more often). Keep consent and preferences front and center.
Done well, omnichannel personalization feels like help, not hype.
Customer Loyalty
As customers discover how easy it is to work with your business, they’re more likely to stick around and continue to buy from you again and again. Why bother finding a competitor if your business has created such a seamless shopping experience?
Loyalty grows when every interaction feels smooth and familiar. Connect rewards across store and online, recognize returning customers, and close the loop on issues fast.
Use lifecycle triggers, like welcome, re-engagement, and win-back, to stay relevant without spamming. The easier you make repeat buying, the less tempted people are to price-shop elsewhere.
Competitive Advantage
Just like we mentioned, there’s no need for customers to shop around and test out your competitors if you’ve provided such a great shopping experience. Omnichannel marketing gives you a major competitive advantage, fueling more of your target audience to head straight to you rather than others in your industry.
Most teams still run channels in silos. You’ll move faster because your data, inventory, and messaging are already in sync. Creative can be reused, offers are consistent, and measurement is clearer. That speed compounds into lower costs and better customer outcomes, an edge that’s hard to copy without a true omnichannel strategy.
Higher Revenue and Conversion Rates
Naturally, if people are sharing their positive experiences, sticking around longer, and ultimately having a great relationship with your brand, you’re going to reap those benefits in the form of higher revenue and conversion rates. Which is the ultimate goal, right?
More relevance and less friction mean more adds to cart, more checkouts, and bigger orders. Omnichannel marketing also improves attribution, so you can double down on the mix that actually drives purchases and repeat business.
Over time, the flywheel kicks in: Better data leads to sharper targeting, which leads to stronger retention, which leads to higher revenue.
Best Practices for an Effective Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
Your goal is simple: build an omnichannel marketing strategy that feels consistent everywhere and moves people forward. Start with what customers do today, not what you wish they did. Then connect the channels and tools you already use, fill the gaps, and measure what actually changes behavior.
Follow along with these steps to learn more about creating an effective omnichannel marketing strategy that will boost your customer satisfaction.
Collect & Analyze Customer Data
Start by centralizing truth. Pull website analytics, email metrics, ad performance, POS data, support logs, and audience sentiment into one view so you can spot insights like:
The channels your customers prefer to use when interacting with businesses
Which devices your customers spend the most time on
The types of messaging that seem to resonate most with them
How your customers feel about your current shopping experience
Then, pick an attribution model that fits your business. Each model is tailored to different types of customer journeys and campaign goals.
For example, position-based tracking is better for businesses with longer sales cycles, like B2B and lead gen. And data-based attribution is great for omnichannel e–commerce strategies, marketplaces, subscription apps, and retailers with steady traffic.
Check out the graphic below for a full breakdown of attribution models you can use to measure the success of your omnichannel marketing efforts.
Map Out the Customer Journey
Your next step is to map out your current customer journey. Outline each step that a Your next step is to map out your current customer journey. Outline each step that a customer would have to take from first discovering your business all the way to becoming a repeat customer.
As Matthew Santos, SVP of Products and Strategy at NP Accel, explains, “Customer journey mapping involves visualizing a customer’s various touchpoints with your brand, from initial awareness to purchase and beyond. By understanding these touchpoints, you can identify which channels are most important at different stages of the journey.”
To create your map:
Identify your customers: Identify your customers’ names, addresses, and other demographic information. Look in your CRM or use a current buyer persona.
Understand their pain points: What drives your customers to make a purchase? What challenges do they want to solve?
Find out where they hang out: What platforms do your customers use during the purchase process?
Track the conversion path: How do most of your customers convert? Their path is unlikely to be straight. They might visit your website, view your Instagram reels, and then purchase in-person, in your store. Aim to define the most common paths.
In the end, your customer journey map might look something like this:
Now it’s time to identify and integrate your different sales and marketing channels, which could include:
Social media
SMS marketing
Email marketing
Your website and online store
A physical store
A mobile app
Make sure to include all channels that you’re currently using to reach your target audience plus any channels you’ve discovered your customers prefer.
For example, you might not have previously incorporated SMS messaging into your overarching marketing strategy, but your customer data analysis showed you that your target audience prefers that method of communication.
Once you’ve selected the different channels you’ll use to communicate, market, and sell to your customers, it’s time to get them to work together.
To properly integrate your marketing avenues and create a successful omnichannel strategy, you’ll need the right technology. Some tools to consider include:
CRM: A CRM can help you store customer information so that it’s accessible across channels. It can also help you segment out your audience to create even more tailored and personalized experiences. Omnisend is a great option for building out specific segmentations.
Marketing Automation Software: To build an effective omnichannel marketing strategy, you need marketing automation tools to engage more on social media, send scheduled emails, or move users through the conversion process. Many tools you already use, like email marketing, CRMs, and social media management, have built-in automation features. You can also use a tool like Zapier to build custom triggers.
Social Media Management Tools: This type of tool can make it easy to communicate with your audience across various platforms. Get access to a social inbox that puts all conversations across all platforms in one single messaging dashboard. Use auto-replies or canned responses that ensure communication is consistent across the board. Hootsuite and Sprout Social are both great options to consider for your social media management.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): A CDP pulls data from all your touchpoints—site, app, ads, email, POS—into a single customer profile. That unified view makes it easier to segment audiences, personalize campaigns, and keep experiences consistent across channels. Tools like Segment or mParticle help you clean, connect, and activate data without needing a dev team for every change.
Once you’ve set up the right tools and integrated all your channels, it’s time to make sure your teams are all on the same page. If your customer support team is using different messaging than your social media team, your overall strategy is going to feel disjointed.
By creating documented brand guidelines that cover how your customer-facing teams should be communicating with customers and talking about your products, you can ensure your channels feel connected.
Your brand guidelines should include things like:
Guidance for brand visuals, like logos, imagery, colors, and graphics
How to handle customer support issues or questions to create positive and consistent experiences
Tone and voice guidelines with “do’s and don’t’s” examples
Copy guidance with channel-specific examples (e.g. email subject lines vs. educational blog content)
Legal guidelines on what you can and cannot discuss, if applicable
Share your brand guidelines with your entire team and make sure everyone is familiar with them. Give constructive feedback when you see people straying.
Brand consistency is the glue that holds an omnichannel marketing strategy together.
Test & Measure Your Efforts
After sharing your brand guidelines across your company and implementing your omnichannel approach, it’s time to test everything out. Run through each of your marketing channels the way you might if you were a new customer to make sure the experience feels seamless from discovery to purchase.
Then, think about how you’ll measure success.
In omnichannel marketing, you need to consider metrics that touch every part of the funnel. For example:
Discovery: Impressions, educational blog traffic, mentions in the media
Consideration: Engagement on social media, product views, visits to company pages
Conversion: Orders, checkout rate, CPA
Loyalty: Repeat rate, time between orders, customer reviews
Use clean UTM rules, consistent naming, and dashboards that show both channel and journey views. Review the data weekly for anomalies, monthly for trends, and quarterly for bigger bets.
3 Examples of Omnichannel Marketing
Let’s look at a few examples of omnichannel marketing in practice so you can get an idea of what this could look like for your own business.
1. Sephora
Sephora offers an amazing omnichannel experience for its customers. First-time customers are able to sign up for a Sephora account using their phone number, and then keep track of all purchases there.
Customers can figure out what they’ve purchased before and when, which makes it easier for them to restock on the products they love. It also makes it easier for the marketing team to tailor messaging and special offers to each customer’s unique shopping preferences.
Sephora accounts also track customer rewards points, as well as when their birthday month is. Whether they make a purchase online or in the store, Sephora sends the customer a little sample-size product as a birthday gift.
This omnichannel strategy makes shopping with Sephora feel easy and personal, no matter where someone is making a purchase.
2. Starbucks
The Starbucks app makes for an amazing omnichannel experience that the coffee brand’s customers love. Not only can customers order through the app then pick up in a nearby store, they can also reload gift cards, pay in-store, earn and redeem rewards, and more.
The app also makes it extremely easy to find stores near you and personalizes its offerings based on the local weather. Starbucks is already a wildly popular coffee chain, but their omnichannel marketing strategy helps boost sales even more.
3. Target
Target is another great example of what omnichannel should look like. Again, customers can create an account and easily track past purchases so they can reorder products again and again with ease.
Target also has its own rewards program called Target Circle that allows users to rack up rewards they can put towards future purchases.
But one of the best things about Target’s omnichannel strategy is that customers can check online if a product is in stock at stores near them. And it’s wildly accurate, even during huge sales events like Black Friday.
The Future of Omnichannel
Omnichannel isn’t standing still. AI, automation, and privacy changes are reshaping how brands connect with customers. Search engines and social platforms now answer questions directly, sometimes before a click. In fact, nearly 60% of searches result in zero clicks.
So how does this apply to an omnichannel marketing strategy?
For marketers, it means two things.
First, you’ll need stronger first-party data—think email lists, purchase history, loyalty programs—to fuel your targeting as third-party cookies fade. Second, you’ll need systems that can use that data in real time, adjusting offers and content across every channel without manual work.
Expect channels themselves to keep expanding. Voice assistants, connected TV, chat apps, and even in-car systems are becoming part of the customer journey. The brands that win will be the ones that stay consistent across all of them.
The future of omnichannel marketing is smarter, faster, and more connected. Get your data house in order now so you can adapt as AI and new platforms evolve.
FAQs
What is omnichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is the practice of connecting all your marketing and sales channels so customers get one seamless experience. Instead of each channel running in isolation, they work together. For example, a shopper might browse on mobile, add to cart on desktop, and finish in-store, with their data and offers synced across all steps. This consistency builds trust, reduces friction, and increases conversions by making every touchpoint feel like part of the same journey.
What is the difference between multichannel and omnichannel marketing?
Multichannel means using multiple platforms, but each runs separately. Omnichannel connects those platforms so the experience is unified, not siloed.
How to implement omnichannel marketing?
Start by collecting customer data, mapping the journey, and picking channels your audience uses most. Then integrate tools like CRM, automation, and analytics to sync messaging and measure results.
Create Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy Today
Your customers want an omnichannel experience, so it’s your job to give it to them. Figure out how to make your channels work together so your customers get a personalized, consistent, and seamless experience every time they shop with your business.
