What Ad Campaign Should I Be Using For My Business Goals?
So you’re thinking about starting some Paid Ad Campaigns but you’re not sure where to start? That’s not surprising - there’s so many different ways to advertise, so many sites to advertise on and they all require your campaign to be slightly different in order to work. Remember though, it only makes sense to advertise where you know your customers will be or are searching for your product already.
Google Adwords/Bing Ads
Search Ads:
Search ads are the most common form of paid advertising. Bing, Yahoo, Google, and other search engines all provide this service, and as people are already searching for the keywords you're connected to themselves, there’s a far higher likelihood those impressions will convert into sales.
They’re also far more simple, having a limited word count to be able to catch someone’s attention. In a crowded marketplace where multiple businesses are paying to appear at the top of results, it can be more difficult to direct an impression towards your site as opposed to others. This competition can also make them rather expensive. As a form of PPC, if you aren’t converting those impressions into sales, it can add up to more than you bargained for.
Display Ads:
Display ads reach more than 90% of people who browse the internet. This provides a great opportunity to reach a larger audience at a lower cost, as competition isn’t as specific.
You also have an opportunity for more dynamic advertising, being able to brand your content and draw in impressions based off of your brand aesthetic and messaging with ease. Again, Google Adwords and Bing Ads are the main provider of these kind of ads.
However, the over-saturation of display ads means a lot of people ignore them all together, and if someone has an adblock on you’ll be paying for an impression that never gets seen. This form of advertising can result in very few clicks, but you may find that brand awareness increases as customers become passively more aware of your messaging and colours.
Google Shopping:
Google Shopping can be more of a benefit to small businesses than third party sites like Amazon or Etsy, as the customer will get sent back to your website in order to make the purchase. It works as a Comparison Shopping Engine, meaning that your product will be lined up next to others for a customer to compare.
The benefit to customers is that they don’t have to know a brand in order to search for a product. They’re able to go to the shopping tab and filter everything down to the specifics of what they need, meaning that if your product is still in the running, they’re far more likely to buy your product out of convenience even though they’ve never heard of your brand or visited your website.
Social Media
Social Media Ads run on third-party sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or a range of others, and allow you to target specific audiences without much effort. They often have a range of formats available which allows you to pick a format that matches your messaging, and are also designed to be used by businesses of all sizes. As they allow for such specific targeting, they often result in high click rates.
However, they can be time consuming to create as so much is being posted all the time, and the trending topics change so quickly.
It’s also important to know which platforms to use for which types of content, as they vary so dramatically - what would be perfect for instagram would fail completely on LinkedIn.
There were 21 960 000 Instagram users in the UK in April 2019, which accounted for 32.5% of its entire population.
The majority of them were women - 56.2%.
People aged 25 to 34 were the largest user group (7 000 000).
The highest difference between men and women occurs within people aged 25 to 34, where women lead by 600 000.
Facebook has 44.84 million users in the UK
The largest age group using Facebook in the UK is aged 25 to 34 years old, with 11.2 million users
Since 2012, users aged 18 – 24 have declined from 24% to 16% in 2020
Users aged 65+ have increased from 4% in 2019 to 9% in 2020
52% of users are women and 48% are men
If you want to drive online sales for products or services, promote events, promote your local business, or grow your following, Facebook is a good bet!
On Instagram you can advertise through Instagram Shopping, Stories, Carousels, Explore pages and a range of others. Instagram’s greatest asset is its versatility.
27,600,000 people used LinkedIn in United Kingdom in September 2019, which made up 41% of its entire population.
People aged 25 to 34 were the largest user group (16,000,000).
LinkedIn is great for Brand to Brand marketing, promoting e-books, whitepapers, demos, webinars or events, and getting your name in front of industry leaders.
Most Twitter users in the U.S. live in cities, followed by suburban and rural areas.
Twitter is the most popular “western” social media platform in Japan, following only Line and ranking ahead of Facebook and Instagram in popularity.
In India, Twitter reportedly has upwards of 30 million users
It’s estimated that 3.2 million people in China have Twitter accounts, despite the platform being banned.
Twitter is great for short-form content that can blend into someone’s feed without being identifiable as advertising. There’s also an opportunity to latch onto trending topics, or insert yourself into content that is already being consumed with in-stream video ads.
500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute (The Street)
100 million people watch YouTube and YouTube TV on a TV screen (Google)
YouTube localised to 100 countries, and accessible in 80 different languages (YouTube)
The benefit of YouTube advertising is that not only can you attach yourself to relevant content, but you can exclude yourself from irrelevant or controversial content. With such an enormous reach that spans so many niche topics, you can be extremely specific with the kind of people you advertise too.
The ads on Pinterest are often used to generate immediate sales of your product or services. Your paid content blends with other pins, allowing your brand to work as another avenue for your web store.
78% of Pinners think content from brands is useful.
77% of weekly Pinners say they regularly discover new brands and products on the platform
98% of Pinners have tried things they find on Pinterest, and 83% have made purchases based on brand content.
The overall benefit of advertising on Pinterest is the intent to purchase - the demographic on Pinterest tends to browse specifically for items to buy. This can lead to greater demand for your products overall as the impressions you make are likely to share your product with others, as well as driving more traffic to your site even without purchases being made.
Did You Catch All That?
There’s a lot of information in this article, and it doesn’t even scratch the surface! A successful campaign includes knowledge of funnels, bidding for ad space and budgeting.
If you want to learn more about all of these areas, we run online PPC training sessions where we can tie it all together.
If you’ve just missed a PPC training session, reach out to us for a free consultation instead.