A lot of business owners wonder if paid advertising online is worth it. As traditional advertising channels like newspapers and television ads fall out of favour because they just don’t reach enough people for your investment, what are your options to reach your target audience? Paid advertising on the internet is growing and if you aren’t doing it, you are losing customers. Don’t despair if it feels overwhelming. Please read on to learn the basics of paid online advertising and how it can work for your business.
What is paid advertising online?
Paid advertising on the internet can sometimes appear complicated with terms and platforms never seen before by some business owners. Let us break it down for you!
There are three ways a business can pay to reach their audience online:
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Pay Per Impression (PPI)
- Display Ads
These paid forms, when done strategically, will expose your brand to a larger audience than what you have right now. Of course, paid advertising is just one piece of the digital marketing puzzle, but it is a major part of exploring and testing strategies for new customers to find online and hire you.
What is Pay Per Click advertising?
Put simply, Pay Per Click refers to you paying each time someone physically clicks on your advertisement. When you set up this type of advertising, you choose parameters to show your ad to people in your target audience, your ideal customers, and you pay each time they click your ad that takes them to your website.
The great thing about PPC, is you don’t pay for the ad being shown to online users, only when someone is interested enough by your ad to click it. You can pay either by setting a budget yourself or by using your chosen platform’s bidding/auction system (i.e. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn).
The best part about PPC is that it is the most measurable and optimisable marketing channel. You can measure instantly and ongoing and if you are finding you aren’t getting enough clicks, you can optimise your ad to drive more engagement. Importantly, though, daily budget limits are key to not spending too much money.
What is Pay-Per-Impression advertising?
Pay-Per-Impression is charged differently – there is a flat rate for every one thousand times an ad appears on your chosen platform. It is referred to as a CPM (cost per thousand) rate and it has its pros and cons.
The good thing about PPI is that you are guaranteed that your ad will be shown a certain number of times, and you know the cost up front instead of having to worry about daily limits to keep to a budget. However, because you are paying for impressions (times your ad is “seen”) and not clicks, the downside is you could show your ad to your target audience thousands of times without them clicking on your ad even once.
Another disadvantage to PPI over PPC is that you cannot measure and assess results mid-campaign – it has to be run in its entirety. It might not be getting clicks if it’s not engaging enough, but you can’t change it to appeal to your audience more half way through your campaign.
What are Display Ads?
Display ads act differently to PPC and PPI because they appear on a wider network of websites and are shown to people as they are surfing the web. Display ads are also known as banner ads and are effectively the modern version of drive-by billboards you see when you are driving your car in the real world.
Display ads can be categorised in the following ways:
- Static images: These are the tried-and-true image ads, usually square or rectangle that appear in various locations around the content.
- Text: These are clickable text ads within content that can be quite effective.
- Floating banners: These banner-style ads move across the screen or hover above the content.
- Popup, popover, pop-under: These may be hated by a lot of users but they are universally effective.
- Video: Video or audio display ads are becoming more popular to match our love of video content online.
- Retargeting: Also called Remarketing, these kinds of ads are a popular subset of Display Ads. These ads are used to follow a user once they have visited a particular website, to then be “remarketed” to by showing them ads as a reminder of the product or service they have already looked at once. These are the ads that you might feel like a company is following you around the web.
Generally, advertisers like display ads because they are often more affordable than PPC or PPI but each type of ad serves a purpose that is worth exploring for your business. Which leads us to….
What paid ad should I use in my business?
The simple answer is test, test, test all types of ads! But, we know you probably have a limited marketing or advertising budget for your business, so how do you navigate the world of digital advertising?
A digital agency with experience across all types of paid advertising can help you find the right mix of online advertising that increases your leads and new customers for your business. Successful online marketing depends on getting your advertisement graphics and text right, showing it to your ideal customers at the right time of day or night and tracking the engagement so you can optimise your ads to drive even more engagement. This is where a digital agency just like us comes in. We help businesses every day with understanding their ideal customer, what makes their customers tick and where they are online and pair that with tailored digital marketing strategies for success.
If you want to take your business to the next level with paid advertising, talk to us at Campaigns You Love and see how our team of expert digital marketers can help you reach audiences you never thought possible.
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