Sounds like a lot, but if you follow the steps above, you can start to build a more cohesive journey for your customers. And if you’re looking for additional help, an omnichannel marketing agency like NP Digital can bring your strategy to life.
ChatGPT recommends products — complete with photos, pricing, and purchase links — to its 700 million weekly users.
And now customers can complete purchases without leaving the chat.
BIG deal.
But will ChatGPT recommend your products?
That’s not automatic. And you can’t pay for placement.
What you can do is optimize your site so ChatGPT understands what you sell, trusts your brand, and surfaces your products when buyers search. This guide shows you how.
You’ll learn the eight-step framework for getting featured in ChatGPT Shopping.
I also spoke with Leigh McKenzie, Backlinko’s Head of Growth and founder of the ecommerce brand UnderFit, to get his insights on what’s actually working.
First, let’s look at how ChatGPT decides which products make the cut.
How ChatGPT Shopping Works
ChatGPT Shopping kicks in automatically for some shopping intent prompts.
While it doesn’t fire every time, I found it appears more often than not after testing 100+ prompts.
The key? Typing a prompt with clear buying intent.
Like “e-bikes that can handle potholes.”
Instead of just explaining things or offering advice, ChatGPT Shopping recommends specific products.
This includes product images, pricing, and links to online stores and websites where users can make a purchase.
Side note: The ChatGPT Shopping experience isn’t consistent. Even with the same prompt, the carousel may (or may not) show. It can also appear at the top, middle, or bottom of the chat. This variability suggests the feature is still evolving.
If your store gets recommended, countless high-intent shoppers will see your products.
For example, when I tested the e-bike query, ChatGPT gave me a brief explanation of what features to prioritize.
But it also provided a visual product carousel with eight products, each in its own card with key details.
(It looks similar to Google Shopping ads, except you don’t have to pay for them.)
Clicking on any card opens a side panel with:
Additional product photos
A list of stores, prices, and direct links
A short “why you might like this” summary
Sentiment pulled from reviews and forums
From there, users simply click “Visit” to reach the merchant’s product page.
But this experience is changing.
As of September 2025, OpenAI is rolling out Instant Checkout — a feature that lets shoppers buy directly inside ChatGPT.
This is a huge shift.
ChatGPT is no longer just a product discovery tool. It’s a full shopping destination.
Right now, Instant Checkout is only available to Etsy sellers in the United States.
But OpenAI plans to expand this feature to Shopify merchants and other countries soon.
Not on either platform?
They’re also accepting applications for merchants to build their own integrations. (More on this in Step #7.)
How ChatGPT Selects Products to Recommend
A shopper describes what they’re looking for (“running shoes with arch support under $150”), and ChatGPT’s AI goes to work.
It scans the web for the most relevant products based on that request.
And weighs details like product names, descriptions, features, reviews, brand authority, and other signals to find the best matches.
If your product checks the right boxes — and the information on your site is clear and crawlable — it has a chance to be recommended.
ChatGPT may also consider the user’s location and preferences when making recommendations.
Ultimately, all product recommendations must also pass through OpenAI’s safety systems.
This filters out low-quality, misleading, or unsafe products.
So, what does all of this mean for you?
ChatGPT Shopping is evolving fast — and the brands that keep up will win the most visibility.
Here’s how to ensure ChatGPT can understand, trust, and recommend your products.
1. Add Structured Schema Markup to Your Site
ChatGPT needs structured data to understand what you sell.
Schema markup is code that labels key details on your product pages (and website as a whole): name, price, description, availability, reviews, and more.
It turns raw HTML into data AI tools can parse instantly.
Without it, ChatGPT (and other AI systems) have to guess what’s on your page.
With it, they see clean, structured information they can confidently include in product recommendations.
At a minimum, your product schema should include:
Product: Name, description, brand, image, and identifiers (GTIN, SKU, MPN)
Offer: Price, currency, availability, and URL
Review: Individual reviews with reviewer names and ratings
It may look intimidating, but many content management systems — like WordPress, Shopify, and Wix — offer plugins or built-in tools that generate the markup for you automatically.
Once your markup is in place, test that it’s working correctly using Google’s Rich Results Test or Schema.org’s validator.
These tools make it easy to check that your structured data is valid, visible, and error-free.
Pro tip: Go beyond the schema basics. Add AggregateRating for average review scores or FAQPage markup to answer common buyer questions. The more context you provide, the easier it is for AI to surface your product in response to specific prompts.
2. Create and Maintain a High-Quality Product Feed
A product feed is a structured file that packages up your product details and sends them to platforms like Google Merchant Center, Shopify, and Etsy.
It includes details like titles, prices, availability, images, links, and more.
ChatGPT may use data from major platforms like Google to decide which products to recommend.
Pro tip: Want to add your product feed directly to ChatGPT? OpenAI will notify interested merchants when this feature is available. Fill out the Merchant Application form for consideration.
For example, if your Google Shopping feed is outdated, incomplete, or inaccurate, ChatGPT may return bad information about your products.
Or skip recommending them entirely.
That’s why a high-quality, up-to-date product feed is critical.
Side note: If you’re on an ecommerce platform like WooCommerce or Shopify, feeds are usually created automatically.
But keeping feeds accurate is easier said than done.
There are a lot of moving parts, like site updates, refresh schedules, and third-party tools.
And it only takes one slip for mismatches to creep in.
Here are a few common product feed issues — and how to fix them:
Product Feed Problem
Why It Happens
Fix
Price Mismatch
Feed not refreshed, sync delay
Enable daily/real-time feed updates. Use one consistent pricing source.
Inaccurate availability
Inventory updates on site, but feed refresh lags
Sync stock levels in real-time whenever possible. Double-check before campaigns.
Wrong or Truncated Title
Feed title auto-truncated or different from H1/meta
Align feed titles with on-page H1/meta. Keep product names consistent.
Incorrect image
Feed defaults to first gallery image
Set hero/product image as primary in CMS and feed
Missing reviews
Reviews hidden in JS or not in schema
Add Review and AggregateRating schema in HTML
Conflicting schema
Multiple apps/plugins overwrite each other
Use one schema source. Validate with Schema.org or Google’s Rich Results test
Automation keeps most updates in sync. And manual checks before major launches or sales help catch anything that may slip through.
Here’s how Leigh maintains a balance of the two for his ecommerce store:
“I keep all my product data in a spreadsheet. Whenever I change a product detail, I update it there first. WooCommerce uses that data to update my site’s pages and schema automatically. Then, Channable takes the same spreadsheet and syncs those updates into my product feeds. That way, my site and my feeds are always pulling from the same source, so everything stays consistent.”
3. Make Sure AI Bots Can Read Your Site
If ChatGPT can’t read your site, it can’t recommend your products.
Two simple technical issues block many ecommerce sites from showing up: hidden content and restricted crawlers.
Check for JavaScript
Many AI bots — including ChatGPT — still struggle with content that only loads via JavaScript.
If key details aren’t in the page’s raw HTML, the bot might never see them.
This includes your product descriptions, prices, and images.
Eek.
Here’s how to check if that’s happening:
Pull up a product page on your website or online store
In Google Chrome, go to “Settings” > “Privacy and security” > Site Settings
Under “Content,” click “JavaScript” and toggle “Don’t allow sites to use JavaScript”
Reload the product page you’re testing
If your product details disappear, it means they’re only loading through JavaScript.
To fix this, work with a developer to ensure all essential information is in your site’s raw HTML.
They’re onboarding merchants on a rolling basis and will reach out when you’re accepted.
Once you’re in the pipeline, you’ll need to:
Provide a structured product feed that meets OpenAI’s product feed specs. Leigh recommends starting with your existing Google feed and updating it as needed to meet OpenAI’s requirements.
Enable ACP checkout. ACP lets ChatGPT place and complete orders in your system. If you’re on Stripe, setup can be as simple as one line of code. If not, you can still integrate using Stripe’s Shared Payment Token API or the Delegated Payments Spec — no provider switch required.
Connect your payment provider. You’ll still process transactions and remain the merchant of record.
Pass certification requirements. OpenAI requires sandbox testing and end-to-end checks before you go live.
Pro tip: Even if ChatGPT Instant Checkout isn’t available for your store yet, preparing your product data, feeds, and backend now will help you move faster when it is. This should give you a head start as this feature gains popularity.
8. Track Your ChatGPT Visibility
It’s not enough to show up in ChatGPT Shopping.
You also need to measure how well you’re performing.
Start with tracking traffic.
The easiest way is through OpenAI’s built-in UTM tag.
utm_source=chatgpt.com
This is code that OpenAI automatically adds to all outbound links. And looks like this:
Set up a custom segment in Google Analytics to track and analyze ChatGPT traffic to your site.
Once that’s done, look for patterns:
Is ChatGPT traffic increasing month over month — or slowing down?
How does the conversion rate compare to other channels?
Do visitors stick around or bounce right away?
Side note: Not every ChatGPT mention will be traceable. Some users see your product in a chat and search your brand directly on Google instead of clicking. Look for spikes in branded search traffic or direct visits to gauge the broader impact of LLMs.
But traffic only tells you what happens after people click.
You also need to measure what happens before — specifically, which prompts surface your products.
To do this, it helps to understand the kinds of prompts shoppers type.
Most fall into four buckets.
Price-based: “Best dog food bowl under $20,” “luxury ceramic dog bowl”
Use-case: “Dog bowl for messy eaters,” “raised bowls for large breeds”
Feature-based: “Non-slip stainless steel dog bowl,” “slow feeder BPA-free”
Problem-solution: “Dog bowl that keeps ants out,” “dog bowl that doesn’t slide on tile”
Think of these buckets as templates.
Test prompts in each category and ask yourself:
Does your product show up? If so, are the details accurate?
If not, who does — and why? (Are their reviews fresher, their authority stronger, or their copy closer to buyer language?)
Repeatedly run these checks to gather more data.
You’ll learn which prompts lead to product mentions, how your LLM visibility changes, and how buyers talk about your brand.
Rather automate this process?
Tools like Semrush’s AI SEO Toolkit let you:
Track which prompts surface your products
Monitor brand sentiment
Compare visibility in different platforms
Beyond ChatGPT Shopping: Your AI Visibility Playbook
There isn’t a magic formula for getting ChatGPT to recommend your products.
