What are the best digital advertising platforms?
In a world completely permeated by digitalization, advertising one’s business, brand, or personal identity online is now undoubtedly a necessary step to acquire and retain customers, which businesses of all sizes and influences turn to.
But what are the best digital advertising platforms through which to establish a presence on the web? What is the right path to take for a return on investment?
What are the advantages of Digital Advertising Platforms compared to traditional advertising?
With the advent of the web and the digital era, advertising has found a new way to convey messages, reaching millions of users worldwide in a very short time.
Printed advertising, for various aspects irreplaceable and partly still present, has had to largely give way to completely different dynamics that allow expanding the audience to recipients that would have been impossible to reach without the help of the web and social networks. The web erases distances, facilitates connections between people at opposite poles of the globe, and, as we often hear, with the Internet, “the whole world is a village.”
The advantage of traditional advertising certainly lies in the authority it is given and the irreplicable multisensorial experience in the online world. On the other hand, traditional media do not have the ability to access specific indicators about the progress of advertising campaigns and, consequently, it is not possible to make immediate corrections or track the level of interest from the audience, intercepting its precise origin. Online advertising, on the contrary, allows for measuring the results of the adopted marketing strategy and the return on investment made, to make necessary adjustments.
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The cost of traditional advertising platforms is fixed regardless of the results achieved, and the duration of the ad goes hand in hand with the duration of the periodical, daily, weekly, or monthly on which it is published. The budget allocated to digital advertising platforms, however, can be modified based on the period and the results of the ads, and campaigns can be paused and reactivated at any time.
Where traditional advertising delivers its message indiscriminately, the user who visits a website through an online campaign is potentially interested in the product/service proposed since Google searches are based on keywords related to the consumer’s interests.
In light of these facts, more and more companies are choosing to increase their visibility and consequently their earnings through the digital advertising platforms present on the web. But which channels to occupy? What are the best advertising platforms to get known and reach one’s target audience?
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We have understood that conducting brand awareness or personal branding online is an advantageous strategy from various perspectives. But how can we identify the best channels based on the set goals and business needs?
When we think about digital advertising platforms on which to execute our strategy, we tend to think of Google and Facebook. Undoubtedly, they are the most well-known, but certainly not the only ones. There are several platforms, each of which offers various advantages that allow us to reach one target over another. In fact, depending on the choice of the advertising platform, we can focus on different types of consumers in different stages of the sales funnel, which is the purchasing process involving the consumer from the moment they come into contact with the brand (brand awareness) to the moment of purchase.
What aspects should be considered in choosing a platform?
Marketing objectives
The choice of the digital advertising platforms to allocate our ads to must align with marketing objectives: interactions, clicks, purchases, leads. Does the platform serve the business objectives outlined in your strategy?
Target audience
To identify the digital advertising platforms that meet your needs, a careful study of the target audience is essential. Understanding buyer personas, i.e., the ideal customers you intend to address, understanding their needs, problems, potential doubts, and how to address these needs is fundamental for building a winning marketing strategy. What information do you have to define your audience? What targeting options does the platform you’re considering offer?
Budget and offering
Each digital advertising platform operates on specific dynamics, often based on an auction-based mechanism for ad placement. Understanding these mechanisms and knowing the level of control you can exert over the campaign budget is crucial in platform selection.
Data measurement
Every successful strategy involves analyzing performance to make necessary adjustments and testing every aspect of the campaigns, from creativity and placements to the selected audience, publication times, and budget. Does the platform you want to rely on provide adequate measurement tools?
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Comparing Advertising Platforms: which one to choose?
Google Ads
Among the digital advertising platforms, Google Ads is, along with Facebook, the most utilized by advertisers.
Google allows businesses to create ads to be found by customers searching for activities of that type on Google.
It functions as a massive keyword market, an auction of keywords that are purchased to create web advertising campaigns. Users bid to secure the best keywords for their business.
The ads are customized based on the desired outcomes.
