Managing your online advertising as a small-to-medium business can be very challenging, whether you are taking care of it personally, or you’re fortunate enough to have a dedicated member of the team to look after it.
In addition to the creation of ads, you also have to manage budget, targeting, and measurement of performance.
On top of all that, you need to make sure that your budget is working hard for you, by constantly tweaking and optimising your adverts and bids.
What are the benefits of PPC, display advertising and social media ads?
78% of adults in the UK use the internet to find information about products and services[1], so the greater your presence in the online marketplace, the more likely it is that these people will discover and buy from your brand.
PPC Advertising
PPC (pay-per-click) ads will drive visitors to your site through keyword-targeted adverts on Google, Bing.co.uk and their wider advertising networks. Not only is this a sure-fire way to generate targeted visitors to your website, and helps you stand out in relevant local search engine results.
Social media ads
Social advertising can target your preferred demographic with visual ads on popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, driving brand awareness and web traffic. Like Google Ads and Microsoft Search Network ads, social media ads are very measurable giving you a clear return on investment. These ads are a great way to reach people in a place where they enjoy spending time. According to the Office of National Statistics research in 2019, 68% of the UK population use the internet to access social media platforms.
Display ads
Display ads are another visual ad, typically called banners, designed to increase brand awareness, appearing on popular and relevant websites in a variety of formats. In some cases they can also be used for remarketing campaigns – targeting those people who have already visited your website, to remind them of your business.
All of these advertising options are very measurable, so you can see exactly what you’re getting for every penny you spend. Furthermore, you can specify your preferred audience, location and other options, to make sure your ads are served up to a targeted demographic.
The various challenges of managing your online advertising
Online advertising results can certainly be lucrative, but it can also become a full-time job to take care of your campaigns. Even once your adverts are up and running, you still need to cultivate them by constantly reviewing the results and making necessary edits over time to optimise their performance. Just a few of the challenges of managing your own online advertising are as follows:
- Managing the budget and reviewing cost-per-clicks for each group of adverts.
- You will need to use more than one platform to manage your ads, from your social media platforms to your Google Ads account. It can be time-consuming and confusing switching from one to another.
- Keyword phrase popularity can go up and down, so in the case of your PPC ads, you may find that you need to bid for different keyword phrases each month.
- If your business experiences swings in seasonal demand, then you may wish to plan your ads and spend to support accordingly.
- Generating and analysing reports for each platform (Facebook, Instagram, Google). Analytics often differ between platforms, making it tricky to draw parallels between your different ad data.
- Evaluating the performance of your ads each month, and working out which are sending you the most web traffic, the highest conversion rate, the most revenue – or whatever else your key aims are.
Manage all your online advertising in one place with a new ad management platform
If you’re short on time but want to make the most of your online advertising budget, then your luck is in: our new Smart Performance product takes care of all the above challenges for you. It uses machine learning to automatically tweak and optimise your various online ads, managing the spend, and giving you the results in one simple to read dashboard.
Not only does it take care of these time-consuming tasks, but it also delivers a far superior result than optimising each online advertising platform individually. This single software solution auto-optimises all of your ads across all your platforms using one budget, leaving you to get on with business as usual!
Want to find out more? Click here to visit our Smart Performance product page for more details.
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[1] ONS2019
