Advertising, whether online or offline, usually aims to increase sales. It also aims to increase brand awareness and share of voice in the marketplace. Advertising is based on the simple economics of demand and supply. Advertisers aim to stimulate a consumer need (demand) and then satisfy that need (supply).
Online advertising has a number of objectives. Those aligned with the goal hierarchy. Here are some of the most common goals or nesting objectives and how online advertising helps implement the strategic approach:
Making people aware of a brand or product is an important long-term goal for any marketer. Once customers know about the brand, the marketer has taken the first step towards gaining the customer’s trust and patronage.
Online, creative advertising or banner advertising is largely visual, making it an ideal channel for promoting brand collateral. The visual strengths can be communicated well through this medium.
Creating consumer demand is a three-step process: inform, persuade, and remind. Consumers can’t want what they don’t know about, so advertising needs to convince them of what they should want and why they should want it.
Modern online advertising provides a great way to communicate unique selling points (USPs).
Once the consumer is aware of and wants a product, they need to find out how to satisfy that need. If brand building has been effective, they will know that a particular brand exists.
At this point, the marketer must show the consumer how their particular brand or product will best meet that need.
The immediacy of online advertising also drives traffic and sales in the short and medium terms. Unlike traditional media advertising, online advertising can immediately turn the potential customer into an actual customer.
What’s more, measuring accurately how effective the online advertising campaign has been is possible.
Online advertising can drive instant sales and conversions.
Unlike other advertising mediums, consumers can go from advert to merchant with one click. Because the Internet is connected, online activities are highly trackable and measurable, which allows advertisers to target their audiences and accurately track and gauge their efficacy.
When should we use online advertising, and when should we use traditional advertising?
Online is just another channel to help implement our strategy and assist consumers through the buying behavior process.
Campaign planning and marketing strategy are closely intertwined, with campaign planning serving as a tactical implementation of the broader marketing strategy.
Online advertising can be effectively utilized at various stages of the purchase funnel to engage with potential customers, guide, support, and encourage them through the buying process.
By tactically executing online advertising in alignment with your overarching strategy, you can master the use of these tools to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Ad Formats for the audience need to be chosen carefully.
There are many options available.
Ad formats
Online ads need to follow the ACE principles
As well as include…
Copywriting refers to the written copy used in the ads. It must follow specific guidelines to be effective.
Samples of Persuasive Ad Copy:
Align your Budget with your campaign objectives and expected outcomes.
Bidding allows you to compete for ad placement by setting bids on keywords, audiences, or placements. Higher bids typically result in higher ad visibility and placement.
Platform-specific features and tools for optimizing campaigns, such as Google’s Smart Bidding and Microsoft’s Audience Ads give specific platforms an edge when tactics are designed around these features.
Analytics and tracking are vital to online advertising campaigns. They provide invaluable insights into campaign performance, allowing advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their efforts, optimize strategies in real-time, and make data-driven decisions to maximize ROI.
Align with your goals, your strategy, your target audience, and the format of your adverts.
Your online adverts will need to: ACE
All advertising needs an appropriate landing page.
Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, is a bid-based online advertising platform that you can use to promote your business, help sell products or services, raise awareness, and increase traffic to your website.
Google Ads offers businesses a powerful and versatile online advertising platform:
Take all of your campaign planning information and choose the campaign type(s) that align.
Set bidding settings per your campaign type, overall budget, keyword, target plan, and desired outcomes.
Set targeting options to reach the right audience and maximize campaign effectiveness.
Set out your ad formats and creative, taking into account your campaign planning.
Take all other campaign optimization factors specific to Google into account.
Once the campaigns have been launched, it is time for ongoing monitor and control.
Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Advertising) is an online advertising platform developed by Microsoft. On it, advertisers bid to display brief ads, service offers, product listings, and videos to web users.
Microsoft offers a very similar online advertising platform to Google Ads:
Dynamic Search Ad (DSA) campaign is a type of Google Ads campaign that automatically generates ads based on the content of your website.
Take all of your campaign planning information and choose the aligned campaign goal.
Set targeting options to reach the right audience to maximize campaign effectiveness.
You can set budget settings according to your campaign type, overall budget, and keyword.
Set out your ad formats and creatives, considering your campaign planning.
Take all other campaign optimization factors specific to Google into account.
Once the campaigns have been launched, it is time for ongoing monitoring and control.
Many Other Options We Will Discuss Upcoming!
Social Ads, Pinterest, Amazon, Reddit, etc.
The trackability of online advertising is what makes it so superior to conventional advertising.
There are similarities to traditional. Making it fertile ground for testing.
If done correctly, online is much more informative, inviting, and less intrusive than traditional forms. Usually, it is significantly cheaper and easier to justify spend.
