You may be thinking that digital ads aren’t a good fit for your business:  

They’re everywhere in today’s world, and with all the clutter, how can I possibly stand out?

I had the same feeling first starting out in my first paid advertising campaign.

But the world of advertising goes so much further than bill-boards and TV commercials.

Digital advertising is sophisticated, tactical, strategic, and dare might I say…fun?!

But if done wrong, can cost your business money with little ROI.

On the flip side, if done right, or have a dedicated digital ad guru, you can have an additional revenue stream attracting ready to convert customers.

That’s why I put together an overview of each ad type, helpful tips to guide you through your ad journey, and show you how your business can use them to attract new leads, and more sales.

Before we get into it, let’s ask ourselves: what is digital advertising?

I like the answer I found from Webopedia:

“Digital advertising, also called Internet advertising (“Internet marketing“) is when businesses leverage Internet technologies to deliver promotional advertisements to consumers.”

There are a number of different types ad formats to choose from.

Using a mix of search, display, and remarketing could bring you leads that traditional marketing or even SEO could have.

A benefit of diversifying your ad portfolio is to capture what is working and what isn’t.

For example, you may not see returns on your search campaigns.  However, your display and social media ad campaigns are working marvelously. 

It’s important to have a broad picture and not be discouraged if one ad group isn’t performing well.

Let’s dive into one of the most common types of ads, which are search ads.

Search ads are listed on either the top, bottom, or even both on a Google result page.

The greatest advantage of search ads is that you can be listed at the top of Google and attract high intent leads.

The drawbacks?  Cost per click, experience working within Google Adwords platform, and frequent monitoring of your campaigns. 

By no means should any of your ad campaigns be a “set it and forget it” model.

You need to constantly be reviewing and optimizing your ads to show for a more targeted audience based off of keywords, time of day and location of where your ads show, and most importantly, what ads are working and what aren’t.

(Quick tip: give your ads 2-3 weeks of run time before making changes.  Once you have enough data, optimize your lower performing ads or scrap them)

Setting daily budgets is your biggest ally when it comes to not over-spending. 

Again, you’ll want to check in on your campaigns once every other day, or you can leave it up to a professional to assess your AdWords campaigns so you don’t have to.

When starting off in AdWords, it’s crucial to set up all the right ad configurations like your keywords, targeting, bid adjustments, ad extensions, ad copy, and descriptions.

One last key takeaway for managing your search ads is to have as high of a quality score as you can. 

Quality score is a ranking from 1 to 10 by Google on how effective and accurate your ads seem to the searcher.

Quality score is determined by:

·         Landing page experience

·         Ad Relevancy

·         Expected Click Through Rate

Subsequently, your ad placement is determined by your quality score times your bid.

Say for example, your competitor has a quality score of 3 on their ad, and they’re paying $5 per click to be the top spot on Google. 

Quality score of 3 x $5 = 15

If you wanted to only pay $2 per click on your ads, you would need to optimize them to have a quality score of 8 or above and be able to be higher seeded than your competitor (while also paying less per click).

Quality score of 8-10 x $2 = 16-20

Increasing your quality score saves you $$.

Next on our list is Display ads.

You’ve most likely encountered these on your favorite news sites or any other largely popular website.

To get started with display ads, you’ll need an appealing piece of creative that catches the eye but doesn’t totally disrupt the visitors viewing experience.

It’s important to remember that your ad’s mission isn’t to catch the attention of everyone, but to bring 1-2% of those who see your ad to your site.

With display advertising, you pay for each 1,000 impressions your ad shows.

What is an impression?

An impression is every time your ad shows once to a viewer.

Although you’re not paying for each click your ad receives, it’s still smart to add targeting to your display ad campaigns. 

Another reason is that it helps your ad spend when shown to closely interested prospects.

You can target your display ads towards:

–          Certain websites that your target audience will most likely interact

–          Demographics, interests, and geolocation

–          Context (keywords searchers use just like in search advertising)

–          Topics

Now, your ad may be shown more than once to the same viewer, this will be the case for all of your ads.

The beauty of display ads is that they can take many forms with ad formats and sizes.

Now let’s talk about retargeting.

If you’re unfamiliar of what remarketing is (also known as remarketing), it’s being able to advertise exclusively to people that have visited your site

How does it work?

This infographic from Retargeter does a great job of explaining

What’s important to know in order for your website to enable retargeting, you or your web developer must add a small piece of Javascript code into your site.

This code is undetectable to the visitors and won’t obstruct their user experience.  When a user loads your webpage, that piece of code registers and drops an anonymous cookie in that user’s browser cache.

Later on, when those users that have been to your site and go to other sites, that cookie will let retargeting servers know to serve your ad (that is if your bidding is high enough).

Adding remarketing to your digital strategy is one of the best ways you can leads and lift grow.

Don’t just take my word for it, here are some stats to back me up:

–          Website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are more likely to convert by 70% –SpiralyticThe click-through rate (CTR) of a retargeted ad is 10 times higher than the CTR of a typical display ad. –Digital Information World

–          Compared to other placement strategies, retargeting generated the highest lift in business name searches by 1,046% –Prnewswire

–          Three of five online viewers notice and consider ads showing products they viewed from another page. –eMarketer

While remarketing may seem like a tremendous investment, like search and display, there are some guidelines and best practices to withhold.

You’ll want to think about how frequent you want to show your ads to your previous site visitors.

Generally, you’ll want to only show your ads to any given user 10-15 times per month.

If you’re a larger brand, you can probably get away with more.

Excluding your already converted users can avoid them from being disgruntled.

On the flip side, you can direct ads to customers that have already converted or purchased on your site.

This can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool you can leverage as customers that have already bought from your business in the past, are much more inclined to repeat in the future.

In terms of targeting, you’ll want to add demographic, geography, and context to your campaigns. 

You’ll want to include these to better market to your desired audience.

You can also include audience segmentation in your ad strategy where users receive ads based on the pages they landed on. 

This provides a much-desired user experience which data shows helps increase conversions tenfold.

Facebook has come a long way from just liking photos and “poking” your friends.

Facebook advertising is one of the best forms of marketing out there.

According to Zephoria, it’s estimated that nearly 1.5 billion (yes, b as in billion) users log into Facebook daily.

Not only is there a wide audience for you to market to on Facebook, but it’s targeting options is unmatched.

Check out this cool infographic Wordstream put together to help illustrate.

Options such as your life events (married, engaged), different business industries, hobbies, purchase behavior, mobile device usage, and of course remarketing capabilities.

With all of this targeting power, you have no excuse for your Facebook audience to be too broad.

Just like your other display campaigns, you’ll want to make sure there isn’t too much text in your ads.

As I stated earlier, people browsing sites aren’t looking to be interrupted by ads, especially Facebook.

Make sure your ads aren’t obtrusive, you are selling a click, not your product or services.

You’ll also want to make sure you’re using the right ad format and that your images are sized properly and optimized for a smaller ad size.

Nothing’s worse than realizing part of your CTA is cut off or unreadable due to a poorly sized image.

And last but definitely not least, for all of your ad campaigns, you want to test.

Whether it’s the ad copy, size, format, layout, image, landing page, CTA, you need to be testing something.

The money that you’re spending on advertising isn’t just for clicks or for leads, but also data.

This data can help you craft winning ad campaigns and remarketing strategies.

It’ll help you cut down on costs and optimize for a better user journey.

Ideally, it’ll allow you to open a consistent revenue stream that you can funnel more spend into because the results you see are consistent and worth the investment.

At the end of the day, it’s your money, and you want to make sure you’re not leaving any of it on the table.