10 Common Digital Marketing Questions, Answered

SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of improving a website so it ranks organically in search results without paying for placement — it works through content, site structure and backlinks, and typically takes months to build. SEM (search engine marketing) refers to paid search advertising, most commonly Google Ads, where you pay for placement and can see results as soon as campaigns launch. Most mature marketing strategies use both: SEM for immediate, controllable demand capture, and SEO for compounding, lower-cost-per-visit traffic over time.

Most campaigns need at least 3-7 days and enough conversion events (commonly cited around 50 per ad set per week) before Meta's delivery system exits its learning phase and results become reliable to judge. Turning campaigns on and off before this point, or reacting to a single bad day, usually leads to premature and inaccurate conclusions.

ROAS (return on ad spend) is the revenue generated for every unit of currency spent on advertising — a ROAS of 4 means ₹4 in revenue for every ₹1 spent. What counts as 'good' depends entirely on your margins: a business with high margins might be profitable at a ROAS of 2, while a low-margin business might need a ROAS of 6 or more to be sustainable. ROAS should always be evaluated against your specific cost structure, not compared to a generic industry benchmark.

A dedicated landing page almost always converts better than a homepage for paid traffic, because it can focus entirely on the one offer or message the ad promised, without the navigation, distractions and general messaging a homepage needs to serve every type of visitor. For any campaign with a specific offer, a matching landing page is one of the highest-leverage changes you can make to conversion rate.

A lookalike audience is a Meta targeting tool that finds new people who share characteristics with an existing group — usually your customers, leads, or website visitors — based on Meta's data about that seed group's behaviour and profile. It's a way of scaling reach to new people who statistically resemble your best existing audience, rather than guessing at interests manually.

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that runs across all of Google's inventory — Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps — from a single campaign, using machine learning to decide where and to whom your ads should show based on the assets and goals you provide. It requires less manual placement control than traditional Search campaigns but can access a wider surface area of Google's properties automatically.

CPM (cost per mille) is the cost per 1,000 impressions your ad receives, regardless of clicks. CPC (cost per click) is the cost each time someone clicks your ad. CPA (cost per acquisition) is the cost for each completed goal — a lead, sale or sign-up. CPM and CPC measure traffic-level costs; CPA measures whether that traffic actually turned into a business result, which is usually the number that matters most.

Most active ad sets benefit from 3-5 genuinely distinct creative concepts (not just colour or headline variations of the same idea) running at once, so the algorithm has real options to test against your audience. Refreshing creative every few weeks also helps counter ad fatigue, which shows up as rising costs and falling engagement on ads that have been running unchanged for a long time.

Each platform uses its own attribution model and tracking method — Meta's pixel/Conversions API, Google's tags, and your analytics platform (like GA4) can all count the same conversion differently depending on the attribution window and how they identify the same user across devices. It's normal for the three numbers to differ; the goal is understanding why they differ and picking one system as your primary source of truth for decision-making, rather than expecting all three to match exactly.

Running ads in-house can work well when you have the time to learn the platforms properly and stay on top of changes to tracking, policy and ad formats. An agency tends to make more sense once you need a strategist, media buyer and creative resource working together on shared data, when compliance or industry-specific advertising rules apply, or when the opportunity cost of your own time managing campaigns outweighs the cost of bringing in a dedicated team.