But the brands that consistently get recommended all have three things in common:
A rock-solid technical foundation
Clear, buyer-focused product copy
Strong trust signals across the web
Get these right, and you’re not just optimizing for ChatGPT Shopping.
You’re setting yourself up to be discovered across EVERY AI platform out there.
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Turning paid ads into profit is a proven path to scalable, predictable growth.
When you nail it, paid media gives you a steady stream of customers, without depending on Google’s latest update or social media’s shifting algorithms. In fact, digital ad spend hit $259B in 2024 and is expected to keep growing.
But which channels are right for you? How can you weave them together into an effective strategy? And what’s the best way to measure your performance?
Here’s what you need to know.
Key Takeaways
Paid media is any form of advertising you pay to place on platforms you don’t own, like Google ads, Facebook posts, banner placements, or influencer partnerships.
The big three categories are display ads (banners and videos that stand out), native ads (sponsored posts that blend in), and traditional media (billboards, TV, radio).
Search ads and influencer partnerships are the most trusted paid channels because they catch people with intent or leverage existing relationships.
A winning campaign has seven steps: get your team aligned, set specific goals, budget for real costs (not just ad spend), know your audience, pick the right channels, create compelling ads, and optimize relentlessly.
Track five key metrics: return on ad spend (ROAS), overall return on investment (ROI), cost per click (CPC), impressions, and click-through rate (CTR). These tell you whether you’re making money or just spending it.
Paid Media Basics
Paid media is any kind of promotion that meets two criteria: it happens on a platform you don’t own, and you pay for it.
Banner ads are everywhere, like the ones shown in the Wired article below.
Paid media drives real revenue, whether you’re running a startup or managing a global brand.
In research from my team at NP Digital, we found that paid ads make up a meaningful chunk of revenue across businesses of all sizes.
Paid Media vs. Earned Media vs. Owned Media
Think of marketing like a three-legged stool. The three legs here are paid, earned, and owned media.
Understanding how they work and how they work together can help you build a strategy that covers your blind spots and scales over time.
As mentioned earlier, paid media is any promotional placement you pay for. Think search ads, social ads, banner placements, influencer partnerships, and more.
Earned media is unpaid publicity that your business receives from other people and websites. It’s what others say about your brand mentions in news articles, influencer shoutouts, customer reviews, backlinks, or viral social shares.
Owned media is the stuff you fully control. Your website, blogs, social media accounts, newsletters, and email list, fall into this category. You manage the content, the experience, and the message.
Here’s how they fit together:
Paid media helps you get visibility fast, especially when you’re just starting out or entering new markets
Owned media builds trust, it’s where your brand message lives
Earned media amplifies both. It kicks in when people start talking about what you’re already doing well
The best campaigns use all three. Paid gets attention. Owned keeps it. Earned multiplies it.
Categories and Examples: Paid Media in the Wild
Paid media is evolving fast. Search, social, video, and display are table stakes, but newer formats are gaining traction too, including ads inside large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Even with all this growth, most formats fall into three core categories: display, native, and traditional. There’s often overlap between them, but these labels help keep things simple.
Display ads: These are visually distinct image, video, and text ads that appear alongside content on the web. Website banners, YouTube ads, and interstitial pop-ups are all examples.
Native ads: These are ads that fit within the flow of content and are often indistinguishable from it at first glance. Influencer recommendations, advertorials, and sponsorships are well-known forms of native advertising.
Traditional media: Commercials, billboards, and direct mail are examples of traditional media. You don’t get the same tracking or targeting you’d see with digital, but these channels still play a role in large-scale brand awareness.
Now that we’ve covered the broad categories, let’s break down some of the most common paid media channels, and where each one fits.
While Google Ads dominates the space, Bing Ads (now part of Microsoft Advertising) can offer lower CPCs (cost per click) and a different audience, especially for B2B brands. Amazon Ads also work well for product-heavy businesses.
We foundthat search ads across platforms drive some of the highest conversion rates in paid media, second only to channels like LinkedIn and influencer marketing.
Here’s what the advertising process looks like:
Open an account with the ad network (like Google or Bing)
Choose the keywords you want to appear for, such as “gardener in Arizona”
Set your maximum bid for those keywords (top bidders appear first)
Create your advertisement, which will be text-based
Launch your campaign and let Google serve your ad on relevant SERPs
The benefit of SEM is intent. You’re targeting users who are already searching for what you offer, which puts them closer to a buying decision.
And if you’re willing to bid competitively, your ad can appear above the organic result, even above your competitors.
Here’s an example of search engine ads for the keyword “paid media consultant.” Note the “Sponsored” label, which helps users distinguish paid ads from organic results.
Third-Party Banner Ads
Banner display ads are shown on a third-party online property, usually a website or app.
Most people think banner ads only appear at the top of pages. Not true. Inline banner ads also show in the flow of content. A banner ad is simply a square or rectangular display ad (an ad that is distinct from surrounding content).
NP Digital research shows that banner ads are the least trusted of all paid media formats, underperforming search and influencer ads significantly.
That said, banner ads are good at raising brand awareness. As customers see the same ad repeated across different websites, “brand memory” strengthens. The average person needs to see a brand at least seven times before they make a purchase.
Here’s an example of a fairly conspicuous banner ad on UK news site the Daily Mail:
The Google Display Network, the world’s biggest display network, consists of over two million websites and mobile apps that businesses can display their ads on—reaching 90 percent of web users worldwide. When someone clicks on an ad, Google Ads and whoever hosted it share the spoils.
Paid Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is big business. The global market was worth an impressive $252.95 billion at the end of 2024, and this is set to grow in the future.
According to NP Digital research, Facebook generated over $100 billion in ad revenue last year, making it the top-performing social ad platform. Instagram followed at $70.9 billion.
Here’s an example of paid media advertising on Facebook. This sponsored post is by McDonald’s and appears in relevant customers’ newsfeeds, enticing them to try their $8 Chicken McNugget Meal. These ads blend into the feed but still offer clear calls to action.
And it’s not just for B2C. In the LinkedIn ad below,Microsoft targets professionals in banking with an ebook download offer.
Social ads work because they meet people where they’re already scrolling. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population has at least one social media account.
Even better, social platforms give you advanced targeting tools. Most platforms let you target people by age, gender, and location, as well as their hobbies and other social media accounts they follow.
Video Advertising
Video content gets more engagement than static text or images. In fact, one NP Digital study found that short-form and long-form videos accounted for 31.38% and 15.51% of all engagement, respectively.
That kind of engagement makes video a powerful paid media tool, especially on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.
Video ads show up before or during content users are already watching.
What makes video ads effective is how they combine storytelling with visual cues. Create a stylish, funny, or cool video, and people will naturally want to discover your brand. Like display ads, videos are great for capturing people’s attention on mobile as well.
In-App Ads
In-app ads are paid placements that show up inside mobile apps while someone is using them. These can be banner ads, video ads, interstitials (full-screen takeovers), or rewarded ads where users watch a video in exchange for in-app perks.
You’ve probably seen these in gaming apps, news apps, or streaming services. They appear between levels, in feed scrolls, or before content loads.
These ads work well if your audience spends a lot of time on mobile, and even better if you’re targeting users by behavior, interest, or location. App data gives you targeting options you won’t always get on the open web.
Performance varies by industry, but in-app ads tend to perform best for consumer apps, entertainment, retail, and local services.
Digital Out of Home (DOOH) Ads
DOOH ads are digital billboards, transit screens, and signage in public spaces. You’ve seen them in malls, airports, gas stations, elevators, and even gym treadmills.
Unlike traditional out-of-home ads, these use screens and software, which means you can update them in real time and target by location, time of day, or audience segment.
They’re a great fit for local campaigns, brand awareness pushes, or national advertisers who want visibility in high-traffic areas. You won’t get click data, but they can be effective for driving searches, visits, and offline conversions.
DOOH is especially useful when paired with mobile or geotargeted campaigns. Seeing a screen ad in a gym, then getting a related offer on your phone, is the kind of multi-touch experience that performs well.
Connected TV (CTV) and Over-the-Top (OTT) Advertising
Connected TV (CTV) and Over-the-Top (OTT) ads show up inside streaming content, on platforms like Hulu, Roku, YouTube TV, and Peacock. These are the ads you see while watching shows or movies on smart TVs, streaming boxes, or even mobile apps.
The big difference? CTV runs on television screens. OTT can run on any device.
These ad formats are great for reaching cord-cutters who’ve moved away from traditional cable. They’re also more trackable than old-school TV ads, with options for targeting by location, device, behavior, and even interests.
CTV and OTT ads are especially useful for brand awareness, product launches, and retargeting. You can run short video ads in high-attention environments—and often get better completion rates than on social.
Large Language Model (LLM) Ads
LLM ads are an emerging format of paid placements that appear in large language model tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. These ad types are still in the early stages, but they’re gaining momentum as AI assistants become part of everyday search behavior.
Right now, some platforms are testing sponsored response blocks or product carousels within AI-generated answers. These typically appear when users ask for recommendations, product ideas, or service comparisons.
For marketers, LLM ads offer a new way to show up during early-stage research, especially in verticals like travel, consumer products, software, and education.
Unlike traditional search ads, these placements are more dependent on content quality and relevance than keyword bidding. That gives brands with helpful, trustworthy content an advantage.
This space is still evolving, but it’s one marketers should keep a close eye on. Testing early gives you a head start as AI search platforms build out their ad offerings.
Sponsorships and Advertorials
Sponsorships, advertorials (paid articles), and influencer marketing are the most prominent examples of paid native advertising.
These ads blend in with regular content.
Here’s an example: an article written by a company executive who’s part of Forbes Council, a paid program that entitles members to publish a set number of articles every year. It looks like editorial content, but it’s paid for, and the author gets guaranteed publishing rights.
Sponsored posts are everywhere, especially on social. The Instagram post below is clearly labeled as a “Paid partnership with Gymshark.” This post feels authentic because it comes from a trusted influencer, not a brand’s ad account.
Along with that, since the influencer has a loyal, engaged following—the post has over 140,000 likes—the ROI will likely be positive for the advertiser.
What makes these work? Trust. When the message comes from someone users already trust, it tends to land better, and perform better.
Benefits of Paid Media as a Marketing Channel
Here are some key benefits of paid media for marketers:
You have more control. As you pay to advertise, you get more say over your ad’s appearance. Conversely, if you submit a press release to a publication, they may edit it to suit their in-house tone of voice.
