Topics: Marketing Toolkit, Digital Media
Digital ads are a relatively new addition to the marketing toolkit, but their effect has been enormous. Whether you’re purchasing PPC search ads or paying for audio ads on Spotify, you now have the ability to advertise your product, service, or business to billions of people around the world quickly and affordably. Not only that, you can target your digital ads in incredibly specific ways, optimize them almost effortlessly, and track their effectiveness with amazing precision. Let’s explore the extraordinary world of digital advertising,
What is digital advertising?
Digital advertising refers to specific types of marketing done through online channels, such as websites, streaming content, and more. Digital ads can help you achieve a variety of business goals across the marketing funnel, ranging from brand awareness, to customer engagement, to launching new products and driving repeat sales.
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Here are some of the most common types of digital ads:
- Search ads appear in search engine results pages. These are typically text ads that appear above or alongside organic search results.
- Display ads are online ads that use text and visual elements, such as an image or animation, and can appear on websites, apps, and devices.
- Online video ads use a video format. Out-stream video ads appear in places similar to display ads: on websites, apps, and devices. In-stream video ads appear before, during, or after video content.
- Streaming media ads, also known as over-the-top (OTT) ads, are a specific type of video ad that appears in streaming media content delivered over the Internet without satellite or cable TV.
- Audio ads are ads that play before, during, or after online audio content, such as streaming music or podcasts.
- Social media ads appear on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
- Mobile ads incorporate any form of advertising that appears on a mobile device (such as a smartphone or tablet) and include text ads, banner ads on mobile internet browsers, and in-app advertisements.
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PPC (or pay per click) ads are a popular form of digital advertising. In this model, advertisers pay a fee each time one of their digital ads is clicked. It’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically. Search engine advertising is one of the most commonly used forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in the sponsored links that appear when someone searches using a keyword that is related to their business offering. Every time your ad is clicked, sending a visitor to your website, you pay the search engine a small fee.
How popular is digital advertising?
- Worldwide, spending on digital ads is predicted to reach $455.30 billion by the end of 2021.
- Global mobile ad spending is expected to surpass $339 billion by 2023.
- Social media advertising budgets doubled worldwide, from $16 billion in 2014 to $31 billion in 2016, and continue to grow at a rapid pace. In 2020 alone, social media advertising budgets grew by over 50%.
What are the benefits of digital ads?
Digital advertising is an incredibly popular form of marketing for a number of reasons. First of all, digital ads can be set up incredibly quickly. In fact, PPC accounts can be set up in minutes. PPC is also perfect for rapid response advertising and testing. Advertisers can react immediately to competitor campaigns, current events that impact their business, and/or adjust keywords and copy as necessary.
“We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.”
– PIERRE OMIDYAR
PPC campaigns can be set up with amazing precision. Putting effective PPC audience filters in place allows you to reach the right audiences, right away. With PPC, you can choose exactly where and when your ads will appear, and you can make adjustments based on location, keywords, and time of day. You can also use geographic pinpointing to target customers in your area who are searching for your business or similar businesses.
Digital ads also allow you to measure a number of valuable metrics with incredible specificity, including your costs, views, and clicks. With this information in hand, you can adjust your advertising immediately to boost your return on investment. And PPC campaigns that are properly designed, executed, and optimized are almost certain to achieve excellent ROI. For example, small businesses earn an average of $3 in revenue for every $1.60 they spend on Google AdWords (one of the most popular online advertising platforms).
How can I create a successful PPC campaign?
When PPC is working correctly, the per-click fee is trivial because each visit is worth more than what you pay for it. A lot goes into building a winning PPC campaign, from researching and selecting the right keywords, to properly organizing those keywords into effective campaigns and ad groups, to setting up PPC landing pages that are optimized for conversions.
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Here are some of the key elements that will affect the outcome of your PPC campaign:
- Keyword Relevance (Crafting relevant PPC keyword lists, tight keyword groups, and proper ad text.)
- Landing Page Quality (Creating optimized landing pages with persuasive, relevant content and a clear call-to-action, tailored to specific search queries.)
- Quality Score (Rating high on Google for the quality and relevance of your keywords, landing pages, and PPC campaigns. Advertisers with better Quality Scores get more ad clicks at lower costs.)
- Creative Copy (Enticing ad copy is vital; and if you're advertising on the display network, you can use a tool like our free Smart Ads Creator to create designer-quality ads that will demand clicks.)
Here at MSS Media, Inc., we’ve been providing Education, Government, Real Estate & Lifestyle clients with succinct, optimized, and successful marketing solutions for more than 15 years. Consider MSS Media, Inc. a full-service, one-stop shop for all your Media and Public Relations needs. Your goals are our motivation. And our mission is to propel your message, further and faster, to achieve the outcomes you’re looking for. If you found this blog post helpful, please share!
