7 Cost-Effective Ad Types for Small Businesses
The benefits of PPC advertising are numerous.
If you want to reach consumers via the internet, you actually have several options. However, there is one option that is often overlooked — PPC. With PPC, you can target your audience based on keywords they type into search engines. PPC also allows you to track how users respond to your ad campaign. For example, if you advertise a new product on Google, you’ll see which pages get the most clicks. You can then figure out what works best on your site before investing more money.
To give more insight, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising gives small business owners a way to get their name out there when people search for products and services similar to theirs.
While it may seem daunting to learn how to make effective PPC campaigns, it really is not that difficult if you follow some simple guidelines. In addition to being easy to implement, PPC also offers powerful features that can help your business grow.
Some of these include:
- Targeting specific keywords– You can target certain keywords to reach customers who are searching for products related to those keywords.
- Tracking results– Once you create your campaign, you can see exactly what happened during the day and night.
- Reporting tools– You can easily access reports to analyse performance and figure out where you should focus your efforts moving forward.
With the help of a good agency like ours, we can provide you an understanding on how to go about pairing up the best PPC ad for your business.
And if you want to learn more about paid search marketing, read through the rest of the post.
There are several available options who are looking into utilising PPC ads for their business. Let us discuss the types of PPC ads and how they could benefit you.
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Display Ads
Display advertising is one type of paid advertising where you display advertisements (usually banners) next to relevant pages, such as search results, social media feeds, emails, blogs, news articles, etc. While the name “display” implies to only show something somewhere else, online advertisers may also create popups, video players, slideshows, animated GIFs, and so forth to display advertisements.
Some forms of display advertising use an overlay style on top of the original webpage, while others replace part of the existing page content. Most online advertising networks allow setting bid amounts for each advertisement, allowing for better control over how much you spend on each individual impression.
For example, if you’re running a website about cats, you might set a bid amount for each cat image seen by visitors. Typically, the higher the bid amount, the greater chance your ad will be displayed to potential customers. In addition to showing ads, advertisers may also provide links to external websites, similar to sponsored links on Wikipedia.
Display Advertising rates depend on various factors including size of advertisement, number of times it displays, placement of the advertisements, number of impressions, clicks, etc.
If you have a product or service that is not widely known over the internet, then you can utilise this type of advertising to gain recognition for your brand.
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Search Ads
This is the most common PPC ad type. You will incur costs for this type and it is mostly what advertisers utilise when they are just kicking off the PPC marketing for a business.
How it works: you can typically choose which keywords you want their ads to appear on and then tell Google Ads what text you would like to display when someone searches for one of your chosen keywords. You can set a maximum price per click (CPC) that you are willing to pay if people click on your ads.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising uses an auction system to determine where on the page the ad appears and how much the advertiser should pay for each click through to their site. Factors considered include the price bid by the advertiser, the relevance of the keywords used, the number of times the keyword has been searched, and other quality metrics.
Pay-per-click search ads can be found either above or below organic search results, depending on whether they’re paid for or not. If there’s a message saying “ad” displayed on the top left of their ad, then they must be pay per click search ads.
In fact, most advertisers who use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising use Google AdWords to advertise their business on the Google search engine.
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Video Ads
Online videos are increasingly becoming an important part of digital marketing. Just this year, online videos account for more than 82% of all consumer traffic. Talk about a rise in the popularity of videos in the online realm!
This could be greatly beneficial to your business. That’s because paid video ads give you access to audiences who may be unaware of your business or following your brand. You don’t actually need to spend time building an audience before running them.
If you’re thinking about video marketing, then YouTube could be a great starting point. With two billion monthly active users, it’s almost guaranteed your target audience is present on that platform. However, before you begin any video marketing campaign, make sure you know how much money you’ll need to spend. If you are doubtful on the cost that running videos entail, you can get in touch with our team so our specialists can give you expert advice on this matter.
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Remarketing Ads
A remarketing campaign helps you reach out to visitors who may have been interested enough in your product to visit your website before. They might also have come across similar information about your company elsewhere.
Remarketing campaigns help you target these users based on their previous actions, such as visiting another page on your website or purchasing something from another vendor’s store. These are known as “lookalike audiences” because they mimic the behaviour of actual consumers.
Using them, you can retarget your current customers and increase revenue per click (CPA) significantly.
Where does this apply best?
- Previous users from your site.
- Old customers who have purchased from your site.
- Those who subscribed to your mailing list.
- Those who added products to their carts but abandoned them.
- Potential customers who viewed your company’s Youtube videos.
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Paid Social Ads
Social media advertising involves displaying advertisements on websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. These ads appear either when someone visits these sites or when people visit pages within them. Many popular platforms provide pay-per-click (PPC) advertising services. Some of these include Facebook, Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Twitter Advertising, LinkedIn Advertising, and Tumblr Advertising.
If you’re trying to advertise your business through Instagram, you can simply set up a Facebook ad for the same purpose. You can do so by going into the Facebook Advertising section. This way, you get both Facebook and Instagram audiences for the same cost.
Paid social enables companies to run remarketing campaigns and/or prospecting campaigns. Remarketing campaigns will show ads to people who visited your website before. Prospecting campaigns will show ads to potential clients. Paid social ad platforms typically allow you to choose between display ads (which are shown on Facebook) and sponsored stories (which are shared on Instagram). Some platforms also let you select between banner ads, videos, images, GIFs, carousels, and rich media.
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Gmail Sponsored Ads
Gmail Sponsored ads let businesses promote their products through Gmail users’ inboxes. They can be created from either Google Ads, which allows advertisers to run campaigns within Google Search, Shopping, and Display to reach Gmail users.
With Gmail sponsored ads, users see an ad that looks just like any other message in their inbox. They can either ignore it or click through to the advertiser’s site.
You can use Gmail ads to drive additional traffic from search engines, but there are several ways to measure their effectiveness.
Here are some of the most important ones:
- Gmail Saves – This metric shows the percentage of users who saved your email for later
- Gmail Forwards – You can see how many times your ad has been forwarded to others.
- Gmail clicks to the site – With a Gmail campaign, if an advertiser clicks on one of your ads, it will expand to show them more information about what they’ve seen. When the user clicks on the same ad again, they’ll go directly to your website. The number next to each line represents how many times the person who saw the ad clicked on it before going to your website.
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Amazon Ads
With so many businesses selling online, it can be difficult to get your products seen by potential buyers. Therefore, Amazon has offered an advertising service called “Amazon Advertising” which allows companies to pay to promote their products using a pay per click (PPC) model.
On Amazon’s advertising platform, there are generally three different kinds of campaign types. Check them out:
- AdWords ads are paid advertisements that appear at the top of Google searches. They’re usually sponsored by companies who want to promote their products.
- Featured Snippets – Shows ads at the top of Google searches. Your ad will be displayed if someone searches for a specific keyword.
- Products display ads – show pictures of your actual products.
- We’ve seen great success using Amazon Advertising. However, we haven’t seen any evidence that Amazon Advertising has taken away our sales from our website.
To get started with PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing, you should make sure that you choose an ad type that works best for your company. You can also run tests and try out new ad formats. When you do decide upon one platform, it is important to stick with it. If you need further advice, get in touch with our team of PPC specialists.
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