There are 4 main places where it would be appropriate to put your ads:
1. On the Google Search Results page with “Google Text Ads”
- Format: Text-based ads, shopping/product ads
- Locations: Above, below and to the side of the search results page
- Set Up: Very easy to set up
- Costs: $1 – $50 per click depending on your industry and how much competition there is (for example industry’s like finance or tourism are highly competitive so cost more per click)
- Targeting: Excellent
- Searchers are actively looking for solutions/products/services like yours, so this is your chance to be considered
- You can specify a geographic target so your ads are only shown to the audience you care about
- Effectiveness: Excellent
- Provides high quality data so you can evolve your ads to lower your cost-per-click over time
2. On websites or apps selling space for display advertising
- Format: Text-based ads, responsive ads, display ads, video ads
- Locations: On websites or apps that have dedicated space to supplement their revenue with ad revenue
- Set Up: Easy to set up
- Costs: Very low CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions) because the inventory available is almost unlimited
- Targeting: Poor to excellent depending on your settings
- Effectiveness: Good reach
- Your ads could be popping up on both high quality and random websites all over the internet – good for cheap brand recognition but traditionally not as good as Google search ads in terms of generating specific actions
3. On Social Media platforms such as Facebook
- Format: May formats available such as static image ads, video ads, lead generation forms and more
- Locations: In the newsfeed, side bar and messenger
- Set Up: Ads manager interface can be difficult and time consuming to use
- Costs: Low
- Targeting: Excellent
- You can specify exactly who your demographic is Eg certain age groups, in specific geographic locations with particular interests
- Effectiveness: Excellent
4. Huge media websites with their own advertising systems
- Format: display ads (interactive costs extra & video is not usually available)
- Locations: Eg TradeMe, NZHerald etc.
- They do their best to sell advertising direct for a premium and then provide any unsold inventory back to the major platforms (such as Google Ads) for a share of the ad revenue
- Set Up: Difficult
- Often have contracts/agreements to sign and difficult payment terms
- Costs
- The CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions) is usually very high and uncompetitive to a discerning advertiser (because they put a very high value on their own audience and there is large overhead to pay for)
- Targeting: Poor. Often only provide choice of section that may loosely follow interests
- Effectiveness: Low
- Slowly phasing out as the technology of the bigger platforms increase their superiority