Online Paid Advertising: Is It Worth It?

If you’re used to traditional advertising channels like radio, television, and print ads, getting into online paid advertising can seem intimidating. But online paid advertising is a powerful marketing tool for boosting your business, and launching a campaign is simpler than you might think.

Learn about some of the key benefits of online paid advertising for your business, what types of paid ads are out there, and how Optimize can assist your business with your paid ad campaigns. 

What Are the Benefits of Paid Advertising?

Online paid advertising offers incredible benefits to brands, from small businesses to large enterprises. Here are some of the top benefits of using a paid digital marketing strategy:

More Affordable

Paid advertising is an affordable way to advertise or remarket your products or services to the right audience. Part of the reason online ads are generally cheaper than traditional ads on television or print is that you can target your efforts to smaller, more engaged audiences. Instead of showing your ad to anyone watching a certain channel, you’ll only have to pay to show your ad to the specific audience you want to reach.

Instagram paid ads, for example, typically cost between $0.40 and $0.95 per click. Most other social media sites offer ad spots in a similar price range, making them highly cost effective.

With online advertising, tracking how much money you're spending is easy as well. Your digital dashboards will track your spending in real time, and if you're worried about overspending on ads you can set an ad budget limit. That way you never pay more than you can afford.

Measurable Results

Measuring the results from traditional advertising efforts can be tricky. It’s hard to tell whether new leads, traffic, or sales directly result from television or print ads. By contrast, online paid advertising, like a search ad or a display ad, easily tracks the results of your campaigns. 

All paid advertising platforms offer users enough data to analyze your ads' performance for users to decide whether or not the ads are working. You’ll know how many people see the ad, click on the ad to arrive at a landing page, and complete a conversion. This data is invaluable for helping you understand your campaigns and adjust them for better results. 

Another benefit of digital ads over traditional advertising is that your results can be nearly instantaneous. As soon as your digital ads go live, they can start driving traffic to your site and creating positive results for your brand. You won’t have to wait weeks or months to find out if your advertising investment has paid off. 

Better Targeting Options

Traditional advertising doesn’t allow you to do much targeting regarding who sees the advertisement. An online paid campaign, on the other hand, makes targeting ads simple, thanks to the wealth of customer data available online. 

When creating ads across paid advertising platforms, you can narrow down the audience of your ad based on user data, such as:

• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Profession
• Income level
• Marital status
• Hobbies
• Education level
• Interests 

Ad targeting helps ensure that you’re only paying to put your ads in front of people who are likely to be interested in your brand’s products and services. 

You need to carefully target the ads to your ideal customers. You can fine-tune these audiences over time, but in order for paid advertising to be effective, properly defining this target audience is crucial.

Helps Uplift Your Organic Content 

Brands often use paid advertising to direct consumers right to their products or services. While that’s an effective advertising strategy, you can also use digital advertising to uplift organic content your brand publishes. 

For example, you might direct consumers toward your brand blog, where you have helpful tips and tricks that are relevant to your target audience. You can also direct customers to your social media pages and encourage them to engage with your brand there. 

Creating brand awareness this way will help your audience become familiar with your products and services by placing them on popular digital channels such as Google and Facebook. This strategy is a bit more long-term and focuses on building a positive relationship with customers who might be interested in your brand going forward. 

Types of Online Ads

Online ads come in several different categories according to the channels where they appear. Here are the most important types of online ads to keep in mind:

Search Engine Advertising

Search engine advertising is one of the most popular types of online advertising today. It’s the practice of placing ads in the search engine result pages (SERPs) of Google, Bing, and other search engines. These ads are displayed when users enter a search query. 

Say a customer is searching for a part for their car. For example, they may search Google for a new vehicle transmission and start looking through the results. With paid Google ads, you can ensure your website appears before the organic results on the search page. The increased visibility in front of consumers who are already searching for terms related to your business makes search engine advertising very effective. 

Search engine marketing (SEM) is distinct from search engine optimization (SEO), which focuses instead on organically ensuring that your website ranks well in a search engine’s algorithm. Both are powerful tools for promoting your business, and you can utilize them simultaneously for better results. 

How do Google Ads work?

Google is far and away the most popular search engine, with over 80% market share. For this reason, brands utilizing search engine advertising typically focus on Google over alternatives like Bing. 

To advertise on Google, you need to decide which keywords you want your ad to appear for and how much you’re willing to spend each time someone clicks on your ad. 

By setting these parameters, your ad is entered automatically into instantaneous ad auctions, where your ad competes against others targeting the same search terms. If Google picks your ad, it gets displayed to a user and you’ll pay the amount of your bid for every click on the ad. 

Your maximum bid amount isn’t the only factor determining whether you win an ad auction. Your ad must also be high-quality and applicable to the search term to win and appear as a sponsored link. 

Display Ads

Display advertising is the practice of placing ads on websites, mobile apps, and social media channels. These ads typically include text, images, or videos to convey the message and encourage viewers to take a specific action. The ad may prompt viewers to make a purchase, visit a landing page, or fill out a form, to name a few examples. 

Display ads are unique because they appear wherever the customer is browsing online. Display ads for your business can show up on entirely unrelated websites as long as those websites are part of the advertising program. Google’s Display Network, for example, has over two million participating apps, websites, and videos. 

You can use data to target your display ads so they only appear to customers more likely to engage with your business. Adjust your display ad preferences so only people within certain demographics see your ad. 

Social Media Advertising

Paid social media advertising is the practice of placing ads on social media platforms like Facebook or TikTok. Paying for social ad campaigns is separate from maintaining an organic brand presence on social media. Your social media ads will appear in the feeds of social media users and have a label like “sponsored” or “promoted” to indicate a paid ad. 

The advantage of using a social media advertising strategy is that these platforms collect user data such as location, age, and interests. You can then use this data to target your ads to specific social media users who are the most likely to respond to them. People also tend to spend lots of time on these platforms, which means there are lots of opportunities for them to see and engage with your ads.

Remember that each social media platform is unique, and ads that work well on one platform may not be as effective on another. TikTok, for example, emphasizes very short-form videos, so you should create video ads in that format to use on the platform. LinkedIn ads are an ideal way to advertise open job positions, while Instagram ads are versatile and useful for many advertising purposes. 

Paid Advertising Through Optimize

Optimize offers a variety of paid advertising packages to assist brands in building a stronger online presence. Our digital advertising services can help you get started with marketing on Yelp, LinkedIn, Google PPC ads, and many, many more, to drive your business to new heights. 

If you want to learn more about how paid advertising can help your business and what Optimize can do for you, schedule your free consultation today.