Marketing
Digital Advertising Services
Since the dawn of the internet, the effectiveness of paid ads has gone up and down with the rise of new platforms, the battles between data capture and data protection, the advent of smartphones and apps, and an increasingly tech-savvy Homo sapiens.
In some ways, the past couple of years has been a ‘golden age’ for digital advertising, as we have seen with the arrival en masse of D2C (direct to consumer).
But with more acronyms than a Soviet textbook. Where do you start?
How to Choose a Paid Ads Service
It can be challenging to figure out the most effective ways to spend your marketing moolah. From search to display ads, CPC to CPM, there are plenty of paid advertising models on the market. But which type is best for your business goals? That generally comes down to two main factors: your target audience and your specific intent.
But Hang On, What Exactly is a Paid Ad?
A paid ad, or digital ad (often used interchangeably with ‘PPC ad’, though not technically the same thing) is the purchase of an ad spot to attract internet traffic. The three biggest sellers of ad spots are search engines such as Google, YouTube, and Bing, publisher’s websites such as The Guardian, Vice, or National Geographic, and social media.
- Search ads are great for reaching customers that are looking for your product/service and the exact time they’re looking. Whether they’re in the discovery and research phase “comfy running trainers” or ready to pull the trigger “emergency plumber Norwich”. You pay every time your ad is clicked (pay-per-click or PPC).
- Display ads are the banners that you see most prominently on news sites that don’t have a paywall (go to The Daily Mail website if you need an example, you can’t miss them). They’re much cheaper and good for brand awareness. You generally pay per thousand impressions (cost-per-mille or CPM).
Easy as One, Two, O.TRIE
We have crafted an internal marketing process to maximise return on investment and minimise risk in the advertising space by testing market reactions before fully launching campaign strategies. We call it The O.TRIE Method – Test, Repeat, Inspect, Execute.
The O.TRIE Method involves carefully testing the performance of hypothetical advertising campaigns and evaluating the results. They are then run again with different conditions, then once again examined. After evaluating all the datasets, a campaign is ready to be launched based on the strongest performing conditions.
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted...
…the trouble is I don’t know which half”
The famous quote by John Wanamaker is true for almost the entire marketing age, and is likely still true for some channels. However, the evolution of digital advertising has answered this question, and enables you to stop that waste at the click of a button.
And here-in lies the beauty of paid ads; you can track ad performance in real-time. The dashboards provided by Google Ads or Meta Business Suit show how different creatives are performing, the number of clicks, the cost-per-click, the revenue generated etc.
Knowing your way around these dashboards is a must for the modern marketer. Best practice is to constantly tweak your campaigns, to enure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck. And to address John’s old concern, if an ad isn’t working, simply click ‘pause’.
A Quick Hit
Ads can give an instant boost to your marketing efforts. Meaning that you can create the ad one day and (usually) have it in front of your target audience the next. On top of this, we have ad retargeting, which enables you to show your ads to individuals that have already expressed interest in your brand/product, either through visiting your website or interacting with your social media. Ads can support almost any campaign and are, for many ecommerce brands, the primary marketing channel.