- Receive more calls
- Increase visits to your store
- Direct users to your website
Payment Method: CPC, Cost Per Click
Payment is based on the results obtained: clicks on the website, calls to the business, and all clicks received on your ads.
Clicks are different from impressions. Impressions only indicate the number of times your ads are shown to the audience (with or without clicks).
Based on your goal (sales, leads, website traffic, product or brand consideration, reach, awareness, app promotion), you can set up a campaign suitable for achieving that goal and target.
Search Network Campaigns: Ads appear when users search for what you offer.
Shopping Campaigns: Showcase your inventory of products online.
Display Campaigns: Aim to capture attention with visually appealing ads.
Video Campaigns: Tell your company’s or brand’s story through videos.
App Campaigns: Introduce your app to the right audience.
The Google Ads Keyword Planner is a specific and free tool for researching and planning keywords to reach your audience. Choosing specific keywords is crucial before creating content and then crafting effective campaigns. This tool assists in selecting and planning the most suitable keywords to purchase for your ads.
The cost of a keyword depends on the number of searches performed by users for that keyword and the number of competitors looking to acquire it, as well as the quality of their websites.
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Facebook allows you to create and publish highly targeted campaigns, presenting well-defined advertising to users, and monitoring performance with detailed reports.
The choice of 2 billion people every month falls on this advertising platform. Let’s see why.
Social media has become one of the most effective advertising channels, capable of acquiring new leads—people who share their contact information by completing a contact form—and converting them into paying customers.
Facebook Ads works in both B2C (Business to Client) and B2B (Business to Business), and is highly effective due to the wealth of data users spontaneously input into their profiles (gender, age, location, interests). This social network has a great understanding of its subscribers and their interests.
With Facebook, you can:
Choose your marketing objective
- Awareness: Display your ads to an audience that might pay attention
- Reach: Display your ads to as many people as possible within your audience
- App Installations: Increase app installations by linking directly to the App Store and Google Play
- Traffic: Increase the number of visits to your site or app
- Lead Generation: Help interested people learn about your company. Encourage them to sign up to provide further information and increase their time on your app or website
- Messages: Encourage people to contact you on Messenger
- Engagement: Get more people to follow your Page or engage with your posts through comments, shares, and likes.
- Video Views: Show your videos to people who might be interested and willing to watch them to the end.
- Conversions: Increase actions on your site or app. Whether your goal is to increase sales, contacts, registrations, or other types of conversions, this objective prompts action. Use Facebook Pixel to track users.
- Store Visits: Encourage people to visit your online or offline store
- Catalog Product Sales: Promote relevant products from your catalog and show them to interested users
Select the audience
By using the information you have about the people you want to reach, you can create your audience based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Choose placements
At this stage, select where to display your ad, whether it’s on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network, or across all of these placements. You can also specify showing ads on particular mobile devices.
Set the budget
Enter your daily or overall budget and the timeframe for running your ads. These limits ensure you never spend more than you intend.
Choose the best format
Facebook provides the option to pick from 6 advertising formats designed to achieve specific goals and target audiences.
You can choose a single image, a single video, or even a larger format where multiple images can be included.
Participate in Facebook’s advertising auction
After submitting the ad, it enters Facebook’s advertising auction, where it’s displayed to the right people.
The advertising auction determines which ads to display and to whom. Using the information provided during the ad creation process, the auction shows the ad to people who might find it relevant, based on the bid price or a lower cost but never exceeding it.
Measure and manage the ad
After publishing the ad, you can monitor the results and make adjustments to campaigns by accessing the Ad Management panel. You can understand which version of your ad is most effective and modify it if needed.
Facebook Business Manager
Business Manager is the central hub for managing all marketing and advertising activities on Facebook in one place.
It’s designed for businesses of all sizes and allows you to create ads, and manage various resources such as Facebook Pages, ad accounts, and Instagram profiles. This facilitates access and sharing of these business resources with your entire team and external partners.