You get immediate visibility. Search engine optimization (SEO) costs less than paid media, but it can take three to 12 months to see optimal results. With paid media, if you’re happy to pay, you can appear in front of prospective customers immediately.
You can measure results. Paid ads platforms offer detailed analytics so you can see how your ads are doing. Some even provide a quality score so you know which campaigns you need to optimize.
You can tailor your ads. You can target your ads to specific groups of customers and even tailor content toward a location. This increases the chances of people responding positively to your advertisements. Similarly, you can advise who you don’t want your ad to show to.
You can implement automation. You can be as hands-on or hands-off with your advertising as you want. For example, Google Ads offers automated bidding where it automatically optimizes your bids to appeal to people more likely to help you achieve your goals.
Top 5 Paid Media Metrics for Paid Media
You could track dozens of metrics, but these five matter most.
There are lots of metrics you can use to track the success of your paid media campaigns. The risk is that you get lost in a sea of data.
I recommend a simplified approach. One that lets you hone in on channels with potential, drop those that aren’t working, and demonstrate a clear ROI throughout.
Here are my top five metrics for paid media:
These give you a clear picture of performance and help you decide where to optimize or pull back.
Return on ad spend (ROAS): ROAS tells you how much revenue you’re generating for every dollar spent on ads. It’s important to measure this separately because it’s the first thing you need to remedy if you’re not achieving a positive ROI overall. If your ROAS drops, you may need to adjust your targeting, creative, or offers.
Return on investment (ROI): This is the big one. If you’re generating more from your paid media campaigns than it costs to run them, you’re on the right track. Account for everything—creative costs, time managing ad accounts, A/B testing, etc.—and not just the ad platform fees. Paid media without ROI is just spend. Use this number to decide whether to scale or pause.
Cost per click (CPC): This is the average amount you pay whenever someone clicks on your ad. Ideally, this should be as low as possible. It’s a ripe area for optimization. CPC is most useful when viewed alongside CTR and conversion rate. A low CPC doesn’t help if nobody converts.
Impressions: This is the total number of times users see your ads. A high reach shows that you’ve chosen a channel that gives you exposure to a large audience, which is important for brand building. Low impression count? It might be time to evaluate the reach of your chosen channel. Impressions alone won’t drive results but they show whether your ads are getting visibility in the first place.
Click-through rate (CTR): This is the percentage of people who see and click on your ad. A high CTR shows that people find your ad interesting and valuable.
How to Create a High-ROI Paid Media Campaign: 7 Steps
Paid media can generate traffic, leads, and revenue, but only if you approach it with a clear plan. Skipping strategy and jumping into ad spend is one of the fastest ways to burn through your budget.
Because large amounts of money are involved, caution is your ally. Many businesses burn through cash before giving up on paid media, wondering what went wrong.
Your paid media strategy should clearly cover the following:
Which internal stakeholders you need to include
Goals you want to achieve
Characteristics of your audience
Platform-specific budgets
Viable paid media channels
Products and services you want to promote
Metrics for gauging success
The process doesn’t need to be complicated. These seven steps will help you build a campaign that’s focused, efficient, and ready to scale.
1. Obtain Internal Stakeholder Buy-In
Getting buy-in goes beyond simple approval. Your team needs to fully understand what’s happening, why it matters, and what role they play.
Start by identifying who needs to be involved. At a minimum, that usually includes:
Sales (if the campaign impacts lead gen or pipeline)
Don’t wait until after launch to bring these teams in. Paid media works best when everyone is aligned from day one.
Set up a short kickoff meeting to walk through the campaign plan. Cover what you’re promoting, who you’re targeting, what platforms you’re using, and how results will be reported.
It doesn’t have to be a big formal process. A shared doc, quick sync, or even a Slack thread can go a long way.
The goal is to eliminate surprises and make it easy for other teams to support the strategy.
2. Set clear goals and KPIs
You need to know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish. Metrics are important (we’ll come to those later), but goals lay the foundation.
If you don’t know what success looks like, it’s easy to waste money. That’s why clear goals are the first thing to lock in, before budgets, platforms, or creatives.
Start by asking one question: What do you need this campaign to accomplish?
This could include:
Lead generation
Product sales
Free trial signups
App installs
Event registrations
Traffic to a specific landing page
Brand awareness in a new market
Be specific, not general. “More leads” isn’t a goal. “Generate 250 demo requests this quarter at a CPL (cost per lead) under $80” is. Pass your goals through the SMART test: are they Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely? The more detailed you make the goals, the easier they will be to achieve.
After that, you can pick KPIs and metrics that match your objective, which we will be talking about in a little bit.
3. Determine budget
With paid media campaigns, it’s essential to set a budget and stick to it. Many paid media platforms let you set a definite upper limit for your ad campaigns. If you exceed this budget, the platform stops showing your ads.
Your budget isn’t just ad spend, but it fuels the entire campaign. Along with the baseline budget for your paid media ads, you must also consider additional costs. These include ad copywriting, graphic design, and videography. If you use an agency, you’ll have to cover ongoing account management fees.
Start by figuring out what success looks like. If your goal is to get 100 leads at $50 each, you’ll need to spend at least $5,000 in ad budget alone. That’s your baseline.
Then add in the supporting costs:
Ad creative (copy, graphics, video, landing pages)
Tracking and analytics setup
A/B testing budget to compare variants
Management costs if you’re outsourcing or using tools
Different platforms also have different minimums and cost expectations. Running paid social on Facebook or Instagram can be more flexible for smaller budgets. Search ads on Google or Bing often require more competitive bidding to see traction.
Don’t spread your budget too thin. It’s better to run fewer campaigns with enough spend to test and optimize properly, instead of trying to be everywhere with limited reach.
And whatever number you start with, keep a reserve. Paid campaigns almost always need tweaking in the first few weeks.
4. Know Your Audience
The more specific you get with your targeting, the less you waste on clicks that go nowhere. If you’re paying for media on a publication or newsletter, you can compare your ideal customer profile (ICP) to the audience specs.
Research all the following points for your ICP:
Industry or niche
Company size or household income
Job titles or demographics
Location
Pain points and goals
What platforms they use most
What influences their buying decisions
Here’s how your audience research translates into paid media results:
Ad platforms: Choose based on where your audience actually spends time
Creative: Match tone, visuals, and messaging to their mindset
Offers: Promote what solves their problem, not what you want to sell
Targeting settings: Use demographics, behaviors, and interests to narrow reach
Retargeting: Build separate campaigns for cold traffic vs. returning visitors
The goal is to reach the right people at the right stage and give them a reason to click.
5. Choose Channels
Not every platform fits every goal. The right channel depends on who you’re targeting, what you’re promoting, and how fast you need results.
Take the following into consideration when choosing where to advertise:
Use search ads (like Google or Bing) if you’re targeting high-intent keywords. People searching are already looking for solutions.
Use social ads (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn) to create demand or raise awareness. These platforms are great for targeting by interest, behavior, or job title—even if people aren’t actively searching yet.
Use display or retargeting to stay in front of people after they’ve engaged. These can bring users back to your site to finish what they started.
You can also learn a lot by seeing where your competitors are advertising. Tools like Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center, and manual Google searches will show you what channels they’re using and how often they show up. Look at their messaging, creative, and landing pages. If it’s working for them, it might work for you.
Budget matters, too. Some platforms are better suited to lower ad spend. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok can give you meaningful reach on a modest budget. Search or YouTube may require more competitive bidding to see real traction.
For smaller budgets, focus on one or two channels where your audience is most active. Don’t try to be everywhere if you can’t afford to run meaningful tests.
And don’t lock yourself into one format. The best campaigns evolve. Start with the highest-potential channel, then expand once you’re confident in performance.
Don’t be afraid of being “loud”—you want an ad that customers stop and look at.
Keep your ad copy clear and concise.
User-generated content and testimonials show prospects why existing customers love your brand.
If you’re using search advertising like Google Ads, take advantage of assets that tell customers more about your business for no additional cost.
Run multiple variants of your ads from the get-go for some quick A/B test wins.
But good creative is more than just how your ad looks, it also covers what you say and how fast you get to the point. Lead with the benefit, keep the message tight, and match your CTA to the user’s intent.
Make sure your offer matches the awareness stage also. A discount works well for bottom-of-funnel buyers. But for top-of-funnel, try a quiz, guide, or video to build interest first.
Finally, try to avoid launching with just one ad. Rotate in multiple headlines, formats, and visuals early so you can learn what actually converts before you scale spend.
In addition, some paid media platforms have ad libraries where you can see examples of paid media ads from your competitors. Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, LinkedIn, and Google Ads all have libraries. They’re fantastic sources of inspiration.
7. Optimize Your Campaigns
Like all digital marketing campaigns, paid media is not something you can set and forget. When it comes to optimization, little and often wins the race.
I recommend checking your paid media accounts at least once a week, even once a day if you’re running a short-term campaign.
Paid media is excellent for running multivariate and A/B testing. You can create multiple ad versions with small differences—such as CTA texts or color schemes—and test them against statistically significant sample sizes.
But don’t stop at testing creative. Optimization includes your audiences, bidding strategy, landing pages, placements, and even campaign structure.
Here’s what to review regularly:
Which ads are getting clicks but not conversions? Pause or adjust those.
Which campaigns are spending without results? Reallocate that budget.
Are certain audiences or geos outperforming others? Double down where it counts.
Is your cost per result trending up or down? That’s your early warning system.
Document what you’re testing and why. Optimization doesn’t mean quickly reacting without thinking. Your team needs to learn over time and building a smarter strategy with every round.
Paid Media and AI: Trends You Need to Know
AI is already shaping how campaigns are built, optimized, and scaled. My team and I ran research looking at AI vs. human-generated ads, for example, and found that AI ads converted at 1.28%, less than half a percentage point below human ads, which converted at 1.54%. Yes, human ads performed better. But not by a huge margin.
