Everything you need to know about online advertising

The development of the World Wide Web over the past ten years has completely changed the advertising landscape. Online advertising is evolving rapidly with time. Nearly half of the world's population uses the Internet, and people of every age group are connected to the Web. New platforms, ad types, and targeting capabilities are constantly emerging. Ever double-tap an image on Instagram, react to a video on Facebook, or click on a search result on Google, only to find out it's actually an ad? Unlike in the past, today, more than ever, advertisements can be contextual, relevant, targeted and useful. In short, advertising today is content.

 

Why is online advertising important?

In today's world, online advertising is very important for the success of a business. Research shows that today, the use of the Internet to search for information about products and services before purchasing them has increased dramatically. This means that you cannot ignore the key role of online advertising in the success of your business, since most of your customers are reviewing products online.
Every entrepreneur and marketer should use this modern age advertising tool. Online advertising can increase customers and ultimately help increase profits.

Advantages of online advertising

Let's take a look at some of the main advantages of online advertising:

• The global reach of

promoting an e-commerce store to a global audience is very easy with an online advertising strategy. Because through internet advertising, you can introduce your business beyond your geographical location and reach your target audience around the world. You don't have to travel anywhere to grow your business. You can easily communicate with your audience with the help of the Internet. In this way, your business will be accessible to millions of customers. Potential customers may later become your customers and help you earn more profit.

• Affordability

One of the biggest advantages of online advertising is its affordability. Unlike traditional advertising methods (TV, radio, etc.), you don't need to spend millions of dollars to advertise your products and services.

• Reaching the target audience

Online advertising helps you find the right audience for you. It actually targets the audience that is most likely to be interested in your product or service. Online advertising tools like, online display ads, social media ads like Facebook and Twitter ads, video ads make it easier to reach a variety of target audiences. So it helps you to make your campaigns more effective and profitable.

• Access to data

With the help of online analytics tools, you can determine which strategies work best for you. You can analyze all data such as keyword data and make necessary changes to improve conditions. You can also easily check the conversion rate and measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

• Fast and Easy

Unlike traditional marketing and advertising methods, online advertising is fast and easy. Traditional advertising method is very time consuming. But in online advertising, from the moment you start your advertising campaign, you can see its feedback. This allows you to reach your goals quickly.

• Interaction with

Internet users is a medium that provides the possibility of interaction with users. Brands not only send messages, but can also receive comments, likes, questions, etc. from users. This allows for smoother and faster communication. Although this requires spending more time on the brand, it has many benefits such as understanding users' interests, concerns, opinions, etc.

How to advertise online

All online interactions start with a search engine, and in this way, you can attract the attention of your target audience through online advertising. There are many ways to strategically advertise your business. Think about who you are trying to reach in the beginning. Ask yourself, "What demographic am I advertising to?" and "How can I introduce my product or service to the target group?". To answer these questions, you need to know which part of the Internet your target population spends most of their time on. Research the most visited social networks and the most searched keywords.
Always advertise onlineThey don't come with a fee, but your audience can find your business organically through social media. Creating a business page on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even TikTok and providing interesting content and posts can be very effective. To improve organic marketing performance, digital advertising can help you in three key ways:

• Increase brand awareness by showing your content to people inside and outside your networks.
• Better understanding of the audience, using targeting and analysis of advertising platforms.
• Create higher performing content by understanding what ad content helps you achieve your business goals and what doesn't.

The goal of any advertising strategy should be to get a positive return on your investment, in this case you should answer two important questions (for example, in the PCC method):

• Are you getting more revenue from your ad campaign than you are spending?
• How can you find out how much advertising costs should be in order to get the most return on investment?

