How To Find The Right Kind of Digital Ad For Your Marketing Campaign

Digital advertising offers a myriad of opportunities for brands to reach their target audience, increase brand awareness, and drive conversions. However, amidst the vast array of options, finding the right type of ad for your business can be challenging. We chat to Mike, our Digital Campaigns Manager, about the different types of campaigns, finding the right campaign for you and how to best utilise your ad budget.

How do you go about finding the right type of ad for a campaign?

It completely depends on your business and the product or service you offer. There are some obvious things to look out for, for example if you offer a service, like a lawyer or a hairdresser, then a product lead shopping campaign isn’t for you.

Start with your goal. Think about what you want your adverts to achieve. Do you want more people to visit your physical location, drive eCommerce sales, or increase brand awareness? Once you have a goal in place, you can start to think about building an ad strategy and planning campaigns to achieve each of your goals.

There are lots of ways to advertise your business and usually a combination of various types of ads work best, but this can only really be determined after carrying out research and planning.

Let’s dive into the main types of campaigns you can use for your planning and some examples of businesses that might benefit from each. We’ll start with Google, the main player when it comes to online advertising, with 83% of the market share.

Google Search Campaigns

These are text based adverts that are shown at the top of the search results when you type in a keyword. These ads are great for almost all businesses but they can be highly competitive and they lack creativity because they are simple text ads. If you are on a low budget, you’ll want to really spend time looking for opportunities and keywords that convert.

Google Display Campaigns

These are image based ads that show across the Google Display Network. The Google Display Network is a network of hundreds of thousands of websites. These ads are great for all sorts of businesses, and for remarketing, which we’ll touch upon later. If for example you sell yoga pants, you can choose to house your display ads across websites and blogs focusing on the topic of yoga, gyms, and sports. This way your ads are most likely to show to people interested in that product. Equally if you are a service provider like an electrician, you can display ads across DIY sites and blogs that answer questions about home electrics. Display campaigns are also great for promoting brand awareness because they achieve a very high level of impressions across the internet.

Google Video Campaigns

Video ads are similar to display ads in that they show across a network of websites and on YouTube.

Video campaigns are highly customisable and can range from short 6 second snappy ads to longer skippable or unskippable videos depending on your budget and needs.

These ads are highly creative and can really boost brand awareness but creating impactful video ads can come with high production costs.

Google Shopping Campaigns

Shopping campaigns are ideal for e-commerce businesses with products to sell. For this you will need to use a shopping feed. There are many third party companies that allow you to create shopping feeds, including Google Merchant Centre. A shopping feed is essentially a database containing your product information, such as price, images, and specifications like colour, weight, and size.

These types of campaigns are great for converting and maximising budget because, on a pay per click basis, visitors can see the product image and price, therefore if someone clicks on the product, you can be sure they are interested and find the price attractive.

Google Smart Campaigns

Smart campaigns are automated search or display campaigns. These are best for people with little time or knowledge to manage campaigns, however, the downside is that you’re reliant on Google. These campaigns are completely machine driven, meaning you can’t optimise them to boost their performance and they provide limited data to help improve your ads.

Google Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max campaigns are machine driven creative ads that include images, videos, shopping feeds and text. These can be really powerful but again, as they are machine driven they don’t offer any optimisation or data so you have to be careful with your budget. Performance Max campaigns are not really designed for people with lack of knowledge or skill in advertising, you’ll need to provide a large amount of assets, such as images and videos, and have your targeting spot on to make it worth your while. As they’re more product focused, these ads are not recommended for a lead generation business and are really only for those with a medium to high budget.

Google Ads Discovery Campaign

Discovery campaigns allow people to discover your brand. These ads can be shown across the entire Google network of over three billion people, and so are great for brand awareness. As they are completely automated you are not able to optimise these ads and have little to no control over where they are shown. They are a good option for businesses wanting to drive awareness and have the budget to explore discovery campaigns. Smaller businesses would do better to focus more on conversion ads.

Microsoft

Microsoft also has its own advertising platform, offering similar advertising methods as Google such as search, display, and shopping. As previously mentioned, Google has over 83% of the ad market share, so unless you’re a large business with a higher budget or your research has uncovered data showing your customer base uses Bing rather than Google, it’s worth focusing on Google Ads for better results.

Social

Social advertising also has its merits. Which platform, again, depends on your product and research. If you are a brand that sells products, then Instagram and Facebook are probably best. If your customers are of a younger generation, you may want to advertise on TikTok or Snapchat. If you are a local business, such as a local plumber or a restaurant, then Facebook is great.

The Ideal Scenario

In an ideal world, you would create an advertising strategy based on your business, your competitors, your products, and your customer data. You would use a mix of different methods and platforms to advertise on and optimise them regularly to maximise your return on investment. This can be a huge undertaking if you want to do it yourself, or you can hire an agency, like ONQOR, to take care of it for you.

What are the common mistakes and how to avoid them?

Google markets its ads platform in a way that appears user friendly and easy to set up, which it is. However, many people run with this and do what I like to call ‘set and forget.’ They set up a campaign, whether it’s a smart or standard campaign, then sit back and wait for the leads or sales to come in.

There are many ways to optimise your campaigns so that your budget goes further. You should monitor the campaign weekly to weed out any keywords or placements that are wasting resources, and split out high converting keywords into their own campaigns.

The ad is only 50% of the work that goes into creating a successful converting campaign. The landing page is where you can really increase conversions. Creating a specific landing page for your ads to point to will in most cases double your conversions from your ads. That happens to be something we can create too.

Advice to those with a limited ads budget?

Again, research is the key to a successful campaign. Don’t spend money until you know who you are showing your ads to. Do the research, try to find some cheaper opportunities. If you’re in a pricey market, pick one route to go down, and once you have success with that, you can build your budget up slowly.

Invest in your landing page. Optimise it obsessively to cut the bad performers and stop wasting budget.

Don’t be shocked at the start if you’re spending without conversions. It may take a week or two to gather enough data to really really understand where to optimise your ads.