A Beginner’s Guide to Paid Ads

Whether you’re just now launching your online business, or you’re struggling to acquire organic traffic through your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts, you may have decided that you’d like to shortcut your traffic generation through the use of paid advertisements.

Learning as much as you can about this strategy is a smart way to go about it, because too many marketers embark on a paid ad campaign with zero knowledge of it and end up wasting their money in the process.

There are several types of paid ads you can run, and different places you can run them on. You have to know what will work best for your target audience, and then know how to set a budget and goal that will help you get the traffic and conversions you’re seeking.

You also need to know how to track and tweak your efforts so that you’re getting the bets return on your investment possible. Below, you’ll get introduced to the world of online paid ads so that you have a good foundation to build from before you implement any one particular strategy.

Understanding How Pay-Per-Click Ads Work

You can place ads on search engines, on other peoples’ websites, in their email campaigns, and on social media platforms so that you’re targeting a specific demographic.

Most times, you’re paying per click (although in some instances, such as direct dealings with a site or list owner, you might be paying a flat fee for the ad space per month or per mailing).

You will be bidding on keywords and then the ads will show up on relevant sites or on search engines whenever people are looking for those words and phrases. You might also be targeting a specific demographic, such a social media campaign that can target women over 60 who like a certain topic.

You’ll usually set a budget for the day, and a maximum amount you’re willing to spend per click. Then, the system will make sure that money is spent in the right places at the right times it helps you compete with others bidding on the same keywords.

You pay whenever someone clicks on your ads. You don’t pay for every time the ad is simply shown to an audience. So this helps you feel more confident that your ad isn’t going to waste on the wrong viewers, as long as you understand how to set your campaigns up for the right demographic.

Knowing When It’s Time to Turn to Paid Advertising

Many marketers simply turn to paid advertising when they get frustrated enough trying to rank well in the search engine results pages, and failing repeatedly. It’s also hard to let go of the fact that there are free methods, in addition to SEO rankings, that can allow you to generate organic traffic.

But even though you can rank on Google and have your content viewed on social media platforms, using paid advertisements can help you get the attention and views you weren’t getting in an organic setting.

On Google, you may be buried against the competition. and on social media platforms, you’re not always guaranteed to have your content seen by the right people. The social media algorithm will determine that.

Paid advertising gives you the shortcut that you want, without having to wait and try to figure out how to strategically get your content in front of the right audience. Each marketer will have their own bar set for when they feel it’s time to dig into paid advertising.

You never want to go into debt to pursue this strategy. You should have some funds set aside so that you are not eating away at your ability to pay your bills or pay yourself for your work.

You also never want to start a new paid ad campaign until you understand the ins and outs of how paid advertising works, and specifically how the platform you want to advertise on operates.

Paid Ads on Social Media

Social media has become a strong competitor against search engines. Many people turn to YouTube, TikTok or elsewhere to look for the information they need instead of heading straight to Google.

Therefore, many marketers are leveraging the power of social media to run their paid ad campaigns. You can run ads on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and more.

The great thing about using social media platforms for your ads is that they have the information search engines often don’t. With a search engine, they are going by the keyword phrases that are typed into their platform to deliver the results to their viewers.

But with social media, they often have information such as the gender of the user, the birthday (age), the geographic location, and even some of the common interests this person has.

Therefore, you are able to target your users more specifically than if you were simply paying for ad placement on a search engine or elsewhere. You can also get increased engagement from your paid ads on social media platforms.

On a search engine, the results are delivered to the user, and they can click through and go to the site to take action. If you run an ad on Facebook, not only can people click on the link, but they can comment on it, like, and share your ad with others.

Because you have such specific demographic data on social media platforms, you are able to get the right ads in front of the right people, which should result in higher conversions and increased profits for you.

Another benefit to running your campaigns on social media is that you can watch your performance and make adjustments to the campaigns as needed so that they perform better for you.

Different platforms have different paid ad capabilities. You may be able to add images or video to some ad campaigns on certain social media sites. they also differ very slightly in how they present their tracking and measurement results to you.