Use this equation to answer these questions: customer lifetime value (LTV) * average lead-to-customer rate * average conversion rate

LTV is how much value a customer generates for you during their relationship with your business. The average lead-to-customer rate is the conversion rate of leads to actual customers. and conversion rate, the percentage of contacts who take the action you want (filling out a form, making a purchase, etc.).
Collectively, these metrics will tell you how much you should be spending on your ads. Let's say you want to use digital advertising to promote your new content. You need to know what the maximum cost of your ads should be to see a positive return on your investment. for example:

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): 12 usd
Average lead to customer rate: 10%
Average conversion rate: 20%

Plug these numbers into the equation above to determine what your maximum ad spend should be. 500000*0.1*0.2=10000 This means that you can spend a maximum of 0.25 usd for each click on your ad, so you should spend less than this amount for a positive return on investment.

All types of online advertising

Now that we know how to advertise online, let's look at the different types of online advertising:

Online advertising on social media

Every month, there are nearly 2.5 billion active users on Facebook, 1 billion on Instagram and 330 million on Twitter worldwide. Due to the large number of active users in these networks, advertising costs in social media are at their highest. Worldwide social media advertising is expected to exceed $8.5 billion this year. Advertising in social networks has many advantages. Among other things, you can:

• Reach your target audience using the multi-audience targeting feature across all social media platforms.
• Use a variety of ad formats to advertise in a way that suits your business goals.
• Invest in specific ads that will lead to more sales for your business.

Let's take a look at eight popular social networks, including: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok, and learn about the audiences and types of ads available on each.

1- Online advertising on Facebook social media

Facebook is the most used social network. Approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide use Facebook. This is more than 30% of the world's population. With so many people using Facebook, it's almost guaranteed that you can attract an audience from any field. That's where one of the most powerful features of Facebook advertising comes in: audience targeting. Targeting functionality on Facebook is not comparable to any other social network. There are three types of audiences you can target on Facebook:

• Core Audience: An audience based on criteria such as age, interests, and geography.
• Custom Audiences: Reach out to people who have already engaged with your business.
• Lookalike Audience: Reach new people whose interests are similar to your best customers.

Facebook's advanced targeting can be used to target relevant audiences. Advertising on Facebook includes a wide range of ad types, including:

• Advertising through photos
• Video ads
• Story ads
• Lead advertising

Another way to advertise on Facebook is through Facebook Messenger. Facebook Messenger is a separate messaging app that has its own advertising opportunities. Around the world, 20 billion messages are exchanged monthly between people and businesses on Facebook Messenger.

2- Online advertising on Instagram social media

Instagram has more than 1 billion monthly users worldwide. Most users are between 18 and 34 years old. You can advertise on Instagram in three ways:

• Promote posts and stories directly from your professional Instagram account.
• Create ads from your Facebook page and promote them on Facebook and Instagram.
• Create ad campaigns.

We recommend that you definitely use the third option and create custom campaigns for your audience on Instagram.

Instagram has the same types of ads as Facebook, including:

• Advertising through photos
• Video ads
• Story ads
• Advertisements in Explore

The most interesting type of ad right now is the one in the Explore tab. People who use Explore on Instagram discover their interests and discover new content creators.

3- Online advertising on LinkedIn social media

The LinkedIn platform has more than 660 million monthly active members worldwide. The platform's users are mostly active professionals, which makes LinkedIn a great place for B2B (business-to-business) advertising. In addition, an important advantage of LinkedIn advertising is its unique targeting capability. On LinkedIn, you'll have access to unique targeting metrics not available on other social media platforms. You can target users on LinkedIn by unique demographics, including job title, job function, and industry. Plus, with the option to include lead gen forms in your LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn can be a lead generation machine. This allows you to reach a specific audience. The most interesting type of LinkedIn advertising is push messages, which allow you to send direct messages to your prospects.

But a warning:

Don't send too many ads to people because it will come off as spam.

4- Online advertising on Twitter social media

Online advertising on Twitter is not very common, as organic reach is still an important driver of a brand's performance on Twitter. Twitter has more than 330 million monthly users worldwide. Most users are between 35 and 65 years old. Many B2B companies use Twitter as a digital marketing tool.

