Sadly, there is no one-solution-fits-all when it comes to creating effective ad campaigns 👎 But, fear not! 🙌

You can read our recent post to discover a few factors to consider when you're in the ad creation phase, in order to create an effective and powerful ad campaign! 📈💥

The low-down on advertising online   

Digital marketing has exploded in recent years, thanks to advancement in technology and easy access to the internet.

With social media platforms being used on average 143 minutes a day, there is a huge potential to captivate an online audience with an engaging online advertising campaign. 

We’ve gathered a few interesting statistics that will open your eyes to the power of online advertising:

• The total expenditure on social network advertising in 2019 was $90 billion
• In 2021, digital ad spending is predicted to reach over $376 billion
• SEO generates around 1000% more traffic than organic social media

With a few statistics out of the way, it is easy to see that marketers are investing in online advertising heavily due to its effectiveness, regardless of whether or not it is on social media, or search advertising.

So, it is imperative that your business is effectively utilising this advertising tool to be able to stay relevant and up to date with ever-changing trends and technology.

Paid search & social online ads

The two main methods of online advertising can be broken down into two different groups; paid search and paid social. Let’s start with paid search.

Paid search 

Paid search or PPC (pay-per-click) is a category in online advertising that is probably the most thought of when someone says online advertising. It is very commonly utilised by businesses and can be extremely effective.

The basis of paid/PPC advertising is keywords. Keywords are text-based terms or phrases that are relevant and specific to your business.

For example, if you own an online shoe store, you may bid on keywords such as “women’s shoes” or “women’s boots”.

Keyword bidding

With paid online advertising you bid for these keywords, at an ad auction. This is done so that each business can have a fair chance of their online advertising campaigns being shown to users of the search engine.

These words are displayed at the top results page to search engine users when they search for specific queries in Google or any other search engine.

This high ranking on the results page increases the chances of getting a click from users when they search for your keyword.

The meaning behind pay-per-click

PPC online advertising works in a very clever way. As a result of keyword bidding, your link will be displayed at the top of the SERPs (search engine results page).

Each time a visitor clicks your link, you will pay a small fee to the search engine.

If your PPC online advertising is set up the correct way, the fee will be insignificant compared to the value of the visit.

For example, if the visit results in a sale worth £100 with a PPC fee of £5, then this is a very positive profit.

Paid/PPC online advertising is an excellent approach to boosting awareness and traffic to your page.

Paid social   

Another approach to effective online advertising is paid social. This category focuses on social media usage and users.

A contrast to paid /PPC advertising, paid social involves the company’s marketers searching for users, rather than users searching for the company to formulate digital campaigns. 

Since many social media users enter their information into social media platforms, such as marital status, age, gender, location and education level, marketers can utilise this to their advantage.

Marketers can create an effective ad to specifically target a very particular demographic with paid social advertising, which is one of the advantages of this approach.

For instance, creating a paid social ad that targets married men, aged between 40-50, who live in London and have a high school level education.

These parameters are an effective way to penetrate the target audience, since you could create a fully tailored ad to appeal to that segment – and overall boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of the ad. 

Considering campaign elements 

Creating online ads is an art in itself. You want to develop an engaging ad that entices your audience to follow through with your call to action. So, it is important to consider the elements carefully to support this.

Text

Of course, the text is an important element in an ad campaign. Generally, you should tailor your copy to appeal to your target demographic, but also keep the length relatively short and concise.

Remember to show some brand personality and character to make the text more interesting, perhaps with emojis if appropriate, and include an actionable step that matches your goals. This could be signing up for the brand’s newsletter, or visiting a recently published blog post.

Visuals

Picking an eye-catching visual or image for your online ads is a great way to compliment your message.

Try and go with a relevant visual that further emphasises your message, or maybe create an infographic to highlight your point.

If possible, you could use brand colours and themes to further tie the elements together.

Split testing

For both text and visual elements, you can utilise split testing to investigate which option performs better with your target audience.

Additionally, there are other elements that will affect the effectiveness of your digital campaign. Such as timing, placement and headlines.

Check out Google’s 5 tips on writing text ads on YouTube here.

How to use the different platforms for advertising 

Different online advertising channels have different setups. For instance, Facebook ads are very different to Google Ads, and vice versa. But each platform usually has its own help centre to help marketers set up a campaign.

Paid/PPC ad channels

Google ads is probably the most used platform when it comes to paid search online ads. Since Google holds the most users of any search engine, the platform can offer marketers a huge audience to display their ads to.

See Google Ads’ step by step guide here to set up your next PPC ad.

Paid social ad channels

Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram ads are common platforms for paid social ads. Just like Google, each channel has its own setup instructions and help centre.

These platforms usually have a whole business section where the help centre is designed to help businesses utilise the channel to display their ads.

You can check out our previous post on Google Ads vs Facebook Ads, to get an in-depth comparison.

How to use Agency360  

Agency360 offers agencies an easy approach to managing and monitoring online ad analytics and data.

With Agency360, you get all your most important statistics in one, easy-to-navigate platform.

To get started, simply log into your Agency360 account and click on your client’s dashboard.

Then click on the advertising option in the side menu.

Here, you can find all your insights from Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, and recently added Twitter Ads, all in one platform.

Want to know which metrics you should track for your Facebook Ad campaigns? See our previous post here.

The first page is Google ads, where you find all your insights and data including the daily performance of your campaign, keyword cost and clicks and cost per conversion.

Agency360’s accessible interface makes managing data super easy, and measuring performance is made quick with the simple, colourful layout.

From the side menu, you can select another social media platform such as Facebook, or LinkedIn to view the data for that particular platform. 

All these deep insights from different platforms are made easily accessible from one location. Gone are the days of logging into each individual platform to view your insights.

See for yourself how easy Agency360 is to use. Try your 14-day free trial here, and see how simple it really is.