The way that companies connect with and influence their audiences has been transformed by online advertising.
This form of advertising allows for an almost direct line to the consumer, as it is conducted in well-defined digital spaces where people congregate. On any given day, the average person is part of several digital environments—whether they are websites, forums, or some other sort of shared virtual space. For these and other reasons, online advertising has fast become the most effective way for businesses to get the word out about their offerings. In this chapter, we will discuss the various aspects of online advertising, including its history, its many benefits, and the multitude of strategies and tools that make it such a powerful form of communication.
A Brief History of Online Advertising
The online advertising journey started in the 1990s and took off rapidly to become the powerhouse it is today. When the internet was first developed, it was a barren wasteland for commercial activity, due to overly restrictive acceptable-use policies, which, thankfully, began to fade away in the early 1990s, making room for a not very profitable but somewhat commercial arena. The first digital ad was a clickable web banner that appeared in 1994, and early online advertising was stupidly simple. It was essentially just a glorified banner ad and email marketing. But as users became more ad-averse and better at avoiding these simple, kind of dumb ads, more sophisticated mechanisms for reaching us emerged. Search engine marketing (SEM) became a thing. Ads on social media platforms became a thing. And, of course, there was (and is) a whole lot of programmatic advertising, which is not as scary as it sounds.
Key Components of Online Advertising
The expansive array of online advertising methods offers enterprises a plethora of prospects to fine-tune and tweak their campaigns. Be it through display ads, paid-search ads, or even some interactive content, businesses can really dial in their techniques to reach, connect, and engage their target demographic.
Paid Search Advertising
Paid search advertising, often tied to services such as Google Ads, has emerged as a vital component of any successful digital marketing strategy. With all the billions of searches happening every day across the globe, targeting users right at the moment they’re expressing intent to buy ensures leads of the highest quality.
The Key to Paid Search Campaigns: Key and Match Types
Paid search campaigns center on picking and bidding on pertinent keywords. Usability selection sorts into two general paths: match types and keyword types. Using match types—broad, phrase, or exact—allows for system selection sorts that make action selection more probable. For example, using exact match limits the action sorts at the format level but maximizes selection at the meaning level (Grosse, 2020).
Strategies for Bidding
The paid search mechanism functions like an auction. Advertisers select keywords on which to bid. The placement of ads relies on several factors, including the maximum bid one is willing to offer, the quality of the ad, and the relevance of the ad to the searcher’s query. The most successful businesses in using paid search are those that achieve high placements of their ads while paying less than one might expect for such placements.
Display Advertising
Visual advertisements that show on other websites are known as display ads. These can be found in any number of formats—they might take the shape of a large banner across the top of the page, or they might pop up when you’re trying to navigate back to something you were working on. But no matter the format, the goal is the same: to have you see the ad and to get you to then perform some action related to that ad—usually, to buy something, or at least to be aware that it’s there for buying when you might feel the need.
Campaigns for Retargeting
Retargeting is where display ads really shine and make a name for themselves. With the help of cookies, businesses can accurately serve up ads to people who have already shown interest in their product or service. For example, an online-only ecommerce site could re-up its ads to include untapped discounts for products a user browsed but didn’t buy.
Media with Wealth
These are interactive advertisements that have a lot in them for the user to interact with to drive greater user engagement. These ads can incorporate features such as videos, animations, or even clickable elements that make the ad a more engaging experience for the viewer. The most advanced platforms even allow for pop-up animation ads that can become an even richer user experience if they are creatively optimized.
Role of Social Media in Advertising
How we interact with ads has shifted from the traditional one-way communication of an ad read to a direct conversation between a brand and its audience. These ads are now seen as a way for those ad-using brands to reach a target audience, using the audience’s information and interactively engaging them. This form of ad may be the most broad-reaching yet.
Facebook and Instagram Advertising
The largest social network, Facebook, is known for its many different advertising options and excellent targeting capabilities. Companies can really use Facebook ad tools to segment their audience by the factors they usually rely on: demographics, interests, and behavior. Facebook allows you to get really granular with your targeting. And for companies that want to do direct response and collect leads, Facebook has a lead ad format that is very simple to use and works really well.