Not everything that you do in terms of paid ads on social media is done through the platform ad tools themselves. Sometimes, you will be paying for ads directly to influencers who have a big following on the platform, who promised to plug your product or website in exchange for a payment.

Paid Ads on Search Engines

Google is still the number one search engine in existence. Many marketers rely on the use of pay per click (PPC) advertising in order to get the traffic they need to their site so they can convert visitors into buyers.

While Google is the biggest search engine, many marketers also advertise on other search engines, including Bing. Paid ads on search engines often appear at the very top of the results pages.

These come before any of the organic search results, so it gives you an advantage over your competitors if you have not been able to rank your content ahead of theirs organically.

These sponsored results will show up whenever a user types in a particular keyword or phrase that the advertiser has bid on. The advertiser will pay when and if the search engine user clicks on their ad.

Paid Ads Purchased Directly Site Owners

While many website owners are signed up with Google AdSense to monetize the content on their blog, others prefer to sell space on their site directly to advertisers and cut out the middleman.

If you know of a blog or site that has traffic made-up of the specific target audience you want to present your ads to, you can approach that site owner and ask if they would be willing to allow you to rent space on their blog.

This will usually be a flat rate publishing arrangement, where you will design a graphic such as a banner ad that goes under the header, in the web content, or in the sidebar. There are platforms other than Google where you can list your website as an available space for marketers to purchase ad space.

Paid Ads for Solo Email Marketing

If you don’t have an email list of your own, or if you just want to expand your reach, you may want to invest in solo email marketing campaigns. These can be used in place of or in addition to and affiliate marketing strategy, where you recruit competitors to promote for you.

With solo email marketing, you will be approaching list owners and paying them to send out an email on your behalf to their list of subscribers in exchange for a payment. There are marketplaces where list owners will tell you the niche that they are in, the number of subscribers the email will go to, and the price for sending out a communication for you.

With a solo email, you can promote a product that you have just launched, send their subscribers to your landing page so that they can consider your lead magnet offer, or get them to take another action by clicking through on your link.

Sometimes, these will be flat rate email campaigns, and other times they will work the same way a paper click add campaign operates, where you will pay a set amount per click through.

You want to make sure that you are working with a marketer who has a high open rate and click through rate. You don’t want to be dealing with someone whose email fails in terms of deliverability because they have been identified as a spammer.

The Three Types of Creative Media for Your Ads

There are different creatives you can pursue when it comes to your paid ad campaigns. The first is the use of text. If you are using a solo add, or even social media or search engine advertising, you will often be leveraging text as a way of communicating to your target audience.

One thing you want to do is make sure you’re including some of the keywords and persuasive verbiage that you need to deliver a strong call to action that gets your target audience to click through to your site.

You want to make sure you are getting to the point with your text ads, and zeroing in on the needs of your prospective buyers. If you have a special deal, you want to make sure that those savings are highlighted.

Display advertising is another format you can use with your ad campaigns, which use image ads such as banners. Display ads are perfect to use on websites and then social media ad campaigns, because it stands apart from the rest of the text being used on the sites.

Although your display ad is primarily based on an image, you will be utilizing text to define a strong call to action that gets your viewers to click through on the image to go to your site.

Some people, when creating their display ads, like to add an animated effect to their banners so that it draws the attention of the visitors are better. You can create vertical or horizontal display ads.

Video ads are another type of creative media format that you can use to generate traffic to your site. You can create video ads that are run on social media platforms and elsewhere, or you can pay for advertising that goes into someone else’s video channel before (pre-roll), during (mid-roll) or after (post-roll) their video ends.

You’ll find that these are very popular on YouTube and TikTok. Video ads are great because YouTube is the second largest search engine in existence and TikTok is closing in on them with enormous growth.

Setting a Goal and Budget for Your Ad Campaigns

Before you even start paying for advertising online, you have to know what your goal is. This will help you not only make the best creative possible for your ads, but it will also allow you to zero in on the right target audience and

Do you want to build your list or get people to buy your latest product or service? Not only do you need to know what the broad goal is, but you have to know who you want to be doing it – so knowing your demographics is important.

