What is social-to-search arbitrage?
Social-to-search means buying visitors with paid adverts on social platforms, mainly Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and monetising them on a page with search ads. It is currently the most common form of Google-based search arbitrage, because social platforms offer huge reach, strong automated bidding and creative formats that suit article-style landing pages.
Social-to-search depends on feeding revenue data back to the platform. A tracker sends each visit's value through a Conversions API so that value-based bidding can find people likely to click an ad after reading.
The weak points are policy and stability. Social platforms reject or ban accounts for exaggerated claims, especially in finance, health, housing and jobs. The feed side now sees the advert's text through referrerAdCreative, so the promise in a video or caption must match the page. Ad fatigue is fast on social, which means constant creative testing. Operators who treat creatives as disposable and compliance as optional tend to lose both the ad account and the feed.