How to Align Your Paid Search and Paid Social Teams for Smarter Testing and Faster Wins

Having a budget of $100,000 a month to spend on media is exciting, but it also comes with significant responsibilities. When you’re operating at this high level, every dollar needs to work harder, so you can’t run the risk of costly inefficiencies.

Unfortunately, it’s common for paid search and paid social teams to operate in isolation, causing numerous concerns like:

• Conflicting creative messages that confuse customers
• A lack of aligned testing roadmaps
• Attribution gaps that conceal the actual channels driving conversions.

This post focuses on the relationship between paid search and paid social; however, the most successful enterprise companies understand that aligning all channels, from SEO and performance creative to analytics and reporting, is a necessity as their business expands. 

To this end, schedule weekly check-in calls to ensure everyone is on the same page. Doing so sets the groundwork to facilitate immersive marketing (aka submerging) strategies.  

Why Cross-Channel Alignment is Critical for Growth

Modern consumers use multiple platforms (ranging from search platforms and social media to banner ads and email marketing) when engaging with brands.

Having numerous touchpoints is ideal, as it increases the likelihood of reaching customers who have different preferred ways to discover, search, and purchase products and services. 

However, multiple touchpoints create attribution challenges, making it difficult to determine which channels or touchpoints actually drove the conversion. In turn, it becomes impossible to know where to allocate the budget.

To make matters worse, when paid search and paid social teams work separately, they often compete for the same audiences, test conflicting messages, and create gaps that hide accurate performance data, further muddying the waters. 

After all, teams frequently duplicate work without knowing it. A paid search team might test ad copy that the paid social team has already found ineffective.

Effective cross-channel media integration through aligned testing strategies solves these problems by creating coordination between teams.

When paid search and paid social teams share insights and coordinate their testing, they find winning concepts faster, avoid repeated experiments, and build better audience profiles for both channels. With smarter budgeting allocation informed by clearer performance insights, sustainable growth is that much easier to attain. 

Establishing Cross-Channel Collaboration

Unified Goals and Metrics

Successful collaboration between paid search and paid social starts with setting shared goals that go beyond individual channel performance and defining shared key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Instead of focusing on channel-specific metrics, like cost per click or cost per impression, aligned teams track business outcomes, including customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), and overall return on ad spend (ROAS) across all channels¹.

At Socium Media, we use a “scorecard” system for each brand. It combines metrics from both paid search and paid social, giving us a clear view of whether performance is improving or declining. The scorecard also includes cross-channel attribution data, audience overlap rates, creative performance scores, and lift measurements that can only be tracked when both channels work together.

Structured Agency Training Programs

Implementing cross-channel collaboration may seem like a no-brainer; however, many teams haven’t received the memo. Unfortunately, when team members only understand their channel, they’re essentially operating in a silo. They are unaware of how other platforms operate, which creates communication barriers, and how creative requirements differ between formats. Ultimately, this results in lost opportunities and wasted spend. 

That’s why Socium’s agency internal training (plus regular workshops and knowledge-sharing sessions) is so essential. Our training programs help every team member learn both channels from the ground up. We start with platform basics and creative needs, eventually covering advanced topics like attribution modeling, messaging strategies, and competitive research. 

These training programs create a mutual understanding between paid search and paid social, removing barriers to enable true collaboration.

Leveraging Real-Time Slack Communication

Emails and meetings have their place, but modern integrated digital marketing often requires instant communication. Slack, a work-focused operating system, provides the necessary real-time coordination for time-sensitive requests, quick optimization, and fast response to performance changes.

Additionally, Slack enables you to create dedicated channels for various types of collaboration. Socium uses channels for:

• Daily performance updates
• Creative feedback
• Audience insights
• Urgent optimization needs

Each channel has clear rules about what to share, who responds, and response times, ensuring everything remains organized. 

Socium’s Slack communication best practices also accommodate data. Our internal client channels receive automatic “Sociumbot” alerts to call out anomalies to our metrics, so all teams immediately understand how their work affects overall performance.

For example, if orders tripled DoD, we’d receive an alert in the morning before even opening our performance report to enable us to dive in deeper. This real-time attention ensures both teams can react quickly to changes and maintain optimal performance across all channels.

To successfully set up and manage your Slack account:

• Create team-specific channels
• Determine which channels are public and which are only accessible via an invitation
• Group similar channels
• Use threads to separate different conversations within a channel

Utilizing Project Management Software Effectively 

We like Slack quite a bit because it’s perfect for quick communication; however, it lacks project management capabilities. And while there are plenty of project management programs out there, most of them create more administrative work rather than functioning as a helpful tool. 

That’s why we use ClickUp, a project management and productivity app. It provides structure for complex cross-channel work. Our ClickUp system uses campaign-level projects, including tasks from both paid social and paid search. This allows both teams to see how their different activities connect, improving transparency.

To make managing and tracking cross-channel projects in ClickUp even smoother, we recommend creating standard templates for product launches, seasonal campaigns, and creative updates. These templates:

• Help assign tasks to the right people
• Set realistic deadlines based on what each platform actually needs
• Build in checkpoints where both teams review and approve the work

Integrated Testing Frameworks

Separate testing is acceptable, but cross-channel testing is less of a headache. Why? Separate testing can interfere with each team’s results. Testing the same concepts independently wastes time and resources. The conflicting messages across channels can confuse audiences and muddy performance data.

