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According to the Digital Third Coast 2021 statistics, Paid ads can increase brand awareness by 80%, while simultaneously increasing the number of purchases by 70%. That’s huge, so it makes complete sense why you would be looking into running Paid Ads for your business. So with that said, understanding how Paid Ads work and how they can really benefit your business is the best place to start. Let’s break down the basics together. 

What is Paid Advertising? 

To put it simply, it’s the difference between paying for advertising space on searches, websites and social media, versus owned content on free marketing platforms. 

Generally, they run on a bidding system, where the highest paying advertisers win by either paying for impressions (PPI) or paying for clicks (PPC). In turn, Paid Ads are designed to generate traffic and increase conversions by attracting more customers, in real time.  

The difference between PPI and PPC?

With Pay-Per Impressions, you are charged every time someone sees your advertisement through search engine results. Although PPI has a lower cost, it also has a lower conversion rate, but that isn’t to say it isn’t a fantastic way to increase your brand awareness. 

With Pay-Per Clicks, you’re only charged when someone clicks on your link. PPC essentially, if done well, puts you at the forefront on your chosen platforms, resulting in higher conversions from an audience that you know is already interested. 

Let’s look at the different types of Paid Advertising

Search Ads

These are ads that appear at the top of search engines every time a keyword is searched, as well as being placed on web pages of the searched phrases. For example Google ads has the ability to place ads both in the search engine and non search websites to help businesses connect with users at every step of the consumer journey. You’ll recognise these by the word ad next to each link.

Social Media Ads

Having a strong, well thought-out social media ads strategy allows you to leverage your current marketing using PPC. You can create, schedule and post highly targeted ads to reach your chosen market on the platforms you know your audience uses. Each platform offers different forms of paid advertisement from visual content, to short form written content. You just need to figure out what works best for your brand alongside each platform.

Display Ads

Display ads are advertisements embedded into high traffic locations, used to increase brand awareness and generate clicks throughs, purchases and leads. Usually in the form of banners, these are the banners and visual links you see at the top, side or bottom of your screen when you visit a popular website. 

Native Ads

Also known as sponsored content, is designed to match the look, feel and function of each platform. This could be editorial content, blog content and even social media content. The key to using native ads, is to make it look like the content itself fits in with its surroundings, as if it’s meant to be there, sometimes, it may not look like an ad at all but a natural part of the platform.

Why are they so important?

You can easily track and measure your progress

Whether it’s paid ads for social media or search engines, you have the ability to track EVERYTHING! We recommend using google analytics which is a powerhouse for tracking any form of paid ads. The beautiful thing about being able to track everything, is that you can continue to define and redefine your targeting and consumer experience while simultaneously taking what works, and what doesn’t, so that you can fix it. 

With the ability to track everything, from click rates, to demographics and behavioral data, you get a clear insight to how your audience is engaging with your ads. So you can learn, understand and modify your campaign to influence your target market to get even better results. Making for one strong paid ads campaign.

It’s extremely cost effective and hits all price points

Any form of advertisement can send alarm bells ringing when it comes to cost, but Paid Ads themselves are one of the cheapest, most cost effective forms of advertisement. When you think about the room you have to define the needs of your customers and create heavily targeted campaigns with a faster ROI, it makes for a highly efficient, affordable addition to your marketing efforts. If you compare the cost of organic growth, to the cost of Paid Ads, there is no competition.

Get faster results & higher conversion rates

Organic marketing takes time (check out our previous post about organic versus paid advertising) and patience to see results, but with paid advertising, you can reach your targeted audience and see the results instantly. Giving you the opportunity to focus on pushing content that converts as opposed to simply increasing brand visibility and awareness. Resulting in a higher, faster conversion rate. 

Increase your overall reach 

Paid Ads give your brand and business instant visibility. The difference between organic reach, aside from slow results, and Paid Ads reach, is that you have the space to instantly connect with your desired audience by taking up guaranteed space and pushing through the plethora of other content in the digital space.

Conclusion

To wrap it all up, Paid Ads are one of the best marketing investments you can make in 2022. As with all marketing, it isn’t a one and done situation, as your business changes, your audience changes and your goals change, so will your paid advertising, which is why you need to stay on top of it and we know that isn’t always possible as a busy business owner. So get in touch today to talk about how we can support you with Paid Advertising.