Most companies in the world, except those who actually sell ads, would probably agree that life would be better if you didn’t have to advertise at all.
After all, who wouldn’t want a brand that’s strong enough to survive without having to constantly remind the masses that you exist?
But, oddly enough, the biggest and strongest brands in the world still spend huge sums of money on online ads. Companies like Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola are known throughout the world, and their products are part of urban mythology. Still, you’ll find their ad links when you search for related products. It’s their campaigns that follow you across websites, especially if you’ve given strong signals of interest towards them.
How does digital advertising work? How does a search engine like Google know which ads to display when you make a search? How do Amazon’s ads follow you across the web and remember what you’ve purchased in the past?
If you invest in advertising for your business, how can you make sure you get a decent return on your investment? How do advertising platforms know which ads led to the best results?
Consider this…
Your online retail store has a number of landing pages created for your most popular products.
You’ve done a lot of search engine optimization to make sure that there’s a steady growth of organic traffic to these pages, and you’ve generated a nice amount of social media buzz around your content, too.
But organic growth is slow. It takes time for your site to be recognized as an authority or a useful resource.
You are ready to turn to digital advertising. You’ve been given a budget, and you now need to figure out how to invest it.
One of the main purposes of any kind of advertising, digital in particular, is to generate demand. In other words, advertising tries to tap into potential customers just as much as it tries to appeal to an existing audience, too.
Search ads let you compete for the ad space that’s shown on the top of the search engine results page (SERP) for any given query. There are many flavors of search ads, ranging from informational to transactional, and from awareness-raising to lead generation.
Display ads allow you to advertise to users as they browse different sites of the web. One of the main use cases is remarketing, where the user is reminded about abandoned carts and products that they might have seen before on other sites.
But what do you need to do to get started? Is it just a question of bidding on keywords that people might search for, or is there more to it?
Yes, there’s much more to it.
Digital advertising is ultimately about budget, relevance, and quality.
You pay to have your ads displayed to relevant audiences, and you hope that they click through to your landing pages to convert against whatever goal you’ve set for those ads. Those landing pages need to match the things the ads said, or else you’ll be penalized for misleading the visitors.