I would urge digital marketers to keep the following four points in mind when it comes There are already a growing amount of applications for AI in the world of paid media:
Marketers are using AI to:
Write ad copy faster (especially for high-volume campaigns)
Build and test ad creative using AI image and video tools
Generate audiences automatically based on existing customer data
Optimize budgets in real time across channels
Predict what offers or creatives will perform best, before spending anything
These aren’t experimental use cases anymore. They’re being built directly into the tools marketers already use.But things are changing fast. Here’s some key points to keep in mind:
Paid media isn’t going anywhere: Most paid media channels will remain viable. People will continue to read their favorite publications, open newsletters, follow influencers on social media, listen to podcasts, and so on. Even if traditional SEO and search ads vanish, LLMs like ChatGPT will need to monetize at some point.
Revenue from ads provides stability: As AI changes the way people consume content online, revenue from ads can actually provide more stability. Unlike organic traffic, they’re not dependent on algorithms over which you have no control.
Paid media helps you build brand citations: Branding will be more important than ever in the age of AI. Citations around the web are one of the ways LLMs identify and measure the relevance of your business to a particular query. For example, if “NP Digital” appears often in AI training materials next to “advertising agency,” my brand is more likely to be referenced in response to related questions.
Now is the time to start experimenting with AI: As was shown in the research by me and my team, AI can perform nearly as well as humans. For a head start when AI is truly ready to assist with paid media campaigns, you should start experimenting and learning now.
That said, AI is a tool, not a strategy. You still need strong positioning, good creative, and clear goals. But if you’re not testing AI workflows now, you’re going to fall behind the brands that are.
Should You Focus on One or All Channels?
Most marketers think they need to be everywhere. That’s usually wrong.
To be clear, I’m a big proponent of omnichannel digital marketing.
When you’re everywhere, you reach more of your prospects. Yet you would be amazed at how many businesses fail to grasp this simple fact.
With that said, for paid, omnichannel may sound great, but isn’t always the right move.
With large amounts of money at risk, you need to do two things: research and test.
If you’re just getting started with paid media, stick to one or two platforms where your audience is most active. That gives you enough budget and data to learn what works without spreading yourself too thin.
Once you’ve found a winning message and offer, then it makes sense to expand. You can start repurposing creative, retargeting across platforms, and building a true full-funnel system.
Here’s the truth: omnichannel paid marketing only works when you have the team, budget, and systems to support it. Otherwise, it turns into a mess of disconnected campaigns.
Ask yourself:
Do you have the creative capacity to build for multiple formats?
Do you have enough budget to collect meaningful data across platforms?
Can you track performance in a way that ties everything together?
If the answer is yes, go for it. If not, focus and scale intentionally. The best paid media campaigns start small, then scale up.
FAQs
What is paid media?
Paid media refers to any marketing or advertising content a brand pays to place on a third-party platform. Common examples include search engine ads, social media ads, display banners, video ads, influencer sponsorships, and traditional placements like radio, print, or TV.
The key benefit of paid media is the ability to generate visibility and traffic quickly, often with precise targeting and measurable results. Brands typically use paid media to reach new audiences, promote offers, or support other marketing efforts. It works best when paired with earned and owned media in a broader strategy.
How often should you evaluate your paid media budget?
Most brands should evaluate their paid media budget weekly. This allows time to monitor spend, performance, and early signals on what’s working.
For short-term or high-investment campaigns, daily budget checks are recommended to catch issues before they impact results.
Monthly or quarterly reviews are useful for larger budget adjustments, channel planning, or reallocation based on return.
Consistent monitoring ensures your budget is supporting your goals and allows for real-time optimizations, rather than reactive fixes after performance dips.
How do you build a paid media strategy?
A strong paid media strategy starts with setting a clear objective, such as lead generation, product sales, or brand awareness.
From there, define your target audience and select platforms that align with where they spend time. Creative should match the platform and campaign goal, while KPIs like ROAS, CPC, or conversion rate help track progress.
Budget should be allocated based on priorities and expected return, with room for testing.
Successful strategies are built on iteration—launching, analyzing, and optimizing based on what the data shows.
What’s the difference between earned media and paid media?
Paid media includes advertising you pay for, such as social ads, search ads, sponsored content, and display banners. It gives you control over placement, timing, and messaging.
Earned media refers to organic exposure you don’t pay for—such as press coverage, backlinks, user reviews, or social shares.
While paid media drives immediate visibility, earned media builds trust and long-term authority. Most marketing strategies benefit from a mix of both, with paid media often used to accelerate early reach.
Conclusion
Most marketers treat paid media like throwing money at a wall and hoping something sticks. That’s expensive and frustrating.
The brands winning with paid media treat it like a system. They start with one platform, nail their message and targeting, then scale what works. They track the right metrics, test relentlessly, and aren’t afraid to kill campaigns that aren’t delivering.
If you’re just getting started, pick Google Ads or Facebook—whichever platform your audience uses most. Set a budget you can afford to lose while you learn. Create multiple ad variants from day one so you can see what resonates.
The app marketing space is hugely competitive, and at the same time, data privacy has become the defining challenge for marketers. From Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) to Google’s Privacy Sandbox, user-level tracking is harder than ever. To stay competitive, you need partners that give you visibility while keeping you compliant. Among these, one of your most important allies is your Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP). MMPS play a central role in any app’s marketing strategy, both for user acquisition and retention.
Key Takeaways
MMPs unify your data: They consolidate insights across paid, owned, and earned channels in one dashboard.
True performance visibility: Go beyond just installs by tracking cost per impression, click, install, and deeper engagement metrics.
Better budget allocation: Identify which channels deliver real value and optimise spend accordingly.
Unlock user insights: In-app event tracking shows not just where users come from, but what they do after downloading.
Essential for privacy-first marketing: MMPs help navigate iOS privacy changes and ensure accurate measurement.
Stay scalable: They simplify your tech stack, replacing multiple SDKs with a single, integrated solution.
What is an MMP?
App marketers typically run user acquisition (UA) campaigns across multiple platforms and channels, including:
Paid – Meta, Google, Snapchat, TikTok, Apple Search Ads, etc.
Owned – Website, blog, email
Earned – App reviews in independent magazines and review sites
Source: Apple Search Ads
All this activity should lead to people downloading and installing your app, all of which is great, but also meaningless if you can’t track which activity generated each download. And in today’s privacy-first ecosystem, that visibility is harder to achieve than ever. With Apple and Google limiting user-level tracking, attribution can feel like a black-box.
An MMP helps you cut through the complexity by attributing, collecting, and organizing app data in a privacy-first way, delivering a unified view of campaign performance across channels, media sources, and ad networks. It gives you this visibility of which channels are performing, and which aren’t.
For each channel, it will deliver metrics such as:
Cost per impression
Cost per click
Cost per install
Cost per acquisition
These insights enable you to optimise your marketing spend towards the best-performing channels so that you can scale up your UA activities most efficiently. This is particularly important when you consider that app user acquisition costs have increased by 60% in the last five years, reaching an average of $29 per user in 2024, according to research from SimplicityDX, reported by Business of Apps. Understanding where your budget delivers the best results is essential for staying competitive.
But it doesn’t stop at downloads. The data MMPs generate enables you to dig deeper into the value of each install by looking at what happens “down-funnel” by setting up in-app events.
Use In-App Events to Generate Valuable Insights from your MMP
In-app events allow you to track what users do in the app after installing it. Each event is a key conversion point in the user’s journey through the app. They will differ depending on the type of app, but will typically include things like:
User registration
Newsletter sign up
Clicks on a push notification
Makes a purchase
Join your loyalty program
You can set up the in-app events that are most relevant to your app and most useful in understanding the value of each user. Your MMP then enables you to track these back to where the install came from. This might reveal, for example, that Meta generates twice as many installs as Apple Search Ads, but that the users who install after clicking on an Apple Search Ads spend three times more in the app than those who came in via Meta.
Simplified Reporting in one Dashboard
An MMPdelivers all these insights in one unified dashboard, across all the platforms you use to find new users. It’s a far easier way to get a consolidated, real-time view of what’s happening. Even if you’re only active in one or two channels, the insights an MMP delivers into things like Customer Lifetime Value, churn, and conversion against the in-app events you set up far exceed what each platform will typically offer in terms of reporting.
The Benefits of Using an MMP
In summary, the key benefits of using an MMP are:
Unified reporting across all platforms in one dashboard
Granular insights into cost per impression/click/install, customer lifetime value, churn, conversion in in-app events
Insights that enable you to optimise your marketing spend and better allocate your budget.
Why Skipping an MMP is a Risky Move
Falling Behind in Privacy Compliance With iOS privacy updates transforming the landscape, MMPs are critical for adapting to new tracking systems and ensuring accurate data collection. They provide the agility needed to stay ahead in a rapidly changing privacy environment.
Misleading Performance Data Without an MMP, you’re forced to rely on self-attribution from platforms like Google, which often overinflate their numbers. We’ve seen examples of platforms over-reporting key metrics like installs, leading to inaccurate performance insights. This kind of misreporting can lead to budget misallocation and misguided strategy decisions.
Missing out on Critical Insights MMPs allow you to measure and optimise performance beyond just installs, providing a more comprehensive view of user behavior and value. Leveraging MMP data can reveal that a lower CPI doesn’t always translate to higher-quality users. By analyzing the relationship between CPI and downstream metrics like trial start rates, marketers can refine their bidding strategies to drive better results. Without an MMP, such nuanced insights, and the resulting optimizations, wouldn’t have been possible.
Overcomplicating your Tech Stack Skipping an MMP requires integrating multiple SDKs, such as Meta, which not only complicates the setup but also raises significant data and privacy concerns.
Setting up your MMP for Success: Best Practices
Most of the main MMP providers will have integrations across your tech stack, but this is a point worth checking with them when you are assessing providers. If the MMP is integrated across your tech stack, it will be easier to set everything up and gain the insights that will feed your app’s success. For example, if you have already set up in-app events in an in-app analytics tool such as Mixpanel, these can be carried across to the MMP platform to avoid duplicating effort.
1. Define the In-App Events to Optimize Towards
The first step to maximizing the investment in your MMP is to define the in-app events you want to track.The chosen events should reflect meaningful interactions that signal user engagement or progression toward higher-value actions. It’s vital to define these events, not only to monitor when and how frequently they occur, but also to optimise your user acquisition campaigns to align with each funnel stage. Once the user completes an event, i.e.., installs or registers, the point of optimization within the campaigns may change to encouraging conversion to purchase, for example.