There are many different conversion points you can test with advertising. You can test to see how different adverts might improve click-through rates, or you can test to see how different adverts affect the conversion rate of the traffic coming to your website.
Things like bandwidth or browser speeds can cause issues with online ads. Data limitations are making targeting more difficult.
Ad blindness is a real issue. We subconsciously train ourselves to ignore advertising we are ‘not interested in’. Consumers are suffering from advertising fatigue, so while new technologies can provide great results, it can get saturated as soon as the market moves mainstream. Consumers are increasingly ignoring adverts.
As well as most browsers now blocking pop-ups, there are also extensions available for the Mozilla Firefox browser, such as AdBlock Plus, that will block advertising on web pages. Technologically savvy consumers increasingly use these methods to limit the advertising they see.
Customer data platforms (CDPs)
Creating a Google Search Campaign:
Campaigns
This is the highest level. It’s a set of ad groups that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings. They’re used to organize categories of products or services you offer.
Stick to just one goal per campaign, like increasing sales of a particular item or getting newsletter signups.
Max 25 campaigns per account.
Next level: these contain a set of similar ads and keywords.
You should be able to develop at least two ad groups per campaign.
Max 100 ad groups per campaign.
Ads include your copy and assets; each ad can have many keywords.
Keywords are the foundation of SEM. These words or phrases describing your product or service determine where your ad appears.
Your ad may appear when someone searches for words similar to your keywords.
How do we find keywords?
Also called SEM (Search Engine Marketing), search engine marketing (SEM) is a method of promotion and advertising that helps companies’ content rank higher in search engine traffic.
“Search engine marketing’s greatest strength is that it offers advertisers the opportunity to put their ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment they’re ready to make a purchase.”
– Wordstream –
Competition can be high. We need to compete where there is the most value for us.
Usually more expensive than display – around $5-$10 per click might be typical, but it varies widely by industry. The most expensive words can be $50+ per click.
CTR is usually higher than display. Around 2% is a good starting point to aim for.
Google Ads is the largest. Most of Google’s revenue comes from this platform (both search and display).
Display ads are ads that are shown on the articles, videos, or websites that consumers browse.
More generic term for visual ads.
A more passive form of advertising.
Allows the content of your ad to change depending on who is looking at it or even where they are looking at it (display different offers or products to different groups).
Interstitial are banners shown between pages on a website. As you click from one page to another, you are shown this advert before the next page.
Pop-ups are how they sound. These are adverts which pop up, or under, the web page being viewed. They open in a new, smaller window.
This advert appears in a layer over the content. Like a popup but layered from another entity.
Usually, the user can close this advert quickly. Very annoying.
This is advertising placed within the available online mapping solutions, such as Google Maps.
Becoming very important for local search.
Video advertising involves using video content to sell products or services. It is one of the most effective forms of advertising, as moving images are more accessible for customers to recall than static images or text.
It can be done in full commercials, skippable, and bumpers.
Static banners are in GIFs or JPEG format, but banners can also employ rich media such as Flash, video, JavaScript, HTML5, and other interactive technologies.
These can be set up on ad platforms or on stand-alone one-offs.
The Manitoban
Shopping ads appear at the top of search results when you use search terms that indicate you’re shopping for a specific product. They contain product information, such as color, size, price, seller, and picture.
Display advertising and affiliate marketing go hand in hand. Affiliate networks also act as advertising networks, allowing advertising to be purchased on a performance basis.
Influencers can be a form of affiliate.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Refers to a type of online advertising that seamlessly blends in with the form and function of the platform on which it appears. Unlike traditional banner or display ads, native ads match the visual design of the website or app where they’re placed, making them less disruptive and more integrated into the user experience.
These ads can take various forms, including sponsored content, promoted listings, in-feed ads on social media platforms, and advertorials. The key characteristic of native advertising is its ability to mimic the look and feel of the surrounding content, often making it more engaging and less intrusive to users.
Native advertising is popular because it tends to capture attention and drive engagement more effectively than traditional advertising formats. However, transparency is also needed to ensure that users can distinguish between editorial content and paid promotions. Platforms typically require native ads to be clearly labeled as such to maintain trust with their audience.
Remarketing & Retargeting
Remarketing refers to engaging audiences who have already interacted with your brand to encourage them to take a desired action that may interest them, such as conversion. For example, customers might log in to your site and add products to their shopping cart but leave without purchasing.
Very powerful.
Ads that convince people to click on them are clear, specific, and compelling. The idea is to “target” your audience by convincing your customers that your products or services are what they’re looking for.
Match your ad as closely as possible with what they’re searching for.
CPI stands for cost per impression, which means the advertiser pays each time the advert appears on the publisher’s page. The most common way of referring to this model is CPM, or cost per thousand impressions (the letter M is the Roman numeral for a thousand). This is how a campaign is usually priced when brand awareness or exposure is the primary goal.
