is digital advertising? Types, Benefits and Examples (Pro Tips!) //
Businesses of all sizes can use digital advertising to increase their reach, find new customers and diversify their revenue streams.
If you are able to navigate it correctly. If you want to get a return on investment, each ad network will have its strengths.
This is why I wrote this guide. It will help you to understand the four key channels of digital advertising and how they can be used to your advantage to grow your company.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
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What’s digital advertising?
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Different types of digital advertising
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Digital advertising benefits
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Examples of digital advertising
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Digital advertising tips
What is digital advertising?
Digital advertising is any digital medium that you pay for. This includes search engines, social media platforms and apps.
Different types of digital advertising
There are four main channels for digital advertising: search and display, social media, and video.
Advertisement search
Search advertising can also be known as PPC, search engine marketing (search ads), search engine marketing (search engines marketing), text ads, and paid search.
Search ads are text-based ads that appear on search engine results pages (SERP). These ads are based on what the user searched for and can be found at the top, bottom and sometimes side of search results. Although you can search ads on Google and Bing, Google is the best.
Search ads can also include Shopping ads. There is also a Shopping tab on Google. Shopping ads can also be found on the regular Search tab.
Display advertising
Banner ads are also known as display ads. They can be found on apps and websites. These are different from text-based search ads. They are image-based and come in many sizes. Display ads can be run on a variety of networks, with the Google Display Network being the most well-known.
Advertising via social media
This is social media advertising that appears on popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. They can be placed in many ways and supported a variety of creatives, including images and videos. Facebook is the most versatile platform available for businesses. This guide will focus on that.
Video advertising
Video ads are supported by social and display networks, but here we are referring to video as a channel rather than a format. It can be complicated to understand the world of video streaming and OTT, but what is *the* channel? YouTube is the best example. YouTube ads can be video ads that play before and after videos, as well as non-video advertisements that appear in search results and over videos.
Digital advertising has many benefits
Digital advertising is cost-effective in many ways. It’s pay-per click (or depending on the platform, it could pay per impression or pay per video view). You only pay when your campaign is followed. Digital advertising offers even more targeting options that allow you to target the right people to perform the desired actions.
Each digital advertising channel comes with its own benefits. Let’s take another look.
Search ads have many benefits
Search engines are the best place to find buyers’ intent. Because you target keywords, your ads will appear for those who search for what you offer. In fact, 89% buy journeys start with search engines, while 65% clicks for commercial intent queries go to paid ads. It’s no surprise that the 200% ROI is so high!
Display ads have many benefits
Display ads increase brand awareness. This is the top goal of 89% marketers. Why? It is vital to the success of any marketing campaign, including your search ads. One study showed that 27% consumers searched for businesses after viewing a display advertisement. There was also a 59% increase in conversions when people used a display ad search. We haven’t even touched on retargeting yet. 92% Marketing professionals believe that retargeting display advertising performs at the same level as search marketing or even better.
Social ads have many benefits
Although intent to purchase is the highest on search engines you should not be limiting your targeting to people with purchase intent. Social media is where you can engage and discover.
Social media ads work in the same way as display ads. They increase brand awareness through the reach of social networking sites and their creative design capabilities. They are also very easy to integrate into users’ social networks and can be shared, liked, commented on, and shared with others.
Social media ads are able to target users precisely because they share personal information. Social ads are great impulse-enablers. These ads allow you to reach users who are open to action.
- On average, Facebook users click on 12 ads each month.
- 78% American consumers have purchased through Facebook discoveries.
- Social media is the second-most used channel for brand research online.
Video ads have many benefits
video content is powerful, as we all know. It can be used to inspire people with creative storytelling, make them aware of their potential for a product/service, simplify complex offerings and create positive sentiment towards your brand.
Although you can place video ads on Facebook or other display placements as well, the sound is often turned off. This is not why people use social media and websites. YouTube users want visual and audible experiences. YouTube is also the second most popular search engine in the world, making it the ideal place to reach people with education, entertainment, or emotion.
88% people claim they were convinced to purchase a product or service after watching a video from a company.
YouTube is the second largest search engine.
70% consumers have bought from a brand they saw on YouTube.
Examples of digital advertising
You can browse tons of examples of digital advertising.
