Social Media Advertising

01

What social is for

Social advertising works both in campaigns and in always-on advertising. The same platform can build awareness or bring purchases, leads and app downloads, but the optimisation, the metric and the creative differ by job.

The weight of social is decided in the media plan, once the media strategy has set the channels' jobs. Social does not replace other channels, but it reaches a large share of the audience at low cost and shows quickly which message works.

02

The channels and who they reach

67 %* of 18 to 74-year-olds use Facebook at least weekly, 63 % Instagram, 31 % TikTok, 26 % Snapchat and 16 % LinkedIn. Social is not only for the young: 82 %* of 60 to 74-year-olds use at least one social service with advertising every week.

The channel is chosen by audience and job. Meta reaches broadly in every age group. In our campaigns TikTok has often delivered the cheapest contact and the widest coverage for the same budget.** LinkedIn targets by professional data, so it is used when the decision-maker audience has to be reached for certain.

03

The objective decides what the platform buys

A platform optimises for whatever objective it is given. A campaign optimised for reach buys coverage cheaply but brings few website visits. A campaign optimised for traffic or conversions brings visits and results, but each impression costs more. In our campaigns these have been different tools, not alternatives to each other.**

So we agree the metric before launch. We compare channels and flights only within the same objective: the cost of an impression in a reach buy, the cost of a click and a visit in a traffic buy and the cost of a result in a conversion buy.

04

Targeting and frequency

Targeting that is too narrow pushes frequency up and eats the click-through rate. In our campaigns a small area, or many parallel ad sets aimed at the same audience, has multiplied frequency.** So we keep the audience as broad as the objective allows, set a frequency cap where the platform allows it and make several creatives for long campaigns.

The cheapest audience to reach is not always the best. In our campaigns the youngest people have been the cheapest to reach, but older age groups have clicked more.** The budget is therefore not split by reach alone; results are tracked by age group and region.

05

Creative

On social an ad is skipped quickly. In our campaigns short video has beaten long video, and the core message and the sender have had to show in the very first second.** We make versions of the creative for every placement and size. The DCO & Templates app in NØRR3 Marketing Engine produces the versions from an approved ad template, and a product feed can drive dynamic social advertising.

06

Measuring from the click to the result

A click is not yet a visit. In our campaigns a clear share of social link clicks never became a measured website visit, and the main reason has been a slow landing page.** So we track page loads and results, not clicks alone, and check page speed before launch.

Alongside the platforms' own figures we measure independently whether the ad was seen by the right person in the right environment. The metric is chosen by platform: in full-screen video, as on TikTok, time in view says more about attention than a standard viewability rate.**

* NØRR3 Media Insights, Norstat panel, August 2026, n = 2 022, aged 18 to 74, margin of error ±1.6–2.1 percentage points. 60 to 74-year-olds n = 559 (±3.2 percentage points). Social services that carry advertising. ** NØRR3's own campaign bank, campaign reports 2024–2026: each lesson recurs in campaigns across at least two industries.