2. How many In-App Events should I Track?
It’s not possible, or even desirable, to track everything that happens in your app. We normally recommend around 5-10 in-app events. These should be the key points you want users to convert against, and the ones you can optimise your campaigns towards. Events should describe an action a user takes and should be a combination of a verb and noun, for example:
Registration Completed
Watched Video
Product Page Viewed
Purchase Completed
Subscription Purchase Completed
Event names should be easy to read and not overly descriptive. Upper/lower casing is supported, and it is recommended that the verb should be in the past tense (see the example below).
Once you have defined the in-app events, create a tracking plan that details the naming convention for each event (e.g. subscription purchase completed); the point where it triggers (once a user selects the ‘confirm payment’ button on the billing page); and any parameters that provide more detail on that event (e.g., ‘monthly’, signaling that it is the monthly subscription they’ve purchased), then pass that onto your developers to in build as part of the SDK setup. Now you’re ready for testing.
3. Test Everything to Ensure Success
Testing is vital to ensure that your app behaves as it should and that the in-app events are triggered correctly. Once the in-app events are set up, set up an app testing account to simulate the potential user journey and ensure the events show within the MMP testing environment. Use this account to complete each in-app event, ensuring that:
The events are triggered at the appropriate points
The tracking is functioning properly
The data returned is accurate and reliable.
How to Choose the Right MMP to Boost your App’s Growth
Choosing the right MMP to work with is all about finding one that is best aligned with your needs and expectations. Choosing the best mobile attribution platform is a detailed process, but essentially this breaks down into four key areas:
Cost and scalability – When allocating your budget for an MMP, you need to look at the bigger picture. As you expand your marketing efforts using an MMP, the associated costs are likely to rise, not just from increased spending on channels but also due to the higher volume of reported conversions within the platform. Remember to evaluate these costs and ensure they remain within your budget as your campaigns grow.
Functionality – Ask yourself, does the MMP do everything you need it to do? For example, does it provide a holistic view across multiple traffic sources and in terms of the granularity of data you require to understand each channel’s performance? Or, can it show you how much it’s costing you to acquire a click and a conversion?
Support level provided – Are you looking/able to run everything on the MMP platform yourself, or do you need the support of a managed service? Consider the level of support the MMP offers, especially for troubleshooting setup challenges or addressing questions about the data displayed in the platform.
Tech stack integration – Consider what level of integration the MMP offers with your existing tech stack, including in-app analytics tools, CRM tools, and DMPs (Data Management Platforms), and any other tools that you rely on to market and sustain your app.
Final Word: Making the Smart Choice
Even the best app needs a constant influx of new users to replace those who churn and deeper engagement with loyal users. Your MMP is key to achieving this, offering a unified view of marketing performance across platforms. It reveals how many installs each platform drives, their cost, and long-term value. Without an MMP, you’re marketing blind as ASO’s future rapidly evolves.
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-09-30 19:00:002025-09-30 19:00:00Why A Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) Is Crucial In A Privacy-First Mobile Ecosystem
Google is piloting a Labs section inside the Google Ads platform, giving advertisers a centralized place to access early-stage experiments and tools.
Why we care. Instead of quietly testing features across scattered accounts, Google appears to be consolidating experiments into a single hub, making it easier for advertisers to discover and try new features before full rollout.
Details.
The Labs section shows up at the bottom of the left-hand menu in select accounts.
Early tests include features like “missed growth opportunities,” which highlight potential campaign improvements through bid or budget adjustments.
Not all advertisers will have access to it.
First seen. The update was first spotted by Vojtěch Audy, PPC specialist at Na volné noze.
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Before this, figuring out what AI Max was doing felt like looking into a black box.
Now, we can finally see the data and make smarter decisions.
Evaluating AI Max: Metrics that matter
When you’re looking at AI Max performance, start with the basics.
Open your search term tab and look for the Search terms and landing pages from AI Max option.
This lets you see AI Max results separately from your exact match, phrase match, and broad match keywords.
Compare conversion share and budget share
The first thing to check is how many conversions come from AI Max versus your regular keywords.
If AI Max is bringing in 30% of your conversions but eating up 60% of your budget, you know something needs attention.
Look at the cost per conversion, too.
AI Max might cost more at first, but that’s normal while Google learns what works for your business.
Look beyond cost – focus on conversion rates
Don’t just focus on the cost. Pay attention to conversion rates.
AI Max often finds people who are ready to buy but use different words than you expected. These new search terms can be gold mines if you spot the patterns.
One of AI Max’s biggest benefits is finding search terms you never thought to target.
Look at your search terms report and filter for AI Max queries. You’ll probably see some surprises.
Let’s say you sell running shoes and target “best running shoes.” AI Max might show your ads for “comfortable jogging sneakers” or “shoes for morning runs.”
These are people who want the same thing but use different words. The smart move is to add these high-performing terms to your regular keyword lists.
Identify irrelevant traffic
If you’re getting clicks from people searching for “cheap shoes” when you sell premium products, add “cheap” as a negative keyword.
AI Max respects negative keywords, so use them to guide the system toward higher-quality queries.
Every AI system needs time to learn, and AI Max is no different.
Plan for a learning phase
The first few weeks often look expensive because Google is still figuring out what works. Don’t panic if your costs jump initially.
Track your performance daily during the first month
As AI Max learns your patterns, you should see costs stabilize and conversion rates improve. If things keep getting worse after three weeks, then it’s time to make changes.
Keep an eye on the types of search terms AI Max finds over time
Early on, you might see lots of random queries. As the system learns, the terms should become more relevant to your business goals.
The biggest mistake people make is changing too much, too fast.
AI Max needs data to work properly, and constantly adjusting things prevents the system from learning.
That said, some problems need quick fixes.
If AI Max is spending money on completely irrelevant searches, add negative keywords immediately.
If the AI creates ads that violate your brand guidelines, remove those assets right away.
Watch your overall account performance, not just AI Max numbers.
Sometimes, AI Max might look expensive on its own, but it actually helps your other campaigns perform better by capturing different types of traffic.
Planning for the future
AI Max is still evolving, and Google keeps adding new features.
To adapt:
Build reporting systems that can grow with these changes.
Set up automated reports for the metrics that matter most to your business.
Don’t try to control everything.
The businesses seeing the best results from AI Max are the ones that:
Set clear goals.
Provide good data.
Let the system do its job.
Your role shifts from managing keywords to managing strategy.
Start testing AI Max on a small scale if you’re nervous about it. For example:
Create one campaign with AI Max enabled and compare it to your existing campaigns.
Run an AI Max for Search campaign experiment and let Google evaluate if the experiment is statistically valid.
Once you see how it works for your specific business, you can decide whether to expand.
Case studies: AI Max in action
These are early results from a limited data set and shouldn’t be viewed as statistically significant.
I’m sharing them to illustrate what I’ve seen so far – but the sample size is small and the timeframe short. Take these numbers with caution.
Case 1: Tourism and travel
This advertiser already had a solid search setup and was seeing good results.
Growth, however, was difficult because of heavy competition and the fact that strong keywords were already in play within a modern search structure.
Match type
Avg. CPC (€)
CVR (%)
AI Max
€0.11
1.47%
Broad match
€0.09
3.79%
Exact match
€0.53
9.00%
Exact match (close variant)
€0.22
7.11%
Phrase match
€0.16
6.25%
Phrase match (close variant)
€0.11
3.27%
AI Max generated additional conversions, but relative to the existing setup the impact was limited.
The conversion rate was much lower than other match types.
Because the average CPC was low, there was no cost spike, but performance still lagged.
Broad match – also known for surfacing broader, newer queries – had an even lower CPC (€0.09) and a conversion rate more than twice that of AI Max.
In this account, AI Max’s contribution was minor.
Search term overlap analysis showed AI Max had a 22.5% overlap rate, meaning 77.5% of queries were new to the campaign.
That’s a fairly good sign in terms of query discovery.
Case 2: Fashion ecommerce
This account focused on women’s clothing and already had a well-optimized campaign.
The goal was to expand reach during the competitive holiday season, when exact match keywords became increasingly expensive.
Match type
Avg. CPC (€)
CVR (%)
AI Max
€0.08
2.15%
Broad match
€0.12
2.89%
Exact match
€0.67
8.45%
Exact match (close variant)
€0.28
6.78%
Phrase match
€0.19
5.92%
Phrase match (close variant)
€0.14
4.11%
AI Max performed well here, delivering the lowest CPC at €0.08 and a respectable 2.15% conversion rate.
Although conversion rates were lower than exact and phrase match, the cheaper clicks kept cost per acquisition competitive.
AI Max also captured fashion-related long-tail searches and seasonal queries that the existing keyword set had missed.
Notably, AI Max outperformed broad match with both lower costs and better conversion rates.
This suggests its ability to better understand product context and user intent – especially important in fashion, where search terminology is diverse.
Search term overlap analysis showed only an 18.7% overlap rate, meaning 81.3% of queries were completely new.
That level of query discovery was valuable for extending reach in a highly competitive market.
Case 3: B2B SaaS
This account promoted project management software and had a mature strategy focused on high-intent keywords.
Conversion tracking was strong, measuring both MQLs and SQLs.
The client wanted to test AI Max for additional lead generation opportunities.
Match type
Avg. CPC (€)
CVR (%)
AI Max
€0.89
0.76%
Broad match
€0.72
1.23%
Exact match
€1.84
4.67%
Exact match (close variant)
€1.22
3.91%
Phrase match
€1.05
3.44%
Phrase match (close variant)
€0.94
2.88%
In this case, AI Max struggled. Despite a reasonable CPC of €0.89, the conversion rate was just 0.76%.
That pushed CPA well above the client’s target, making AI Max the worst-performing match type in the account.
It tended to capture too many informational searches from users not yet ready to convert.
Even broad match, typically associated with lower-intent traffic, outperformed AI Max with a 1.23% conversion rate at a lower CPC.
The complexity of the B2B buying cycle favored exact and phrase match keywords over AI Max’s broader interpretation.
Search term overlap analysis showed a 31.4% overlap rate, leaving 68.6% of queries as new.
However, these were mostly low-intent informational searches that didn’t align with SQL goals – underscoring the importance of high-quality conversion tracking when evaluating AI Max.
Wider industry sentiment
Advertiser feedback so far mirrors these mixed results.
In a recent poll by Adriaan Dekker, more than 50% of respondents reported neutral outcomes from AI Max, while 16% saw good results and 28% reported poor performance.