5- Online advertising on Pinterest social media

Pinterest is a unique social media platform with 300 million users, mostly women. Some people say that Pinterest is the only platform where they really want to see ads from their favorite brands, because everything is visual on Pinterest. Pinterest is great for businesses that rely on photography to sell their products and their target audience is mostly women.

6- Online advertising on YouTube social media

With more than 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Ads are displayed on YouTube before or during YouTube videos or as a standalone video ad after a search. Because you can target demographic information and interests, you can serve your videos to specific, relevant audiences who are watching movies from similar brands or related topics.

7- Online advertising on Snapchat social media

Snapchat's 218 million users are mostly comprised of people between the ages of 18 and 24. Snapchat offers different types of ads, including story ads and augmented reality (AR) lenses. Snapchat's ad options are very similar to Instagram's ad options. What really makes Snapchat unique is its augmented reality lenses. AR lenses are sponsored by a business to create interactive moments that users can use and share with their friends.

8- Online advertising on Tiktok social media

One of the newest and most popular social media advertising players is TikTok. TikTok is about creating short, creative and often funny videos. This social media has become very popular in the past few years and has reached 500 million monthly users. TikTok doesn't link posts to websites and has only recently allowed ads, so businesses advertising on TikTok focus more on branding than leads or traffic.

Paid search advertising

People who search online are looking for something specific and click on the first result they think is most useful to them. You might be thinking, "I'm already showing up in search engine results organically, why should I pay for ads?" Well, there are three main reasons:

• On average, businesses that use digital advertising in this way are expected to earn four times better than other businesses.
• With this type of advertising, you can appear more successful in the competition with your competitors.
• Paid search ads appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) above organic results. Therefore, it allows advertisers to capture the attention of their audience in a more targeted way than organic search.

Native ads or matching ads

In this type of online advertising, brands pay publishers to create posts and videos in their style for their audience and distribute this content to their wider audience through social media and their website. That way, even though your post is technically an advertisement, it's still appealing to your audience. They will enjoy reading your post and won't feel like you or the publisher are advertising to them. This will give you wider exposure and attract new followers to your brand.
Native advertising creates a symbiotic relationship between publishers and brands. Publishers earn money by publishing native advertisements from a reputable brand. Partnering with prominent publishers, on the other hand, can help brands capture publishers' audiences and increase engagement, as native ads are clicked through much more than traditional ads.

Display advertising

Display advertising is a hot topic in the digital marketing community. Display advertising technology has advanced to the point where ad networks can use data and machine learning to deliver more effective targeting strategies to advertisers, and more relevant ads to consumers. Advertising networks such as Google Display Network and Facebook Audience Network are the pioneers of banner advertising. They can show your ads to the right target audience at the right place and time. Below we describe the features and targeting capabilities of each ad network:

1- Google display network

When you use the Google Display Network, you can design engaging visual ads and place them on over two million websites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail. You can also create a new audience by targeting visitors to your website who are most likely to be interested in your product or service by capturing their contact information. You can also let Google Ads do it for you. Advertising in the AdWords system is done in two ways: advertising in search results and advertising on other Google partner sites. In this advertising method, the two features of targeting and automatic offers can identify the highest audience for return on investment.

2- Facebook audience network

Using the Facebook Audience Network (FAN), brands can extend their Facebook advertising campaigns and use the same targeting data they use on the platform to advertise on a huge selection of websites and apps. Commercial brands can place their advertising content in different formats in the form of native ads, banner ads, full screen ads (interstitials), executive and rewarded video ads. Repeated visits of this type of advertisement can be especially effective for mobile games.

last word

Now that you are familiar with all the different types of online advertising available, the next step is to learn how to use the right ads for your business to achieve your goals. Advertising on all these platforms looks more or less the same, so knowing how to advertise on one makes it easier to advertise on the other, and using these advertising methods correctly can increase the efficiency of your business.

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