A Guide to Effective Digital Advertising

by Barry S. Digital Marketing Specialist

Today the world of digital advertising is more competitive than ever. The industry has moved on a long way from simple banner ads on the top of popular websites and search engines.

Today, you can zero in on your prospect customers with specific demographics and users’ intent.

The three most popular places to advertise your business or product are Google, Facebook and YouTube. And here’s our guide to pulling off successful campaigns on each:

Google

Google Ads, formerly known as AdWords, is the go to source for most businesses. This allows you to bid on specific keywords to appear in the top four results at the top of the Google search engine results, above both the map and organic results.

As well as selecting the specific keywords you want your ads to appear for when users conduct a search, you can get much more in-depth with when and where your ads appear, including:

Location
Days of the Week
Time of Day
Gender
Age
Language

It can seem quite daunting to set all of this up, what ad copy to write, what keywords your prospects are searching for. That’s where you should consider appointing a digital advertising agency to do this for you and give you regular reports on the results.

Of all the places to advertise, Google has the biggest audience. The search engine giant has 92% of the market share, which combines for more than 3.5 billion searches on a daily basis across the world.

Facebook

The online social media network is less than two decades in age but has over 2.8 billion active users each month. They also have their own business manager where you can run ads to potential customers.

You can create more niche targeting than Google, with the following options:

· Age
· Gender
· Location
· Interests
· Behaviours

Again, this may seem confusing to anyone who hasn’t used the system before and without a background in marketing. Your digital marketing agency will be able to create campaigns for you to bring new customers to your business.

There are a couple types of ads you can run too, from single image ads to carousels that contain up to 10 images. Videos can be inserted too. As well as your ads appearing on Facebook, you can run them on Instagram as well or instead of.

As with all platforms in this document, you have control over your daily or monthly budget and have near-live analytics to see how well your campaign is performing. It goes without saying this is hugely important in helping you make sure your campaign is profitable and to see where and how you need to adjust your campaigns to improve performance.

YouTube

Did you know YouTube is the second biggest search engine? Only behind Google. The online video-sharing platform, originally founded in 2005, has more than 2 billion logged in users that combine to watch more than a billion hours of video every single day.

Today, Google owns YouTube and you can set up your ads on the video platform from within your Google Ads account.

To advertise on YouTube you’ll need to be a little more creative that the text you produce for Google, as it required videos of course. You can make yours appear before or during content on the site.

Like with Google and Facebook, it’s also very important to set up your targeting correctly on YouTube in order not to waste money showing your ad to irrelevant users. You can select which specific channels and/or videos that you want your ad to appear on, or a bit broader by selecting interests.