The way we shop and spend money is changing faster than you can say “add to cart”. With more than 64% of the world’s population practically glued to their internet-connected devices, businesses need to meet them where they are – online.
While traditional advertising is still highly relevant, it isn’t the only strategy your business needs to drive sales. To be successful today, you must have a strategic online presence. Digital advertising brings your marketing strategy into the online space, helping you connect with your audience through search, email, and social media and more.
Let’s explore some types of digital advertising, the benefits, and how you can boost your current strategy.
What Is Digital Advertising?
Digital advertising – also referred to as online advertising or paid media – is a strategy that promotes a brand, product, or service using online channels like search engines, websites, and social media platforms.
The ultimate goal of digital advertising is to bring audiences along on a journey that ends in a desired action or conversion. This might mean getting people to buy a product, sign up for an email list, or subscribe to a service.
Types of Digital Advertising
There are seemingly endless and constantly increasing options for online advertising strategies and tactics. Some of the most common ones include:
Paid Search Advertising
Paid search advertising involves paying search engines, like Google or Bing, to place ads higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) with the goal of driving traffic to your site or landing page.
The most common form of paid search advertising is pay-per-click (PPC) where you don’t pay for ad placement until a user clicks on your ad. This is an affordable way to advertise and helps ads reach relevant users.
Several factors go into how ads are placed in the SERPs, including:
Bidding
Advertisers can bid on phrases or keywords that are relevant to their business, products, or services. For the most part, the highest bidders get the highest rankings.
Ad Extensions
Google Ads extensions include additional information displayed alongside the ads, such as links to subpages on a website, call buttons, or pricing information. The impact of these extensions can influence ad placement on the SERPs as well as ad performance.
Ad Quality
Google assesses ads and assigns quality scores to determine how useful and relevant the ad landing pages are for the user. A high quality score can increase your ranking with respect to your bid amount.
Ad Rank Thresholds
To ensure high-quality ads, Google sets minimum thresholds that an ad must achieve before it will be displayed. These thresholds are determined dynamically at the time of each auction – the Google search process that determines which ads appear and in which order – based on information like ad position, ad quality, and user attributes.
Auction Competitiveness
When two ads with similar ranking are competing for the same position, each has the opportunity to win – or earn the top placement – by using highly relevant keywords and ads.
Search Context
Context matters for the ad auction. The user’s search terms, location, device, time, and nature of the search all impact the ad auction.
Display Advertising
Display advertising consists of image and video ads that appear on websites, social media, apps, and connected TVs. They include any digital ad format other than paid search and audio ads.
These ads are versatile. They can be simple text or images, animation, video, audio, or changing text (rich media ads), all with different goals. One of the most common types of display ads is a banner ad, which is commonly used for awareness marketing campaigns.
Display ads use different targeting, including:
- Remarketing or retargeting to attract previous visitors who haven’t converted
- Personalized ads to target based on demographics or interests
- Contextually targeted ads placed on websites according to specified criteria
- Website placement targeting to select relevant sites or pages
Native Advertising
Native advertising blends into the page content and design, making the visitor feel as though the ad “belongs” there. Promoted search ads, sponsored content and boosted social posts are common forms of native ads.
This format offers value to users in the same way as organic results and user-generated social media posts. They’re not disruptive like traditional advertising formats can be, and consumers trust them more readily.
Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising takes place on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. The platforms leverage various data sources to allow you to hyper-target audiences and deliver more personalized ad content.
Examples of social media ads include:
Static Image Ads
These ads are highly visual and use a static photo with a short caption or a call-to-action (CTA) button that directs visitors to a website.
Video Ads
Like photo ads, video ads leverage visually appealing content with short-form video. These ads are popular on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, all of which use a lot of short-form video content.
Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising takes place on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. The platforms leverage various data sources to allow you to hyper-target audiences and deliver more personalized ad content.
Examples of social media ads include:
Static Image Ads
These ads are highly visual and use a static photo with a short caption or a call-to-action (CTA) button that directs visitors to a website.
Video Ads
Like photo ads, video ads leverage visually appealing content with short-form video. These ads are popular on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, all of which use a lot of short-form video content.
Source: Facebook
Stories Ads
Stories ads are offered on platforms like Instagram and Facebook and use videos or photos in full-screen ads where users can easily swipe up to visit the advertiser’s website.
Messenger Ads
Messenger ads show up in Facebook Messenger’s Chats tab instead of users’ news feeds and offer a one-to-one format. Users can start a conversation, ask questions, or visit the brand’s website.
Audio Advertising
Similar to radio ads, audio advertising is a sound-only ad format that targets listeners within podcast episodes or between songs on music-streaming platforms. Most of the free or lower-tier versions of these services don’t allow ads to be skipped, so users are required to listen to the advertisement.
The most common form of audio advertising is simple audio ads, which may be placed pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll, so they play before, during, or after a streaming session. Skippable ads are another option for paid subscription users.
Video Advertising
Video advertising is a widely consumed format that’s often more engaging than text or static images and may appear in short form on social media platforms like Facebook or TikTok, or within breaks on YouTube. Video content is also used in display ads, social ads, and native ads on websites, such as entertainment or news sites.
Some types of video ads include:
- In-stream ads that appear before, during, or after video content
- Non-linear ads that play outside the main video, sometimes as an overlay
- Interactive ads that play inside a game to incentivize viewers
- Native video ads that appear as organic content on a website
- Shoppable video ads that redirect users to complete a purchase after watching an ad
- Video search ads that appear in the SERPs
Source: YouTube
Get Started with Digital Advertising
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to advertising for your business, but with so much of the world population online, digital advertising should be part of your marketing mix. As a versatile solution, digital advertising can be tailored to your industry, products, services, and audiences while meeting your customers where they are already spending time – online.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About the Types of Digital Advertising
Still have questions? Find answers to the most pressing questions about digital advertising.
What Is the Difference Between Digital Advertising and Digital Marketing?
Digital advertising is the process of promoting products and services through paid channels, while digital marketing is the process of organizing, promoting, and selling a product or service. Advertising is focused more on short-term goals while marketing is interested in long-term strategy.
What Are the Different Types of Digital Advertising?
The main types of digital advertising are display, native, paid search, social media, and video. Some of these formats overlap, such as when video ads are used in social media advertising.
What’s the Difference Between Digital Display Ads and Native Advertising?
Display ads are generally graphic (and sometimes animated) in nature and only appear where the programmatic tool places them. Conversely, native ads are designed to show within normal website content, sometimes as article content or social posts, making them seem more organic to users.
What Is Media Buying?
Media buying is purchasing advertising from a media company like a television station, newspaper, or website and includes negotiating the price and placement to maximize spending.
What Are the Benefits of Digital Advertising?
Digital advertising has many advantages, especially when combined with a larger digital marketing strategy. With so many channels to choose from, it’s a cost-effective way to fuel brand awareness and boost conversions.
Virtually every digital advertising channel offers performance and analytics to fine-tune your campaigns and boost your ROI, as well as the ability to target your ideal current and prospective customers. Throughout your digital ad campaigns, it’s easy to make changes to optimize for better results, getting the most out of your time and effort.
How Can a Marketing Agency Help with Digital Advertising?
Digital advertising can be cost effective, but it’s easy to waste marketing budget with the wrong ad strategy, placement, or messaging. Working with a marketing agency that understands the digital advertising landscape leverages the experience and expertise of many marketing disciplines to ensure you deliver a targeted strategy with higher ROI and less trial and error.