Paid advertising is one of the best ways to bring in new customers, get leads and increase brand awareness; but not every paid advertising campaign is equal. Some businesses create an online advertising campaign and spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars, but they see little to no return on their investment.
RevLocal wants to help you not only avoid this scenario, but also to capitalize on everything paid ads can offer your business.
If you’ve not seen results with online advertising in the past, or if you aren’t sure how to get started, read on to see why you should consider giving paid advertising another chance. We’ll talk through the most effective ad types and how each one brings a competitive edge to your business’s online presence.
Paid advertising is worth the time, money and effort for the revenue it can generate for your business.
To see these results for your business, it’s important to use the most effective ad types.
Search ads are displayed in the search results of a user’s browser. You can create search ads for Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines. These ads look exactly the same as organic search results except they are identified as advertisements with a little “Ad” symbol in the top left corner.
Your Search Ads will pop up when a user searches for a specific set of keywords as well as any other criteria in your ad campaign.
For local businesses, Search Ads are a great way to beat the competition and meet demand by getting to the top of organic and local search results. When local consumers are searching for products or services like yours, Search Ads make sure your business shows up. Running Search Ads will give your business’s online presence a boost, no matter how your business ranks organically.
Lastly, Search Ads can help your business get to new markets. Even if your business is showing up when users search locally, creating Search Ads can help you expand your customer base and show up in non-local but still relevant searches.
Retargeting ads are shown to people who have visited your website in the past but who didn’t take an action you wanted them to take while on the site.
As an example: Let’s say you have an e-commerce store and someone visits your website. They add a few items to their cart and then click off the site before completing the purchase. They would be eligible to be served Retargeting Ads.
Retargeting ads can reach users across multiple platforms. Retargeting Display Ads can show up when the user visits another website. They can also be shown in organic searches or on social media.
Retargeting ads can drive some serious benefits for businesses:
For more information on retargeting, check out our post, What is Retargeting?
Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram allow businesses to advertise to their users. With advanced targeting options, and the option to retarget users on some social media sites, social media advertising can be extremely beneficial for your business’s growth.
Facebook has more than 4 million active users, the majority of which are small businesses. That means there’s a good chance your competitors are using Facebook to advertise to your customers, so you should too! You can set your Facebook Ads to show up on Instagram too, since Meta owns both platforms.
Display Ads are ads that Google shows on websites that are part of the Google Display Network. Users will see your Display Ads when they visit one of these 2 million websites. If you create ads for the Google Display Network, your ads could be served to users on one of these sites. Display network websites reach 90% of Internet users worldwide.
Display Ads can be text or graphic based and they allow you to target users either by audience or website.
Targeting by audience allows you to serve ads to users with specific interests. For instance: people in the "foodies" category or users in the market for engagement rings.
Targeting by website allows you to target users based on the websites they are visiting by showing them ads from a similar website or topic.
Sometimes businesses don’t see results with paid advertising because they don’t have the time or expertise to manage an online advertising campaign as well as they’d like to. With so many ads to choose from, constantly changing technology and multiple responsibilities as a business owner, it’s no wonder paid advertising could be overwhelming.
If you want to take advantage of all the benefits paid advertising campaigns can bring to your business but you’re not sure where to start, our digital marketing experts are always ready to talk. For more information on what it’s like to have RevLocal handle your digital marketing, contact us or check out these resources.
Taylor Rice, Blog Contributor
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