What is digital advertising?

Digital advertising is a type of marketing that focuses on leveraging all available online channels to promote your brand and reach the right audience in the most effective way. Nowadays, majority of businesses use digital advertising as it is a indispensable and often a cost-effective way to bring customers to the business.

For the purpose of this article we will solely focus on paid advertising & channels.

Benefits of digital advertising

1. Reach the right audience in the right place at the right time. Advertising tools allow you to set up the ads based on your target audience’s online behaviour, which means you can serve them at the times and in places they will work the best.
2. Measure performance of your efforts and improve where appropriate. You can view performance of your ads almost in real time and adjust how and where you serve them as required.
3. It is cost effective. It is way cheaper than traditional offline marketing channels and oftentimes brings much better return on investment than traditional advertising.

Types of digital advertising

Digital advertising can be classified into the following categories:

Native ads

Relatively new format that is becoming very popular as, contrary to display ads, it is not being blocked by AdBlockers. These are the ads that show on a publisher site as a ‘recommended article’ in the bottom of the page and resemble in look and feel of the page you are currently on.

Display ads

These ads come in different formats and are usually visual (static image, carousel/GIF or video)

• Banner ads (static and moving ads in different formats and sizes)
• Floating banners (these are the moving ads that float on a website)
• Wallpaper  ads (serve as a background of a website)
• Popup ads (one of the most annoying ad formats – new windows that appears on top of the viewed content)
• Video ads (videos on a publisher website, often autoplaying)
• Google Maps ads (ads that prominently show your business in local searches)

Remarketing ads

These are ads served as display ads on publisher sites or social media and target specifically your past visitors only. Remarketing is a known tactic to increase sales and conversion from past website visits and brand awareness as ads tend to follow people across the web.

Search ads

Ads served on search engines like Google, Bing and others (of your choice). Unlike the ads mentioned above these are text-only ads and are served in response to people’s search queries. They can be divided into:

• PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads – a marketer puts a bid on specific keywords and if the bid is strong enough, the ad pops up in top search results, like shown below:

• CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand) ads – business is billed a flat rate for 1,000 impressions.

Paid social

Ads purchased and served on social media channels. Majority of currently available channels offer some sort of paid advertising, some examples include:

• Sponsored tweets
• Pre-video ads on YoTube
• Facebook ads
• Pinterest ads
• Instagram sponsored ads (via Facebook advertising platform)
• Snapchat ads

Sponsored content

These ads are pieces of content that you have paid for and usually resembles an article on a publisher page or a blog post on blogger website.

Affiliate marketing

This type of marketing allows others to make commission on driving traffic to your website and generating sales. It’s a great tool to use in partnerships and with influencers to help them make commission by promoting your products and services.

Email advertising (and SPAM)

Email marketing is a popular form of promotion and requires a list of contacts that expressed an interest in receiving communications from you. Please note, new GDPR regulation is coming in force in European Union and it affects your marketing efforts to customers based in EU.

Email marketing is a popular channel and many brands use it to build relationship with their contacts, share news, inform them about upcoming sales and promotions or simply present them with an interesting content.

Who is digital advertising good for?

Every business or individual who is trying to:

• Increase traffic to the website & brand exposure,
• Build stronger relationships with customers and understand them better,
• Increase sales online and offline & leads,
• Reach target audience.

How to start with digital advertising?

Start with the basics:

• Identify the right channels for you.
• Clarify your objectives.
• Create a budget.
• Dedicate resources and time to planning, implementation, management and evaluation.

You can choose to manage advertising yourself (in-house) or have an agency (like ourselves) do it all for you. Key platforms to get yourself accustomed with include:

1. Google Analytics (if you don’t have it yet – for analysing traffic and behaviours on your website)
2. Google AdWords (for managing search, display, remarketing & YouTube ads)
3. Facebook Business (for display & remarketing ads on Facebook)

If you wish to find out more how we could help you effectively manage your advertising, get in touch.