Paid search is bought intent — spend it like cash

What it’s actually for

Paid search is the most honest channel on the map, because the meter never stops. Every click is a small, visible withdrawal — you are renting the buyer’s attention at the exact moment of intent, and the landlord raises the rent every quarter. Spend it like cash, because that is what it is.

Its job is to buy your way in front of intent you have not yet earned organically — the high-value queries where you do not rank, or cannot afford to wait. Done well it is a precision instrument: the right query, the right page, the right offer, measured to the qualified opportunity. Done badly it is a tap left running in an empty bath.

Where it fires

Paid search → Looks and Sizes up. Intent you rent by the click, meter always running.

A targeted channel.

On the marcomms map, paid search fires at Looks and Sizes up, in targeted mode. At Looks it answers the problem query; at Sizes up it intercepts the comparison and the high-intent, purchase-shaped searches. The fatal confusion is sending a problem-framed searcher to a solution-framed page, or the reverse — paying for the click and then fumbling the catch.

The numbers that matter

Activity metrics: click-through rate, cost per click, conversion rate, quality score. Necessary, never sufficient. What lands on the report is cost per qualified opportunity — not per click, not per lead, per opportunity worth a salesperson’s time. A campaign with a beautiful CTR and a cost-per-opp nobody checks is optimising the wrong number, beautifully.

When not to use it

Where it goes wrong: bidding on broad, solution-framed terms because they feel important, while the problem-framed terms your buyers actually type go unbought. And running it as an always-on tap with nobody asking whether the last thousand pounds bought anything that converts. If you cannot name the cost per opportunity, you are not running paid search — you are funding someone else’s quarter.

One row of twenty

This is one row of the marcomms map: every channel, every stage, every targeting mode, on one page.

The full system lives on the Methodology page.