Tips to analyze AI Max search terms
You can analyze AI Max queries in Google Sheets using a few simple formulas. If your search term report has the term in column A and match type in column B:
To check whether a search term appears in both AI Max and another match type:
To count how many match types trigger a given term:
=COUNTIFS($A:$A;A2) can be used to count how many match types trigger on that search term.
To measure query length with an n-gram analysis:
=(LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","")))+1
These checks show whether AI Max is surfacing unique queries, overlapping with existing match types, or favoring short-tail vs. long-tail terms.
Because AI Max is still in early stages, it’s hard to draw firm conclusions.
Performance may improve as the system learns from more data, or remain flat if your setup already covers most transactional queries.
That’s the question advertisers will answer in the coming months as more tests and learnings emerge.
So far, results can be positive, neutral, or negative.
In my experience, neutral to negative outcomes are more common – especially in accounts with strong existing setups, where AI Max has fewer opportunities to add value.
A Google Ads script to uncover AI Max insights
To make analyzing AI Max performance easier, I created a Google Ads script that automatically pulls data into Google Sheets for deeper analysis.
It saves hours of manual work and includes the exact formulas mentioned earlier in this article, so you can immediately spot overlap rates and query patterns without manual setup.
The script creates two tabs in your Sheet:
AI Max: Performance Max search term data with headlines, landing pages, and performance metrics.
Search term analysis: A full comparison of all match types, including AI Max, with automated formulas.
The analysis covers:
Overlap detection between AI Max and other match types.
Query length analysis (short-tail vs. long-tail).
Match type frequency counts to identify competitive terms.
Automatic cost conversion from Google’s micro format into readable currency.
How to use it:
Create a new Google Sheet and copy the URL.
In Google Ads, go to Tools > Scripts.
Paste the script code and update the SHEET_URL variable.
Run the script to automatically populate your analysis.
With this setup, you can quickly calculate the same metrics I used in the case studies – like the 22.5% overlap rate in the tourism account or the 81.3% new query discovery in fashion.
The automated workflow makes it easier to see whether AI Max is surfacing genuine new opportunities or simply redistributing existing traffic.
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Google AI Mode is getting more visual by providing a more graphical response to some of your queries, including your shopping search queries. Google can do this by using its new visual version of the query fan-out technique it has used with AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Google AI Mode, for certain queries, particularly those related to shopping, will respond with images and graphics. These are aimed at sparking inspiration, Robby Stein, VP of Product Management at Google Search, told Search Engine Land.
AI Mode will be able to not just understand your query in a text-based manner, but also understand your query visually and respond with both textual and visual responses. It is a new and updated fluid, ongoing conversation in AI Mode that “sparks inspiration,” Google said.
Visual search fan-out technique. Google’s fan out technique is able breaking down your question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously on your behalf. Now, Google can also do this visually by looking at the image and text query input for query analysis and various image region analysis, including meta data and context around the image. Then Google AI Mode can render a visual grid of responses to your query.
“This means AI Mode can perform a more comprehensive analysis of an image, recognizing subtle details and secondary objects in addition to the primary subjects – and then runs multiple queries in the background. This helps it understand the full visual context and the nuance of your natural language question to deliver highly relevant visual results,” Google wrote.
AI Mode is more visual. Now when you search for some queries in AI Mode, the responses will be much more graphical and visual, right up front. Yes, AI Mode may have responded with images before, but now the images are higher and more prominent in some of the responses.
Plus, you can conduct follow up questions on the visual responses.
“You’ll see rich visuals that match the vibe you’re looking for, and can follow up in whatever way is most natural for you, like asking for more options with dark tones and bold prints. Each image has a link, so you can click out and learn more when something catches your eye. And because the experience is multimodal, you can also start your search by uploading an image or snapping a photo,” Google added.
Shopping in AI Mode. Lilian Rincon, VP Product Management Google Shopping, told us one of the best places for a visual experience is with shopping in Google Search. A more visual AI Mode helps you shop conversationally with fresh shopping data, can lead to a better shopping experience.
With the addition of Google’s Shopping Graph of 50 billion product listings, where 2 billion products are refreshed daily every hour, the responses are not just inspirational but detailed and helpful.
AI Mode for Shopping can not just give you ideas on what to put in your living room but also help you find the perfect article of clothing, in your color, style and fit.
Here is a video of this in action:
More details. This is launching today in Google AI Mode in the US in English. These are free listings, not shopping ads, and currently have no paid model, including no affiliate model. While Google has ads in AI Overviews, Google is only experimenting with ads in AI Mode, and there are no more details on ads right now for this experience.
Agentic experiences, like helping you buy and find what your looking for, is here for some areas now in Search Labs. But Google said they want the final purchase to happen directly on the retailer’s site.
Why we care. A new, more visual and graphical experience in AI Mode, may be a better search experience for some searchers and for some queries. Google is experimenting with a lot of changes to Google Search and is rapidly trying new interfaces and technologies.
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Pinterest is rolling out Top of Search ads, a new ad format that places brands directly in the first 10 slots of search results and Related Pins, where nearly half of user clicks occur.
Shopping on Pinterest is inherently visual, and most searches on the platform (96%) are unbranded according to Pinterest. That makes the top of search results a prime spot for discovery – and for brands to reach consumers who are open to new products.
Why we care. Pinterest’s Top of Search ads put your products in front of shoppers at the most valuable moment: when they’re actively browsing but not yet brand-committed. With nearly all searches unbranded, the format offers a powerful way to win new customers and outperform competitors. Early testing shows significant performance lifts, making it a high-return opportunity for brands looking to drive both visibility and conversions.
How it works. Top of Search ads ensure a brand’s products are featured where shopping journeys often begin. The new format also includes a brand-exclusive ad unit that highlights an advertiser’s catalog, giving products prominent placement over competitors.
Early results. According to Pinterest:
Top of Search ads have driven a 29% higher average CTR compared to standard campaigns.
Top of Search ads are 32% more likely to attract new clickers.
Wayfair, an early tester, reported a 237% CTR lift in just two weeks compared to its typical campaigns.
Between the lines. For advertisers, Top of Search ads offer a way to intercept undecided shoppers earlier in their journey, effectively turning Pinterest’s visual-first search into a new performance channel.
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Wondering why your site’s not ranking or showing up in large language model (LLM) results, even though your content is solid?
The answer might be backlinks. Specifically, the lack of high-quality ones.
Tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews are starting to summarize answers without always linking to a source. That means fewer clicks, more brand mentions, and a big shift in how SEOs need to think about authority.
It’s important to remember, though, quality backlinks are still one of the strongest signals of trust and relevance even as search evolves. They play a key role in how Google evaluates which brands earn visibility and can increase the chances of a source being cited or surfaced in AI-generated answers.
If you want to show up in AI Overviews, earn brand mentions, or rank higher in organic search, you need a solid backlink strategy: one that’s built on quality, not shortcuts.
Let’s break down what that looks like in 2025, and exactly how to do it.
Key Takeaways
High-quality backlinks still matter, even in an AI-driven search world.
One link from a trusted, relevant source beats 100 weak ones.
Quantity and quality both have a place in your strategy, but quality should lead.
You can earn strong links through content, partnerships, and digital PR.
Smart SEO means earning links by adding value, not tricking Google.
Why Building Backlinks Is Important
Backlinks are votes of confidence for your site. Each tells Google, “Hey, this content’s worth checking out!”
Sites with more (and better) backlinks tend to rank higher. In fact, a study from last year noted that over 96% of websites ranking in Google’s top 10 positions had more than 1,000 backlinks from unique domains.
But—and this is a big one—not all backlinks are created equal.
Low-quality links from shady sites can hurt your content more than help. What you want are editorial, relevant, and trusted backlinks that align with your content and brand. These quality links can:
With that in mind, how do you know the difference between a high-quality backlink and a poor one?
What Makes A Quality Backlink?
High-quality backlinks check three boxes:
Relevance: The linking site is topically related to yours. Backlinks from respected tech blogs to your AI tool are good as gold.
Authority: The linking domain has strong credibility and trust. Think of industry publications, .edu sites, or even top-ranking competitors.
Natural placement: You’ve earned this link editorially. No one paid for it or jammed it into a comment thread.
As Alex Horowitz, Digital PR Specialist at NP Digital, explains: “A good backlink comes from a site with solid domain authority (DA 35+), consistent organic traffic of at least 1,000 visitors a month, and content that’s trustworthy and relevant to the client. A poor backlink opportunity usually is on sites with little to no traffic, low authority, or content that feels spammy or off-topic. If the link won’t add value for readers or align naturally with the brand, it’s likely not worth pursuing.”
There are other bonus factors to consider, too. Keyword-rich anchor text, used sparingly, can help. So does placement high in the page’s content. The signals are even better if the page linking to you has strong traffic or links.
Getting these links takes work, but the payoff lasts for a long time.
The Quality vs Quantity Backlink Debate
How many backlinks do you need? This is a common question, and the answer is every SEO’s favorite:
“It depends.”
Do you need hundreds of backlinks? Not really.
Would you like to earn hundreds of great backlinks? Absolutely.
Quality and quantity both matter, but quality always wins. Quantity helps build a diverse link profile, especially from mid-tier, niche, or enthusiast sites. Quality delivers the real authority, trust, and rankings boost.
The problem is when people and marketers chase quantity for the sake of it by buying links, trading links, or spamming blog comments. That behavior isn’t just unsustainable, it’s unwelcome. It’ll tank your reputation among those sites you want cachet from and won’t help your rankings long-term.
Tips to Build Quality Backlinks
We know backlinks matter. We know good backlinks matter. How do we get them?
Never fear. These 14 tried-and-true strategies can help you earn high-quality backlinks in 2025 and beyond.
1. Emphasize What Benefits the Site Gets
Asking specific sites to link to you can work, but it requires being strategic. When reaching out, make it about them, not you. Instead of asking, “Can you link to my blog post?” you might try a message like,
“Your readers might find this guide helpful. It includes a breakdown that expands on your section about [topic].”
Show them the value their audience will get. If it plugs into content already performing well for them, even better.
2. Write Relevant and Competitive Content
People don’t link to average content. They link to the best. That means standing out among the crowded pack. What does that look like?
Go deep. Cover the topic more thoroughly than your competitors.
