Skip to content
If you know what you’re doing, PPC advertising can benefit your business greatly. You need to know the right platform for you, the right strategy, best practices and effectively use all the PPC features offered. Specifically, in this article, we will be tackling the different PPC ad types. By the end of this article, we hope that you will have a good idea of each type. Whether you do PPC in-house with white label software or go the white label PPC services route, you can see which one might be the right fit for your marketing and campaign goals.
Search Ads
Paid search ads are often the start of an advertiser’s journey in PPC advertising. As the most common type, you can often see these marked “Ad” on the top left side of a link. These ads can be positioned either above an organic or nonpaid result or below it on search engine results pages (SERPs).
The process for setting these up is similar across multiple search engines: Potential advertisers start by choosing the keywords that will prompt their ads to appear. Then they’ll determine the most they’re willing to pay once these are clicked. This enters them into an auction system that considers their bid, the quality of their ad, and other factors, Determining the spot they take and how much they will have to pay.
Google Ads is the most commonly used platform for paid search advertising due in no small part to its over 90% search engine market share in March of 2020. While advertising on Google is more popular, people still use Microsoft Advertising to do paid search campaigns on Bing. Even if its market share was below 3% in 2020, Bing tends to have lower click prices. It is a common practice to run both a Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaign simultaneously.
Display Ads
In display advertising, you’re able to show your product or service to people who are surfing the web. They appear as photos with text and appeal to a more targeted audience on Google Affiliated Sites.
You follow the same steps of choosing keywords and bid amount but with 2 additions. One is that your ad should pass through screening by Google, making sure it fulfills Google’s Ad Image Requirements. After this, you will have to choose the markets you want to focus on by selecting sites for your ad to appear.
Here lies the strength of Display advertising. Showing your ad to individuals that might have an interest in your product or service gives you exposure and helps build awareness for your brand at a lower price than Search Ads. The caveat to this, however, is that you may see lower conversion rates when compared to Search Ads.
Video Ads
As the name suggests, Video Ads involve advertisements in the form of a short clip on your product or service. With the expansion of digital marketing, these have gained in popularity. Paid Video Ads give you the opportunity to reach more individuals without having an established following. And if you’re already on Google Ads, one of the best places to start is YouTube, which has 2 billion monthly active users.
Shopping Ads
A Shopping Ad campaign involves displaying ads on Google and other search engines that include elements such as a product image, title, product description, and price.
Because of the transparent nature of Shopping ads – the fact that searchers can see what the product is and how much it costs – the conversion rate is usually higher than regular Search Ads. Additionally, Google Shopping campaigns can get a discounted click rate if they use a CSS partner.
[bctt tweet=”If you know what you’re doing, PPC advertising can benefit your business greatly.” username=”ThatCompanycom”]Remarketing Ads
Remarketing shows ads to people who have already interacted with your business. It is a way to re-engage customers who have viewed your services or products and might still be making up their minds about purchasing. This could also be used to upsell or cross-sell products and services. These ads appear on Google Display Network-associated sites or social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
To start a remarketing campaign, you choose a particular ad network. This ad network will give you a pixel tag or a small piece of code. This is placed on your website to detect new users and add them to your list once they interact with your pages. When they visit other sites hosting your ad network provider, they’ll be able to see your image or video ads: maybe the shoe they were eyeing or a cleaning service they were considering. This way, remarketing ads increase the chance of a sales conversion and give you an edge over businesses that offer similar things.
Gmail Sponsored Ads
Gmail Sponsored Ads appear like usual emails in a user’s inbox and are great for brand awareness and top-of-the-funnel traffic. These ads are subtly different in that they have their subject line in bold with a small “ad” tag. You’re charged once the user clicks the email and gets shown a detailed version of your ad. They can save your message for later, forward it to others, and/or click to see your website –metrics that can be monitored to see your ad’s performance. Through these, it is possible to strategize and boost brand awareness.
Since they’re part of Google Ads, you can effortlessly expand to include them if you’re already advertising with Google Search, Display, Shopping, and/or Remarketing.
Amazon Advertising
E-commerce giant Amazon continues to grow with over 1.9 million-selling partners, 206 million daily visitors, 300 million active customer accounts worldwide, 12 million products online, and more online search traffic than Google back in 2016. As the competition increases, so does the need to stand out. PPC Amazon Advertising gives you this much-needed leg-up on similar businesses.
Since it is a retail site, sales conversions are likely because people are browsing with the intent to buy. With Amazon’s advertising platform, you can choose from 3 types of campaigns to highlight your product:
- Product Display Ads look much like shopping ads with photos of your product. They can be found on Amazon search results pages, the home page, the product detail page, and also on third-party websites and apps.
- Sponsored Product Ads show up in search results once the keyword you’ve chosen has been searched for. Because they mimic organic results, they perform well in terms of click-through rates and sales conversions.
- Headline Search Ads, also known as banner ads, appear on top of search results with the brand logo. Offering the most amount of customization, these are best to showcase a group of products and increase brand awareness.
It’s worth noting that Amazon Advertising could steal attention away from your selling efforts on a website.
Paid Social Ads
Paid Social Ads involve launching an ad campaign to an audience within a social media platform such as TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram – sites that also offer PPC advertising services. This can include ads that are integrated into the news feed of the user, prospecting campaigns to find potential customers, and retargeting campaigns to hook customers. These platforms tend to have an array of ad types, the most common being image and video.
Due to them being under the same parent company (Meta), Facebook and Instagram have the means to integrate and manage their PPC ad campaign efforts through a single dashboard. Thus, it is common to see ad campaigns run side-by-side on both of these platforms.
Final Thoughts
With all the ad types and PPC platforms available, it can often be hard to pick the right ones to use, but hopefully, you now find yourself a few steps further on in your journey to identify the right ad types to inform your PPC marketing strategy. If you need the help with your white label digital marketing, then look not further.