Tips for digital advertising
Every digital advertising platform is different. Here are our top digital advertising tips broken down by channel.
Advertising tips:
These are the essential things to know if you are new to search advertising or just want to refresh your knowledge.
- How the Google Ads auction works This will allow you to make better decisions about your strategy and account structure.
- Learn keyword research.
- Responsive search ad best practices. RSAs are the default search ad type, so it is important to understand how they work.
- How to set up your first campaign. You can find everything you need in our Google Ads tutorial or conversion tracking guide.
These are more advanced tips if you’re still struggling with your search ad strategy.
1. Learn the nuances of Quality Score
Google rewards high-quality ads that have higher positions and lower cost per click (hence, it’s our #1 starter tip). Keeping your click-through rates up, aligning your landing pages and keywords, and optimizing the user experience on landing pages are all ways to do this.
A healthy Google Ads account will have a variety of campaigns. However, a Quality Score of 10 for certain keyword types is not realistic. Here is the Quality Score that’s appropriate for various types of keywords.
- 8-10 Branded Keywords
- Keywords with high commercial intent: 7-9
- Keywords with low commercial intent: 7
- Keywords for competitors: 3+
These are important to remember when you create your campaigns.
2. Your ad groups should be themed
How you organize your campaigns and ad groups will impact how easy it is to manage your account. This also impacts the cost of your ads.
Your campaigns can be organized according to your preferences, such as by type of product or service or geographical location. Importantly, the ad groups in those campaigns are organized by theme.
This is because landing pages can only be used once per ad group. It will ensure that your ads and landing pages are highly relevant to keywords you target (to maintain a high Quality Score).
3. Get feisty
Search advertising is so efficient because it’s so competitive. You need to be there to win it. You will want to bid on the brand terms of your competitors, as they may be bidding on yours.
You can also use competitor keyword search tools in order to discover which keywords they are bidding on. You may be able target some keywords head-on and offer better deals for others. To increase your click appeal for keywords that aren’t as compelling, you can use extensions and extraordinary ad copy. Your appearance, enthusiasm and words are what sell!
Don’t forget about the weak points–keywords that aren’t focused on can be captured clicks for.
4. Be a keyword connoisseur
The right keywords are key to a successful Google Ads campaign. It’s not enough just to do keyword research and then input your list into your ad groups. It is important to keep your keyword lists up-to-date and to search for new keywords to target. Here’s how:
- To find lower-cost, more converting keywords with less competition, new keywords to add in your ads and to identify negative keywords that can be used to stop wasteful spending.
- Separate keywords with low Quality Scores: Take out keywords with low Quality Scores, and place them in their own ad groups with hyper-focused ads. If they don’t perform well, you might want to stop them or remove them.
- You’d be amazed at the number of keywords you can find using Microsoft’s Advertising Intelligence. There are six ways you can use it to grow your keyword lists.
5. Your campaigns should be adequately funded
We see this account all too often: Their average CPCs are over $10, they have many well-focused keywords and high-quality keywords. However, their daily budget is split across 5-10 campaigns. Each campaign gets $5/day, which is not enough to cover one click.
Keyword research (starter tip #2), is essential! We have a free keyword tool for this!
Google Ads optimizes the delivery and performance of your ads using real-time data. Your ads won’t be served frequently enough by Google if you don’t have the funds to pay for them. This will result in a decrease in Google’s ability to optimize your campaign and return you money.
There are many ways to save money on Google Ads without compromising your values, especially if you’re tight on cash. Once you have covered everything, prioritize your account. Select the campaign or keyword set that you believe will perform well, then turn off all other campaigns and allocate all your budget to it. You can let it run for a while, then evaluate the performance. If you’re seeing results, keep going. If you don’t see results, stop the group and start over.
Display advertising tips
These are some tips to help turn your display ads into awareness-building and audience-building superstars.
- Learn about sizes, specifications, and how to set them up. This cheatsheet covers all aspects of display ads.
- Get design tips and creative ideas. You’re not just dealing with text as in search ads. These display ads will provide inspiration, insight, and best practices in creative design.
- Audience targeting is a great friend. Search ads are keyword-based while display ads are audience-based. It is important to be aware of all audience options that are available to you.
These are the essentials. These are the top tips to optimize your display campaigns.