CPC stands for cost per click. This means the advertiser only pays when an interested party clicks on their advert, regardless of how many times it was viewed. CPC advertising is usually associated with paid search marketing, called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Banners can be priced this way when the aim is to drive traffic. It is also a payment method sometimes used in affiliate marketing when the aim is to drive traffic to a new website.
CPA refers to cost per acquisition. This model means the advertiser only pays when an advert delivers an acquisition. CPA is the best way for advertisers to pay because they only pay when the advertising has met its goal.
Target return on ad spend (ROAS): If you want to optimize for conversion value, you can use Target ROAS to help increase conversion value while targeting a specific return on ad spend (ROAS)
With this model, advertisers pay for rollover adverts, typically placed in videos or applications (such as Facebook applications) and based on the interactions with that advert. An interaction sometimes called an engagement, means they have interacted with that ad via click or extension.
Sometimes, owners of lower-traffic sites choose to sell banner space at a flat rate, i.e., at a fixed monthly cost, regardless of the amount of traffic or impressions. This would appeal to a media buyer who may be testing an online campaign that targets niche markets. There are several variations to what a sponsorship on a website entails.
When planning a campaign, knowing how the advertising will be paid for and what kinds of advertising publishers offer is essential. A company specializing in advert serving, media planning, and media buying can solve many of these problems.
An advertising network is a group of websites on which adverts can be purchased through a single sales entity.
On the other hand, advertising exchanges are where publishers place unsold inventory for bidding. They allow publishers to fill unsold inventory at the highest available price and can give smaller advertisers access to this inventory.
Campaign Objectives: The payment model chosen often depends on the advertiser’s campaign objectives. For example, CPC may be preferred for traffic generation campaigns, while CPA may be suitable for conversion-focused campaigns.
Budget and Risk Tolerance: Advertisers with limited budgets or risk-averse may prefer CPC or CPM models, paying only for clicks or impressions. Conversely, advertisers with higher budgets and confidence in conversion rates may opt for CPA.
Industry and Competition: The industry and competitive landscape may also influence the choice of payment model. Due to increased competition, some industries may have higher CPCs or CPAs.
The Budget is Derived from Your Marketing Budget
Marketing Budgets are typically 5%-25% of revenue or revenue target.
PPC usually receives 10%-30% of that Marketing budget. This is unique, and it could be more or less. Needs, goals, business type, top-down or bottom-up structure, and ROI all play a part in this decision.
Ideally, budgets would be built from the bottom up.
Usually, a % is carved off the corporate budget and allocated down.
Fixed budget: Allocate a set amount of money for the PPC campaign over a specific period.
Flexible budgeting: Adjust spending based on performance and available resources, allowing for more agility and optimization.
Choose a local business website.
Ad servers serve adverts across several websites and can track users visiting sites using cookies or IP addresses.
This means that ad servers can offer advertisers:
The ad server can also target adverts based on the business rules of the advertiser or based on the profiles of the users:
Day and Time: advertisers can choose the time or day of the week when their adverts are shown. Advertisers can specify when their campaign should air, down to the minute. This usually depends on the client’s objective for the campaign or the product itself.
Social Serving: websites gather demographic data and then serve each user with targeted and relevant advertising. For example, Facebook will allow advertisers to select specific characteristics of users who will be shown an advert.
Behavioural Targeting: the ad server uses a user’s profile (built up over previous websites visited) to determine which adverts to show during a given visit.
Contextual (placements or topic-based) Advertising: the ad server infers the optimum adverts to serve based on the page’s content.
Ad extensions are additional information or interactive elements that enhance your ads, making them more prominent and engaging.
They provide extra value to users and improve ad visibility, CTR (click-through rate), and overall campaign performance.
They play a crucial role in the success of PPC campaigns by providing users with a seamless and relevant post-click experience. (UI-UX)
Landing pages are standalone web pages specifically designed to convert visitors into leads or customers after clicking on a PPC ad.
Our keyword lists are developed through tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, SEMrush, Ahref, etc., and assessed for their potential reach, traffic acquisition, difficulty, intent, and conversion potential.
Consider the intent behind search queries and select keywords that align with your campaign objectives.
Let’s play: Search for 3 Short-tail and 3 Long-tail keywords for “sugar-free cakes.”
Ad extensions are additional information or interactive elements that enhance your ads, making them more prominent and engaging.
They provide extra value to users and improve ad visibility, CTR (click-through rate), and overall campaign performance.
Benefits of Ad Extensions
Testing is critical in optimizing PPC advertising campaigns by identifying the most effective strategies and improving overall performance.
It allows advertisers to make data-driven decisions and refine targeting, messaging, and creative elements to maximize ROI.
How do you test a campaign?
Best Practices for Testing
