What is Paid Advertising?
Online paid advertising is an incredibly effective and necessary advertising method today. If your business is not yet utilising paid advertising as part of your digital marketing strategy, you are losing traffic and leads to your competitors. So, what is paid advertising exactly? With many years of experience, allow us to explain and guide you through it.
What is Paid Advertising really?
Paid advertising in the digital world can refer to any online advertising that requires you to pay for it. In other words, digital marketers need to pay the publisher for their ad space on the internet. Depending on the type of paid advertising, the digital marketer would pay every time a user views or clicks on their ad. With paid advertising, you are essentially purchasing attention and traffic online instead of earning it organically, like with SEO.
How does Paid Advertising work?
Firstly, a bidding process between the owner of the ad space and the digital marketer determines the cost of the ad space. In addition to this, you also bid against your competitors for the keywords most relevant to your business. Your ads, however, need to be present on the most popular ad networks in order for them to be effective.
Two of the most widely used online locations for ads are Google and social media platforms. If you want to learn more about Social Media Marketing or how to market your business on social media, have a look at some of our other blog posts. For the purposes of this blog post, however, we will focus more on advertising on Google.
Google Advertising
Google continues to be the leading search engine, which also makes it the best possible location for your ads. How users see paid ads on the internet depends on the format of these ads. Depending on your objective, there are different Google Ad formats available: Display Ads, Search Ads, YouTube Ads, Shopping Ads and Universal App Ads.
Display Ads
Google Display ads are mainly used for brand awareness and will appear on different websites that form part of the Google Display Network. These ads can show text, images and videos and are available in various orientations and sizes.
Search Ads
Google Search ads, on the other hand, are text ads that show up on the search engine results pages (SERPS) when someone searches for a specific keyword. These ads look very similar to the organic search results. The only obvious difference, however, are the words “ad” or “sponsored” on the paid ads.
YouTube Ads
By running ads on YouTube, you are able to show your video content to users in the search results or before they start viewing another video on YouTube. YouTube Ads allow you to connect with potential customers in a more entertaining way.
Shopping Ads
Shopping ads on Google allow you to show an ad with an image of your product, its price and other relevant product information to users already searching for that specific type of product on Google.
Universal App Ads
Universal App ads help promote apps across the Google Network with the goal of driving more in-app conversions and app downloads on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Different Types of Paid Advertising
There are different types of paid advertising or bidding strategies available online. Some of these include pay-per-view, pay-per-install, pay-per-download and pay-per-acquisition. The most common type of paid advertising, however, is pay-per-click advertising (PPC). With PPC, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. The quality of the ad and the demand for that keyword will determine the price of the click. You are also able to limit the number of clicks if you need to stay within a budget.
Benefits of Paid Advertising for your Business
Whether it’s a small start-up or an already established business, there are many benefits of paid advertising for a business. Firstly, it’s instantaneous. As soon as you have set up your ads, your ads will start showing on Google. And quickly thereafter, you’ll start seeing more traffic to your website. Paid advertising also allows you to expose your business to a larger audience.
Another valuable benefit of online paid advertising is that everything is measurable. Tagging is an integral part of the process and once this is in place and set up correctly, all activity on your website can be tracked. This is essential in understanding the success of your ad campaigns and optimising for the best Return on Investment (ROI) or Return on Ad spend (ROAS), as it’s referred to in the paid advertising space.
How do I get started?
If you’re interested in getting your own business’ paid advertising or Google advertising started, get in touch with us today. Our team of digital marketing specialists have been running successful ad campaigns for a wide range of clients for years. Contact us to find out more about our paid advertising or other digital marketing services. We are always ready to answer any questions you might have.