1. You should carefully curate your audience
Display advertising’s main purpose is to increase brand awareness and impressions. You must carefully select your audience if you want to make that volume have an impact on other campaigns. These are some resources to consider:
- Referral Traffic Report (Google Analytics): Click Acquisition > Referral traffic and see which websites link to yours most. This will help you identify websites that cater to your target audience.
- Audience report Google Analytics: Go to the Audience > Inquiries > Overview to find out which affinity or in-market audiences your website visitors are.
* Audience Intelligences (Google Ads). Go to Tools>Shared Library>Audience manager and examine affinity and market characteristics for any list/segment–all users and all converts, blog subscribers and users who logged into the site. These qualities will change depending on the segment you are looking at.
2. Retarget your customers strategically
Retargeting campaigns allow you to serve ads to people based upon their past engagement with your company, such as products they’ve viewed and not yet bought, content they’ve downloaded, solutions that they’ve viewed, or other ads they’ve seen.
This is why you might do it. Retargeting display ads have a 10x higher click-through rate than regular display ads. A website visitor who has been retargeted by a display ad is 70% less likely to convert.
Remarketing campaigns are essential if you want to run high-quality display ads. ).
3. Conduct placement audits
An advertiser who is good at targeting their audiences will set the parameters and then end it. An excellent advertiser will examine how placements in those audiences perform and then refine with exclusions.
Mobile app and game placements, for example, can be costly. There are too many unintentional taps. Some placements are among the best. To find out which placements are the best, conduct placement audits.
4. How to measure success
We’ve already mentioned that most industries don’t see many direct conversions through their display campaigns. How can you gauge their success when the bulk of their magic happens behind the scenes?
An all-star advertiser knows what to do.
View-through conversions are the easiest way to go. An view through conversion is when a user views your display ad but does not click on it. However, he or she later returns to your website (either by direct search or organic search) and completes the conversion.
You can customize your Google Ads settings so that view-through conversions are included and you use a brief lookback window (the time between impression and conversion).
Although this metric is not as reliable as click-through conversions it is reasonable to believe that we can trust. You can also find advanced methods to measure the impact of display ads on search campaigns .
Tips for social advertising
Here are some tips to help you succeed in Facebook advertising
- Create your account and set up a campaign: Our Facebook tutorial will guide you through the process of creating your first campaign.
- Aggregated Event Measuring: This additional step is necessary to protect your privacy. To understand the AEM tips and how to prioritize your events, please visit our AEM tips .
- How Facebook targeting works. Targeting is Facebook’s mainstay, but privacy policies have made it more complicated. Get up-to-speed with our Facebook Ad Targeting Guide.
Here are some additional Facebook advertising tips that will help you get to the next level.
1. Create a complete Facebook ads funnel
It’s tempting to promote only bottom-funnel opportunities that bring you direct profit when you pay to play. This can backfire on your business. This can backfire on you. Not everyone in your audience will be ready to buy right away. It’s not about what is most valuable to you but what’s most valuable to your prospects at each stage of their buying journey.
You can promote offers from different areas of your funnel by using a variety campaign objectives in Facebook ads. A full-funnel strategy can help you capture leads, nurture them and retarget them with better value offers. This can have a huge impact on your conversion rates as well as your ROI.
2. Your campaigns can be organized by objectives
Advertisers often break down their campaigns based on who they are targeting, rather than what their goal is. Let’s take, for example, a small business SEO ebook. There are three versions of your ebook: one for lawyers, one for physical therapists and one for interior designers.
Instead of creating separate campaigns for each audience member, it is better to create one campaign to promote the ebook, and then create three ads sets for each audience member within that campaign. This is how Facebook ads and campaigns are intended to be used.
This Facebook Ad Account Structure will allow you to manage your ads more effectively and scale your offers and efforts.
3. Consolidate all your conversions
Once you have your pixel set up, you will be able to tell Facebook about the conversion events that you wish to track. Recalling our SEO ebook example: You can create a separate conversion event per ebook download. However, this is what will be displayed when you go to the campaign-level view.
It is impossible to view conversion numbers at a glance. To see the total number of conversions from each campaign, you will need to go into each ad-set’s data.
You can quickly see the total number of ebook downloads if you create one conversion event. This is a minor detail that will save you time and allow you to make better decisions.