Types of Advertising
These platforms have formats such as carousel ads (boasting multiple images/videos), video ads for narrative purposes, and instant experience ads that let users interact with a brand right on the platform.
Successful retargeting requires knowing who your audience is and what they’re interested in. Facebook allows businesses to track visitors to their sites, so they can serve these people ads that have a better chance of convincing them to revisit and convert. Instagram itself also offers brands a way to reach prospective customers through Explore ads that find their way in front of users actively searching for new places to spend their money.
LinkedIn Advertising
LinkedIn offers a one-of-a-kind platform for advertisers who want to reach a highly professional audience. This makes it the advertising platform for B2B marketers. On LinkedIn, businesses can serve up their promotional content to exactly the right people—down to the level of job title, company, or industry.
LinkedIn enables advertisers to personalize direct-message advertisements
which when done right, can lead to lots of lovely conversations and even more lovely leads. If you’re not familiar with direct-message ads as an idea, think of them as the direct-mail equivalent of ads that show up in your LinkedIn inbox. Unlike human art projects, these ads are more like business-on-human life projects.
The Mechanics of Programmatic Advertising and Real-time Bidding (RTB)
These days, programmatic advertising pretty much runs the show. And when it comes to programmatic, real-time bidding is where the money gets made. In a virtual instant, if not nano-second, advertisers are able to bid on ad placements just as users are about to be served a webpage. It’s all highly automated and software-driven, using binding data about past user behavior—along with the now almost stereotypical usage of demographics—to make ad placement decisions. And where better to save your time and money than in “efficient” real-time bidding?
Benefits of Programmatic Advertising
Advanced targeting can reach people based on their behaviors, such as previous purchases or product affinities. But nothing comes close to the behavioral targeting of today’s demand-side platforms (DSPs). These platforms make use of the vast quantities of data that are used to build individual profiles on millions of people. They also do a much better job than humans ever could of figuring out what kinds of people are more likely to take actions that lead to the kinds of results the advertiser is looking for.
Pricing That Works
Beyond the cost-per-click and cost-per-thousand views pricing models, programmatic platforms use a different method for ad placement. They use something called dynamic ad placement, which ensures ads are placed optimally for the given budget.
Retargeting and Behavioral Ads
Pixel-based retargeting is a way of serving retargeting ads that most people understand. When a user visits a site that has an ad server on it, the server places a pixel in the user’s browser. When the user is served a retargeting ad, the ad looks as if it’s been specially tailored to the user.
Metrics for Success in Online Advertising
The first step is to create eye-catching ads, but the next step is a lot more fun and a lot more important: Work with actual metrics to determine how well the campaign is performing—is it even performing at all? Metrics bring meaningful indications into how an advertiser’s online ad campaigns are doing.
Key Metrics to Track
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of individuals who, after viewing an advertisement, went on to click on it.
- The conversion rate measures what proportion of users carry out an action we want them to do, whether that is buying a product or completing a form on our site.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA): The cost incurred in converting a lead into a customer.
- Ad Spend Return On (ROAS): Measures the income generated for each dollar invested in advertising.
- Metrics of engagement: They are the ones that gauge how the user interacts with the advertisement—do they share it; do they comment on it; and, most importantly, do they spend time with the content of the ad?
Ensuring Ad Effectiveness
Methods of testing, like A/B testing of advertisements or experimenting with design engagement, drive better iterations in our banners and videos. They work particularly well with multi-format campaigns and are even better with our mobile innovations.
Utilizing Online Advertising Tools for Efficiency
Managing advertising work efficiently requires well-integrated tools. WoopSocial is an indispensable utility for any business, no matter what scale, that seeks to implement social media strategies with maximum effectiveness and minimum friction. It is a tool that allows for automation and analysis of social media strategy on three indispensable levels. It offers post-publishing workflows, exists as a solid desktop utility, and operates as a smartphone app that occupies the third possible dimension of the user experience—ubiquity.