Add visuals, statistics, and original research.
Include expert quotes or insights.
Match search intent. Don’t write a blog post when searchers want a product comparison.
No matter what you create, ensure your content reflects E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
You should be able to find several ways to make your content stand apart from the existing results, whether that’s creating a more in-depth and actionable article or citing research no one else has.
That’s the exact approach my digital marketing agency used to get 20 top-tier media links like CNBC and Retail Wire for one of our clients in the personal finance industry.
We created a data-driven asset that resonated with a large audience and was different from anything else out there. This allowed us to pitch to dozens of relevant media outlets that were more than happy to give us a link in return for a good story.
3. Prove Your Site Is Legitimate
Getting links is a lot easier if your website positions you as a professional, trustworthy, and legitimate organization.
There are several elements that signify trust, and I recommend including as many of them as possible:
HTTPS certification (as well as other certificates)
A branded domain
High-quality web design
Links to your social profiles
Contact information, including the address of your company
E-E-A-T signals like an about page, editorial standards, and author bios.
You can see I’ve got almost all of these elements in place in my website’s footer:
4. Make Your Pitches Short
Want to increase the response rate of your pitches? Practice brevity to make it easy for recipients to understand your pitch.
There are many single lines, and it’s easy to find and click on the links. The email is to the point, and there’s no question what it’s about.
Here’s my advice for making your pitches concise and clear:
Keep paragraphs to two sentences or fewer
Write no more than five sentences
Use bullet points and bold font to make it easy for readers to spot the key points
State what you are asking for clearly
5. Leverage Digital PR
Digital PR (DPR) may initially feel like a focus on building a personal brand, but that’s not the real focus. Instead, consider creating newsworthy stories for journalists, bloggers, and industry outlets to cover and link to.
This matters because PR campaigns can often land backlinks from the highest-authority sites; places like Forbes, TechCrunch, or industry trade publications are significant wins. Those links carry way more weight than dozens of smaller blogs.
Here’s how to use it:
Data-driven stories: Package up survey results or industry insights. Journalists love citing fresh numbers.
Expert commentary: Offer quick takes on trending news. Tools like HARO or Qwoted connect you with reporters in real time.
Unique hooks: Tie your brand to bigger conversations. For example, a fintech startup might publish a “State of Student Debt in 2025” report.
High-quality backlinks come when your story provides genuine value to readers and publishers. A strong DPR campaign earns more than mentions. You get citations that boost rankings.
6. Do an Original Study
Original research is often a backlink magnet. Why? Because everyone needs data to support their content, and they’d rather cite your study than come up with their own.
You don’t need to be a research firm to pull this off, though. Here’s how:
Run a survey with your customers or audience.
Use public datasets and analyze them in a new way.
Combine anonymized data from your own tools (if applicable).
For example, look at my agency’s route when building links for a logistics client. We used multiple, varying datasets to see how different roadside restaurants in America compared to one another for truck drivers and roadtrippers.
The trick is to tell a compelling story with your data, the kind journalists will want to write about. In our case, every driver wants to know the best place to stop, and the geo-specific nature of the report meant local news outlets could report on truck stops in their state.
As a result, we garnered over 1,400 shares, likes, and comments across social media, a massive amount for such a niche industry. We also won a host of new rankings like “best truck stop food”.
7. Create an Infographic or Original Image
Infographics aren’t dead. They’re just evolved. In 2025, they’re bite-sized knowledge hubs that provide real value to readers.
These visuals are often easier to share, embed, and link to than walls of text. A great infographic travels across social media and blogs and can even get picked up by news outlets.
Here’s how to do it right:
Use tools like Canva or Venngage to create professional designs.
Focus on one core statistic, process, or concept. Don’t cram everything in.
Include embed codes so other sites can easily share and link back.
Look at this infographic example from Venngage that talks about the psychological impact of font choices on audiences. It’s a pretty robust dive into the typography of several popular Netflix shows and how title choices can play with mood and genre:
This one’s simple, but it works. Companies love showcasing happy customers. When they feature your testimonial on their site, they usually link back to you. Here’s how to make it happen:
Reach out to SaaS tools, agencies, or vendors you use.
Offer a detailed testimonial that highlights specific results.
Make sure to include your full name, role, and website.
See examples below from MarketHire:
These links aren’t just filler. They come from trusted, established brands that want to show off real customer success. That credibility makes them high-value backlinks, and all you did was share your experience.
9. Link Externally and Then Reach Out
Linking out to other sites doesn’t mean you’re giving away visibility. The trick is to follow through. Here’s how this works:
Write a blog post and naturally link to a relevant site, tool, or expert.
Reach out to the site or personality and tell them they’ve been included.
Start a conversation. Eventually, they may return the favor with a backlink.
You can strengthen this strategy with your own internal linking. Google sees that your page is well-connected both internally and externally, boosting your crawlability and authority.
This is not an overnight backlink hack. Instead, it’s a trust-building move that snowballs into collaborations, mentions, and citations from quality sites.
10. Comment on Other Relevant Blog and Social Posts
Comments on blogs and social media posts are a great way to build relationships with people in your industry and occasionally snag yourself a backlink.
But before you start passionately commenting on posts and throwing out backlinks everywhere, let me explain something.
You might occasionally have an opportunity to include a backlink in your comment. However, the comment should primarily focus on building a mutual relationship with the author:
If you don’t know what to say, make the author’s day.
If you want to share a bit more, you can add some meaningful insight into the topic at hand.
If you want to craft a comment that merits a response from the author and helps build the relationship, add your own commentary to the discussion.
Here’s an example from Leanne Wong on how a comment can start a conversation that might lead to a backlink:
Whatever you do, add value with your comment. The more value you can add, the stronger your relationship will become— and that’s a recipe for a future backlink if ever I saw one.
11. Align Social Signals
If you’re serious about building out your link building strategy and rising through the ranks, then aligning social signals is a must.
Social signals communicate to search engines how active and updated your website is. The more active your website, the better your rankings. You’ll notice I link to all of my social profiles in the footer of this website and keep them all updated:
You may not have the time to leverage every single social platform. In that case, choose one or two that you can keep up with, and post at least once a day on the platforms you’ve chosen.
Check that all of the information on your social profiles matches the information on your website. The company name, address, and phone number need to be aligned to communicate to search engines that your website is up to date.
This is a simple but effective way to build your rankings with very little extra work.
12. Find What’s Newsworthy
Timing is everything. If you can tie your content to breaking stories or trends, you can increase your odds of earning backlinks from journalists and bloggers covering it. Seek out opportunities in the following spots:
Picture this: Google rolls out a major algorithm update, and an SEO agency could publish a quick analysis within 24 hours. Journalists writing about the update may cite that content, earning authoritative backlinks.
Prefer a real life example?
My agency used this tactic to get backlinks from sites like The New York Times and The Atlantic for our client in the entertainment industry. Competitor research told us that a rival website had a lot of high authority backlinks to a page where fans could watch a trending television show from our client. But the link sent users to a broken page.
Our strategy was simple. We contacted every linking publisher and asked them to swap the broken link for our client’s, letting fans actually watch the show.
13. Find Brand Mentions
People may already be talking about your brand but not linking to it. That’s low-hanging fruit.
“Hey [Name], thanks for mentioning us in your piece on [Topic]. Would you mind adding a link so readers can easily find the resource?”
These links are easy wins. The writer already trusts you enough to mention your brand—now you’re just helping readers (and your SEO) with a clickable source.
14. Look At Competitor Backlink Profiles
Your competitors’ backlinks are a roadmap for your strategy. If it’s working for them, it could work for you. But how do you start and what should you look for?
Use Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, or Semrush to pull competitor backlink reports.
Examine their homepage links, most-linked blogs, and referral domains.
Identify patterns: Are they earning links from industry directories? Guest posts? Data-driven reports?
Once you know what they’re doing, ask the big question:
Can I create something better?
If your competitor earned a link for “2024 Social media Trends,” why not publish a deeper “2025 Social media Playbook?” Provide more value. Pitch it to the same sites.
Competitor backlinks are more than insights. Use them as valuable opportunities for growth and wins.
Writing the Pitch to Get Your Backlink
Your content or idea may be strong, but the pitch determines whether you actually earn that backlink.
Today’s editors, journalists, and site owners are bombarded with outreach. Generic templates don’t cut it. A valuable pitch is:
Short and personal: Under 100 words, customized for the recipient.
Value-driven: Show how your resource improves their article or helps their readers.
Clear: Include the exact link and context—don’t make them dig.
Credible: Reference your expertise, unique data, or why you’re a trusted source.
Timely: Tie your pitch to something current—like a trending topic or recent update.
Here’s an example of a pitch that works in 2025:
Hi [Name], I really enjoyed your recent piece on [Topic]. I noticed you mentioned [related stat], and we just released a new study with fresh data on this in 2025. I thought it might add value for your readers. Here’s the link: [URL]. Would you consider including it?
This kind of outreach blends relevance, authority, and timeliness: the same qualities that make backlinks valuable in the first place.
FAQs
How to get quality backlinks?
Use digital PR, original studies, expert content, and smart outreach strategies. Focus on building real relationships and offering value, not tricks.
How many high quality backlinks do I need?
For those in competitive spaces like finance or software, more high-quality backlinks will help you stand out. But it’s not just about the overall total. A good benchmark for many key pages is 20-30 strong backlinks. This number can make a real difference. Even five to 10 backlinks from top-tier domains can beat out hundreds from low-authority sources.
What is a high quality backlink?
It’s a link from a trusted, authoritative site relevant to your content and placed editorially.
How can I leverage social media to build backlinks?
Promote your content, join conversations, and tag influencers. When people see and share your content, backlinks tend to follow.
Is it okay to pay for backlinks?
Technically, it’s against Google’s guidelines. Tread carefully and focus on sponsored content, not spammy link buys.
How do I approach website owners to request backlinks ethically?
Be personal, brief, and helpful. Show them why linking to your resource benefits their readers.
How can I identify websites that are relevant and authoritative for link building?
Look for sites in your niche with real traffic, strong content, and domain authority (DA). Tools like Ubersuggest or Ahrefs help.
Conclusion on How to Get Backlinks
If you focus on creating content worth linking to and getting it in front of the right people, you’ll earn links that matter. These links improve rankings, boost traffic, and build long-term authority.
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