You’ll also want to consolidate your Aggregated Events Measurement conversions. If iOS 14+ users take events that are not within your priority selections, they won’t be reported.
4. Find out how to be creative
Payed social is all about understanding your people and how you can inspire them. This was easy in years past, with all the native targeting. Privacy changes have made it difficult. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be creative. We have many clever solutions for you to consider. Take this example:
- Although the pixel might not capture all visitors to your website, it can still be used to retarget them based on how they interact with your posts and Facebook pages. These three strategies on-platform are making a comeback.
- Aggravated with Aggregated Events Measurement Facebook Lead Capture with click-to-messenger or lead form ads.
- Are you frustrated by restrictions on targeting that is based on finance, employment and real estate targeting? You can still use in-market audiences from Google to drive traffic to your website. This is also a source audience that you can use for a Facebook lookalike campaign.
5. Strategically target interest more
Facebook allows you to target specific interests, despite privacy restrictions. Instead of targeting the same interest as the product or service that you are advertising, try thinking outside the box. Take a look at the following:
- Competitors You’re creating brand awareness among your audience, even if you don’t get clicks.
- Similar interests: You might target children’s clothes if you advertise toys. If you are advertising exercise equipment, you might target people who are interested in electronic music and healthy recipes.
- Consider adjacent audiences: Take a look at influential people and institutions within your industry who have pages with large followings. You’ll find pages that are similar, liked by the page, and top followers. Then, you can go to their profiles and add “/likes”, at the end of URL, to see what they’ve liked.
YouTube advertising tips
This is your YouTube advertising starter kit.
- Learn the basics of how to advertise on YouTube. This YouTube advertising tutorial will show you how to start your first campaign.
- How to make video content with a limited budget Video content is very powerful but can be resource-intensive. There are three ways you can lighten the load.
- Learn the secrets of memorable YouTube ads. You need to know how you can interrupt a video session.
Here are some advanced YouTube advertising tips:
1. Prioritize the first five seconds
Video ads that are well-crafted understand that most users won’t view past the first five seconds. Some people fall for the six-second bumper ad format, which is equal parts science and art. Others try to convince the user to stay longer.
Pragmatically, ensure you include your business name and contact information within the first five seconds.
2. YouTube Studio Analytics
YouTube Studio offers a wealth of data that is not available in regular Google Ads reports. You can view device reporting in Google Ads but you can also look in Studio to see additional metrics such as card clicks.
This is because it seems that devices alone bring in enough views to make it appear as though there are TVs, tablets, and gaming consoles.
When you consider average percentage viewed and card clicks, we see that the average viewing duration for TV and Video console is shorter, but these devices have zero clicks.
This is because TV and Game consoles will not show cards. If you run a TrueView discovery campaign you will be charged for video views even though they are not converting.
If you are not also trying to increase awareness or engagement with video, these metrics suggest that your campaigns should only be run on Computers or Mobile phones. Get more YouTube Studio report tips.
3. Pay attention to fine-print settings
You should be aware that there are specific settings for setting up video campaigns within Google Ads. Video Action campaigns, for example, support sitelink extensions and call-to-action extensions to encourage visitors to your website.
Google says that the call-to-action button for TVs can only be used by Video campaigns with the “Brand awareness, reach” or “Product and Brand consideration” goals. These extensions will not appear on all TVs. This is why you should turn off the placement if your campaign is Video Action.
Television device targeting doesn’t have to be boring. Many people are glued to their smartphones and can easily search for your brand or products after they see your ad. Split the campaign into separate campaigns if you want TV devices to be a part of your marketing strategy. This will allow you to have more control over the budget and provide better insight into how your Action campaigns perform on TV.
4. Establish a frequency limit
Video ads can interrupt the content that a user has chosen to engage with. This is besides being creative. People will tune out if you show the same ads (or the same series) too often. This can lead to negative brand sentiment.
Set a daily/weekly view limit. Five views per week is a good starting point. Then, you can adjust.
Digital advertising 101: Wrap-up
All ad channels, whether they are search, display or social, have a place in your digital advertising team. As long as you understand how each channel works, that is. This guide should have helped you to understand the strengths of each ad so that you can create a sales-, lead-, and ROI-generating machine in your business.
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