Paid advertising is now a core pillar of digital marketing. Any brand looking to reap the rewards of trading online needs to place at least a healthy chunk of their budget on paid ads. But which platforms are the best to invest in? In this article, we’re taking a look at a number of the biggest paid ad opportunities on the web and letting you in on which ones are best for what.
Take a good look through these options and see which platform sounds best for your brand. Getting the best return on your investment is all about picking the system that ticks the most important boxes for your specific needs.
Low cost and accurate ads
Why not start with the biggest name in social media? The size of Facebook is too huge for any brand to ignore. Not only is it the world’s largest social network with 1.8 billion active users, it’s also one of the most comprehensive advertising systems available. You can pick exactly who you want to reach, where, and when, all while safe in the knowledge that every user your ad pops up for is ready to be bathed in things they’re interested in. 40 million other small businesses are taking advantage of Facebook advertising, isn’t it about time you were too?
Facebook’s business pages died a while ago. If you’re still content with the fact that your business has an active presence on Facebook through an organic page, think again. Over the years, Facebook has been drastically reducing the relativity of business page posts to the feeds of followers. The sad truth is; the only way to really reach your target market with any serious impact on Facebook today is to use Facebook ads.
The best reasons to use Facebook ads? The price per 1000 views is relatively low compared to other networks, and brands can be extremely picky about who those 1000 people are. You can aim campaigns at users with precise interests, exact ages, location and more. If you have a very specific demographic in mind, Facebook is a great place to find them with sheer accuracy.
Google AdWords
Specific search queries and large search volumes
Adwords is the original paid advertising platform launched by Google in 2000. Google dominates the search engine market by leaps and bounds. It’s estimated market share is around 75%, which is worth around 1.3 trillion searches per year. This is where everyone is looking which is why so many brands chose to spend their ad budgets almost exclusively on Googles Adwords platform.
One of the most attractive features on Adwords is the ability to control your daily budget. Whether you plan on spending £5 per day or £5000, Adwords paid ad campaigns are widely recognised as flexible, measurable and highly scalable.
The other huge selling point of Adwords is access to other non-search sites under Google’s reign – Youtube being the most powerful of these. With over 1 billion unique views a month and several billion total views a day, Youtube is the world’s most popular video content haven.
Where Facebook and other social platforms plant your ads on the sides of pages, Google places your ads as top options in response to people’s actual search queries. This is ideal if you have specific phrases and search terms that you want to target. With Adwords, you know that the users responding to your ads have actually found you by actively searching for what you offer. You can find out how to make the perfect landing page for your Google Ads campaign here.
Instagram ads
High engagement and natural looking ads
Instagram is the fastest growing social powerhouse on the web. It has 700 million active users right now and had nearly half that many a year ago. That level of growth says it all. The most fascinating thing about Instagram as a paid ads platform is the scope for return on your creativity. Users here aren’t looking for services by using search terms like with Google, and they’re certainly not spending any serious amount of time on each page like they do on Facebook. On Instagram, users are looking for pure entertainment, and the ads play into this dynamic beautifully.
Why is Instagram’s photo-centric design an advantage? Because it allows advertisers to break through barriers that are more detrimental on other platforms. Most people that use Facebook ignore the ads on the side because they are more interested in the social content across the sites ram-packed pages.
It’s easy to bypass the top links on a Google search because they’re clearly marked as “ads”. People are generally annoyed by adverts and we’ve all learnt to push them away naturally because we’re increasingly bombarded with countless communications every day. But on Instagram, all we care about is great content. So even if a photo is technically marked as an ad, as long as the photo itself is something awesome, we’ll engage with it.
Instagram see’s higher levels of engagement than any other social media platform. The ads here are non-intrusive and bring users exactly what they’re looking for on the network – fun stuff. If your brand wants to build a reputation for creative flare or beautiful content, Instagram is the ideal channel to reach audiences without bugging them. You’ll need to commit far more of your resources to pursue creative quality, but the potential return on your efforts is vast and rising.
Those are the paid ad platforms that we love most right now. Choosing the perfect fit for your business depends greatly on your brand’s individual objectives. If you wanna target people based on their precise interests, look at Facebook. Need to relate your offering to user-friendly terms? Then Adwords is your best bet. Wanna bring your audience something beautiful or outstanding? Instagrams the best place to do it.
All three of these platforms offer user friendly creation systems, thorough metric analysis, and flexible costing to suit all budgets. Pick the one that fits your goals best or dabble in all of the above. If paid ads are set to play a huge role in your digital marketing strategy, these are best channels to go of it.