The huge growth of e-commerce means that selling goods and services online has become a crowded and fiercely competitive market.

So even if your business benefits from a well optimised website, excellent content and positive social media engagement – you still might need a little bit of help reaching your target audience.

For this, an increasing number of businesses use paid advertising services to amplify their visibility and engage the web users they really want to reach.

As a brief introduction, here we explain how paid advertising works and look at some of the most popular and effective paid advertising platforms available to businesses.

So, what is paid advertising?

The internet has become rapidly easier to monetise over the past decade, so on websites, search engines and social networks everywhere you will notice there is a lot of advertising space.

In 99% of occurrences, the adverts you see as you browse online are governed by a commercial advertising network and tailored to match your personal preferences. This is usually based on your search history or related to the website/content you are viewing.

So for example, if you visit a football website or use a search engine to look for football stories, you will be more likely to see adverts about football themed products that relate to your interest.

Similarly, if you follow Manchester United on Facebook there is a good chance that you will see the occasional Manchester United or football related adverts on your timeline based on your profile preferences.

How can a business benefit?

Paid platforms allow targeted advertising to put your brand in front of the audiences that you feel are most likely to be interested or invested in your products and services.

This kind of funnelled marketing helps businesses to create engaging campaigns that are tailored for the web users that are more likely to answer your calls to action – whether that is to visit your website, find out more, or make a purchase.

With intelligent bidding systems that help to build an online campaign without breaking the bank, paid advertising offers direct B2C and B2B engagement that can drive traffic to your website within the constraints of your budget and with absolute flexibility.

Here we look at some of the most popular platforms used by businesses:

Google Ads

Google offers advertisements which appear in search results through the Google Ads network, or ads that appear on other websites through their tailored Display Network and Google’s AdSense facilities.

Bing Ads

A largely similar format to the Google equivalent, Bing Ads is a dedicated pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system. All bids are based on how much you are willing to pay per each click on your ad.

Google Shopping

Google also allows e-commerce businesses to pull their product feeds directly into a pay-per-click system which enables these products to appear in shopping search, helping them to best reach those people who are a little further progressed in their purchasing decision.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are targeted to users based on their location, demographic, and profile information. Once an ad has been created, a budget can be set to bid for each click or thousand impressions that your ad will receive across the site.

Find out more

If you would like to find out more about the benefits of paid advertising and how the team at SEO it Right can build and manage your campaigns, please get in touch!

Call our friendly team on 0121 308 0219 or email us at [email protected].