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Payments: Since Facebook users can only see a limited number of ads per day, Facebook follows an auction system among advertisers to secure ad placements. You can pay in various ways:
- Per impression: Pay for each ad view
- Per click: Pay only when someone clicks the ad
- Per action: Pay only if a user takes a specific action
Linkedin is the world’s largest professional network. Advertising on Linkedin allows small, medium, and large companies to achieve their goals by setting up:
- An Exclusive Audience: You can create ads on Linkedin by selecting your audience based on qualifications, roles, industries, and other profiling criteria.
- Create Simple and Effective Ads: Promote your brand, find new customers, and receive event sign-ups with straightforward and impactful ads.
- Manage Bidding Budget: Customize your budget and pause bids at any time.
- Send Personalized Ads to Linkedin Inboxes: This method can generate more conversions compared to email messages.
Payments:
To advertise on Linkedin, you can choose between CPC or CPM. Alternatively, with sponsored InMail messages, you pay only when the message is delivered.
Twitter Ads campaigns help you achieve your marketing goals, whether it’s creating awareness, driving consideration, or generating conversions.
Twitter Ads offers over 20 options to display your content and media in the format that best suits your goals. While these options can be used interchangeably, most are directly associated with a campaign goal and marketing objective to maximize results.
Twitter allows you to connect with the most influential people at the moments of peak receptivity through powerful targeting tools.
Sponsored accounts suggest Twitter accounts to users who do not yet follow them but might start doing so, and who are the subject of follower campaigns.
Where are sponsored accounts displayed?
Twitter placements allow sponsored accounts, including the timeline, to appear in the “Who to follow” section and search results. In these areas, you can see sponsored accounts relevant to you.
Payments:
There is no fixed fee. Ads are published using an auction system, where all advertisers place bids to buy the available advertising space for the audience they want to reach.
The cost you pay for your campaigns depends on how engaging the ad is, the audience size, how many advertisers are targeting the same audience, and the bid.
Highly sought-after audience segments require higher bids to win the auction and be published.
Pinterest is particularly valued by people when they need to decide what to do, create, and buy. The audience of this Social Network is primarily female, and this aspect should be considered. If your business communication relies on images, this digital advertising platform is definitely worth testing.
Pinterest ads, known as Pins, are aimed at reaching buyers searching for new ideas and inspirations. Pinterest offers the ability to create and edit Pins directly from the app or desktop version. You can create one Pin at a time or multiple Pins simultaneously. A successful Pin should be visually appealing, tell an interesting story, and encourage people to discover more.
Payments:
During ad creation, you can choose whether to pay for interactions with the image or to promote website visits. In both cases, payment only occurs when people show interest in your ad.
Tik Tok
TikTok is the current Social Network trend, continuously growing and currently populated by a very young audience.
TikTok For Business is the place to showcase all your creativity. If you have a good amount of appealing visual content and if your target audience falls between 18 and 30 years old, it’s worth reaching them through TikTok advertising campaigns.
Payments:
As a relatively recent and less-utilized advertising platform, the costs for ads are higher, but it’s interesting to test it to see if it can help you achieve your business goals.
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Spotify
Spotify allows you to create audio ads with a voiceover. It’s an innovative solution but comes with significant costs.
The Spotify Ads campaigns are paid campaigns within the Spotify advertising network. Through Spotify Ads campaigns, you are allowed to display advertising announcements in every available placement on the Spotify website, application, and software. The goal is to reach new users in your demographic, geographic, interest-based, and placement-based target, significantly increasing your brand awareness by using targeted ads to achieve specific marketing and business objectives.
Payments:
In this case as well, since this platform is still not widely used for advertising, the cost, in terms of content creation and goal achievement, is likely substantial.
Amazon
With over 300 million active customer accounts worldwide, Amazon, fully understands how buyers interact with products and brands at every stage of the purchasing process.