This is where unified campaign testing comes in. It’s what happens when teams coordinate their experiments and create joint testing plans that work across multiple channels simultaneously. 

Let’s say it’s time to test new messaging. Successful testing requires coordinating timing, audiences, and measurement, with clear rules for test design, data collection, and results analysis. This ensures that insights from one channel can be applied to the other.

With unified campaign testing, teams can design matching experiments. For instance, paid search tests headline variations while paid social tests visual versions of the same message. The multiple data points speed up the learning process while maintaining a consistent message across touchpoints. This approach saves time and improves performance across both channels.

Furthermore, cross-collaboration will benefit audience targeting. Paid social focuses on demographics to build brand awareness, while paid search addresses consumers who are ready to make a purchase. Combining strategies will lead to better results.  

Data-Sharing and Reporting Consistency

Teams struggle when deciding whether data shows different results across platforms. After all, each platform measures performance differently and reports data at different times. It’s easy for all of this to spiral out of control, creating confusion and conflicting conclusions. Without consistent avenues to collect and analyze data, your teams can’t compare results or decide where to spend their budget.

Our approach (and one your business can adopt) creates unified reports that transform platform-specific metrics into comparable business results. For instance, instead of comparing Facebook’s cost per result with Google’s cost per conversion, we focus on customer acquisition cost, which is calculated the same way across both platforms. With this consistency, teams have a single source that they can trust when making decisions.

Cross-Channel Creative Strategy

Creative consistency across channels gets tricky. Teams often create identical ads that lose their impact with multiple views or fail to translate effectively across different platforms. In other cases, they go in completely different directions and confuse their audience. Without coordination, great insights from one channel are never shared with the other, which slows everything down and wastes opportunities.

Your best bet? Develop creative strategies that feel natural on each platform while keeping your core message and brand promises consistent. 

Now, this is where it heats up: Insights from one channel can significantly accelerate creative work on the other. When paid search data indicates that specific keywords generate more traffic, you can use these insights for paid social audience targeting and messaging.

Meanwhile, paid social testing finds compelling visuals or emotional hooks, which you can adapt into paid search ad copy and landing pages. By cross-pollinating ideas that are still brand-consistent, you can maximize what works on each platform.

Real-World Examples of Success

Walking the walk and talking the talk are two different things. At Socium, we want you to know we can walk the walk better than anyone. Our recent client wins demonstrate what happens when cross-channel alignment is done right. 

Catbird, a Brooklyn-based jewelry brand, wanted to stretch its ad budget while boosting orders and revenue. We coordinated their paid social creative work with paid search campaign changes to make it happen.

On the social side, our team built a creative testing plan that made Catbird’s beautiful product shots work harder for performance. We adopted Advantage+ campaigns with larger budgets, which significantly cut their CPMs. At the same time, we reorganized their brand search campaigns with clear ad group themes, set up target ROAS bidding, and rewrote ad copy to hit “Good” or “Excellent” ratings².

Meanwhile, Fine Linens, a luxury home goods company, saw a 43% jump in conversions, a 48% increase in revenue, and a 12% boost in CTR during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The win came from investing in high-intent audiences, real-time campaign management with dynamic bid adjustments, and competitor analysis that enabled them to adapt in a snap.

A contemporary home decor retailer got similar results with 43% more conversions, 24% more revenue, and 21% better conversion rates. This was achieved through data-driven campaign tweaks, a creative strategy that aligned with their brand, and a focus on audience quality over just generating clicks.

These examples demonstrate that successful paid search and paid social alignment creates results that are way better than what each channel could do alone. When you align your paid search and paid social teams effectively, you truly achieve the smarter testing and faster wins that make all the difference.

FAQ

How often should cross-channel training sessions occur?

Quarterly structured sessions combined with monthly informal knowledge-sharing meetings ensure ongoing alignment and effective collaboration.

What are the best practices for Slack channel setup for cross-team communication?

Create dedicated channels by account for internal purposes, define clear communication guidelines, use consistent tagging and threading, and ensure active moderation. It’s important when onboarding new team members to adhere to this style.

How do unified KPIs benefit both Paid Search and Paid Social teams?

Shared KPIs ensure both teams work towards common goals, facilitating better resource allocation, strategy alignment, and performance transparency.

What’s the biggest challenge in aligning Paid Search and Paid Social teams?

Overcoming data silos and establishing effective real-time communication are typically the biggest hurdles, both of which can be addressed through structured frameworks and regular collaboration.

Sources

1. Bose, S. (June 6, 2025). Key Ecommerce Metrics Explained- RoAS vs CAC vs LTV. Saras Analytics. Retrieved June 23, 2025, from https://www.sarasanalytics.com/blog/roas-cac-ltv-ecommerce-kpi
2. Pandya, R. (February 11, 2025). What Is Quality Score? And How It Impacts Your Google Ads. SEMRush. Retrieved June 23, 2025, from https://www.semrush.com/blog/quality-score/