Paid advertising is any form of internet advertising that a marketer or company pays for. With paid ads, advertisers are basically renting a space on a platform with their target audience and advertising their offer.
Types of Paid Advertisements
There are different options for advertisers to choose from when it comes to paid marketing.
No matter the type of business you’re into, there’s something you could use.
The major ones are:
1. Display Ads
They can be in the form of a text, images, or videos displayed on websites e.g. news sites. It is mainly used for general advertisements and brand awareness ads.
2. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC is a type of advertising where advertisers pay only when someone clicks on their ads. It is one of the most used internet advertising models. Advertisers mainly use PPC to drive traffic or generate leads.
3. Social Media Ads
Social media ads are advertisements placed on the various social media platforms. It is considered to be one of the most effective ways of digital advertising.
4. Native Advertising
Native advertising integrates ads into the platforms they appear on. They give the feeling that the ads are part of the platform’s content which makes them great for promoting blog posts. Popular native advertising platforms are Outbrain and Taboola.
5. Video Ads
Video ads are shown on video streaming platforms like Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube.
6. Remarketing/Retargeting
Retargeting ads are one of the best ways to remarket your products to people who have already visited your website.
7. Influencer Marketing
With influencer marketing, advertisers pay popular social media personalities called influencers to market their product through endorsements and product placements.
Should You Use Paid Ads?
It is important to consider a number of factors before you begin spending on paid ads.
1. Budget
The first thing to consider is your budget. Paid ads can be expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you’re a business or website owner without a considerable advertising budget, you would want to look into some free advertising options first before considering paid ads.
2. Return on Investment
The next thing to consider is the return on investment (ROI). For every dollar you spend, how much do you get back? You want to make sure that you’re generating a positive ROI with your paid ads. You may be attracting customers and generating revenue with your ads but overall you may still be getting a negative ROI.
With that said, paid advertising can also be a great investment for your business especially if you have the budget.
What Are the Advantages of Paid Advertising?
There are several advantages to running paid ads. Here's four of them:
1. Instant Results
The first advantage that comes to mind when it comes to paid advertising is that you see results immediately. For example, if you're running a traffic campaign to your blog post, you should start seeing visitors immediately your campaign goes live. The same cannot be said for organic methods.
2. Highly Scalable
Another one of the major advantages of paid advertising is that it is highly scalable. This means there’s no limit on how many people or customers you can reach with your paid ads. The higher your budget, the more people you can reach.
3. Multiple Targeting Options
Unlike organic marketing, paid ads give you the option to target specific people who may be interested in your product or service. For example, a platform like Facebook ads give you the option to target people by gender, demographics, location, interests etc.
With these targeting options available to you, you can be sure of that the people you reach are more likely to convert into customers.
4. Measurable
Most paid ad platforms provide detailed analytics to help you measure well your campaigns are doing. You can see how many people your ads have reached, how much you've spent, your conversion rate and lots more.
Paid Advertising Platforms
There are a lot of paid advertising platforms you can use to drive traffic, generate leads, and increase sales.
Below, we’ve listed some of the most popular platforms you can start using today:
Serpstat is a really useful platform for paid advertising. It offers great features for PPC and contextual advertising. With its detailed analysis report for advertising, this platform offers insightful data on ads and keywords used in those ads.
You can easily find your competitors in PPC and spy on your competitor ads. It also provides details of the landing pages of your relevant competitors. With these ad examples from competitors, you can smartly gauge your own marketing strategy and improve your ad campaigns.
SEMRush is a great tool that helps you save hours from your marketing efforts. It spares you hours of finding the most profitable ads of your competitors. Having a collection of these ad images, keywords, and ad copy is a great way to analyse good marketing strategies, and find out what’s missing in your paid advertising campaigns.
There are 4 sub-tools to do this: the keyword magic tool, keyword manager, keyword gap tool, and PPC keyword tool.
It also helps you discover new advertisers for Google Ads. The display advertising tool provides reports that tell you about your competitor's ad placements and also provides information on their audience.
SE Ranking is a software made for comprehensive marketing needs, including competitor analysis which helps you find out what your competitors are doing, and how well their efforts are paying off.
The competitive research section of this software tells you about the most popular ads of competitors, which keywords they target, and how these ads are displayed in Google. It also provides details to their Google Ads marketing campaigns and their monthly Ads history.
Not only this, this tool also gives you ideas for alternative keywords to use in your ad campaign.
Leadpages offers AdWords-friendly, easy-to-customize templates for your landing page which is one of the most important parts of your marketing funnel.
AdWords determine the quality score of your ad and include the features of your landing page in the score too. A high-scoring, high-converting landing page helps you rank your ad in a better position.
Some of the features of a high-scoring page are navigation, easy-to-find contact information, relevant text, and rich content. Leadpages integrates all these features in its templates.
Other tools: Optmyzr, Google Data Studio, Google Ads Editor
How Can We Help?
Not sure which paid advertising route would be best for your business? Get in touch and we’ll book you in for a free strategy session.
If you like what you see, we could pair you with an awesome marketing team using our matching service. They’ll implement everything we discuss and more.
If you already have a team, send them over to our training courses to get the latest lessons in marketing. There they can learn techniques and tips that we love AND use!