Amazon Advertising is Amazon’s in-house system that allows advertisers to create paid advertising announcements. Choosing Amazon as an advertising platform can help you reach customers at every step of their journey. Amazon’s goal is to achieve the advertising and business objectives of advertisers and to help customers find the products they’re looking for.
There are many possibilities for advertising on Amazon, which can be divided into:
- By objective
- By product
- By sector
- On Amazon, you can:
- Measure your results
Payments:
Advertising on Amazon is based on a Pay Per Click (PPC) payment system. Similar to the Google advertising mentioned earlier, you only pay when a user clicks on the sponsored ad.
Criteo
With Criteo, you can:
- Generate Brand Awareness
- Boost traffic to your website or app and increase installations
- Encourage people to make a purchase by increasing conversions on your website, app, and store
Criteo purchases ads using Predictive Bidding: it establishes the value-to-cost ratio of each impression based on consumer, site, product, and publisher data. This allows you to get the most out of your budget by creating the right bid at the right moment to advertise your business online and reach your marketing goals and target audience.
Payments:
Depending on your advertising objective, you can decide the budget and strategy for your campaign.
Outbrain
Outbrain connects skilled advertisers and expert publishers with the aim of reaching the desired audience.
This advertising platform enables you to manage, control, and monetize your ads in the open web, generating greater engagement through native format.
With Outbrain, you can:
- achieve a higher RPM (Rotations Per Minute)
- increase total revenue by ensuring higher engagement
- have complete editorial control to understand your readers and enhance user experience
The purpose of this article is to introduce you to advertising platforms and provide you with the necessary tools to evaluate which path to take to advertise your business online based on your marketing goals and target audience.
Payments:
Outbrain follows a pay-per-click payment system.
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Digital Advertising Platforms: frequently asked questions
Ever wondered about the digital realm’s hidden orchestrators that make ads pop up across your screens? Meet the digital advertising platforms (DAX), the technological maestros behind the curtain. These software marvels empower advertisers to perform a digital symphony, seamlessly orchestrating campaigns across diverse channels and gadgets. Curious minds often ask:
1. What’s the hype about Digital Advertising Platforms?
Think of DAX as the magician’s wand that conjures revenue spells. They’re your gateway to an ad universe bursting with possibilities. By tapping into various ad sources and formats, DAX dons the hat of a revenue virtuoso. It’s your partner in crime for precision targeting across channels and devices. But the magic doesn’t stop there. DAX also pulls a cost-cutting rabbit from the hat, streamlining tasks like budgeting, billing, and reporting.
2. Why should I step into the DAX Arena?
DAX invites you to the VIP lounge of advertising. It’s not just about showing your ad; it’s about crafting an experience. With DAX, you’re the architect of your campaign’s destiny. It’s your backstage pass to data-driven optimization, fine-tuning your strategies like a maestro tuning an instrument. Plus, DAX speaks the language of the modern audience, appearing seamlessly across screens and gadgets.
3. Unveiling the diverse cast of DAX Players
Picture this: a digital arena where two titans roam – Media Management Platforms (MMPs) and Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs). MMPs are the generals, marshaling your entire media battalion across the digital frontier. They wield an arsenal of tools that tame the chaos of channels and devices. On the other side, DSPs are the mavericks – catering to those who wish to choreograph their ad dances from start to end. They’re the architects of your personalized ad journey.
In this digital saga, DAX emerges as the grand conductor orchestrating a harmonious blend of advertising art and technology. So, as you navigate the intricate tapestry of digital ads, remember that the real maestros are the digital advertising platforms, crafting the symphony that captures your attention.
Programmatic Advertising Platforms
Programmatic Advertising platforms are based on intelligent algorithms capable of segmenting the best leads.
The goal of a Programmatic Advertising campaign isn’t just to reach users who would have become qualified leads anyway, but to reach users who might be interested in the product or service due to demographic and behavioral characteristics.
The main advantage of Programmatic Advertising campaigns lies in the ability to create ads that target a precise audience.
Regarding the budget to invest, companies can choose how much to spend on a given offer.
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