Make sure your goals are specific and not too vague. You want to be able to see if your ads achieve the types of numbers and conversions you set for yourself, such as a 30% conversion of your ads on your sales pages.

While setting your goals, get specific with your budget, too. This is a strategy where you can lose a lot of money if you’re not careful. Some people set a high daily ad spend amount, not realizing that the platform will use up every bit of it when given the chance.

You want to go with a low amount at first until you’re able to fully tweak your ad campaign so that it’s performing well for you. That doesn’t mean it performs well in getting the clickthroughs.

If the clickthroughs aren’t paying off for you in terms of new subscribers or sales, then you’ll be losing money regardless of how many people are responding well to your ad. You’ll want time to tweak the ads or the pages you’re sending people to, if necessary.

For a smart ad budget, think about how much you can spend so that you’re not having to go into debt to pay for these ads. Even if it’s just $5 a day, that’s a good place to start as you’re learning.

Never assume that spending more is going to cause you to have a big influx of profits immediately, because it may not work out for you like that. If you’re going to be using paid ads in more than one area, decide how much each platform will be allocated from your budget.

You want to allocate more to the platforms where your target audience is likely to be in higher numbers. For example, if your audience is over 50, you might find more of them on Facebook than you would on TikTok, so you could spend more on your ads there.

By setting a budget for paid advertising, you can ensure that you are maximizing your advertising dollars and achieving your marketing goals. Take the time to research your target audience, set a realistic budget, and track your results to make the most of your paid advertising efforts.

How to Find the Right Targeting for Your Ads

Setting up the targeting for your paid ads is something you need to get right, and tweak as time goes on. You never want to cast a wide net for your ad campaigns. It’s better to target a specific demographic so that your ad dollars are wisely spent.

This will help ensure that your ads are shown to the people most likely to engage with or click through on your ad. You want to make sure you’re targeting those in the right country or region.

If 90% of your customers are in America, focus on targeting that audience. You can set some other demographics, too – so figure out the likely age of your buyers or subscribers, their gender and even their income level and interests.

There are other targeting elements you can use to determine who sees your ads. For example, some platforms can present your ads to people based on prior behaviors they’ve engaged in, such as where they’ve visited online or what else they’ve purchased from others.

Tracking and Tweaking the Results of Your Ad Efforts

It’s important that when you start using paid ads, you’re not using a “set and forget” mentality. You have to be tuned into what’s happening with your ads so that you can tweak them to perform better and pay off for you.

Compare the amount you’ve spent versus what the results have been as the campaign goes on. If you notice that an ad isn’t paying off for you, you want to replace it with a new creative to hopefully improve its performance.

You also might need to tweak your budget so that you’re spending more (or less), depending on how things are going. You should be able to see which ad groups are working better, and then you can begin split testing those against a new set of creatives.

You can get a lot of information by using UTM parameters. These can tell you what the source of the traffic was (which is helpful if you’re running paid ads on multiple platforms).

It can also tell you things like what type of content sent the traffic (which is helpful if you’re using a mix of text, images and video ads), and which keywords and phrases were used.

So if you want to run paid ads to the same page on two different networks, the UTM parameters will tell you which ones are performing better for you in more detail so that you can tweak your efforts.

Tips for Achieving a Good ROI on Your Ad Campaigns

Tracking and tweaking your ad campaigns is all done in an effort to improve the ROI (return on investment) that you’re working toward. You’ll be able to refine your ads and strategy so that you’re earning more in profits than you’re spending.

Pay attention to the data being given to you by the platforms, but also take the initiative to split test your landing pages so that you’re able to get a better ROI on your end. If you’re not paying attention to whether or not your ad efforts are paying off for you, you’ll be wasting money and blowing your budget.

If you become aware of an ad that’s performing better than all of the others, duplicate it on other platforms and in its style and approach to see if you can get a better payoff overall.

Paid ads are not something you need to be doing when you’re desperate to make money online. It’s a bad idea for someone who is on a shoestring budget to invest a lot of money in, in the hopes that they’ll strike it rich with a good ROI.

Instead, you should leverage the power of paid ads when you’re at a place in your marketing journey that you have a little extra set aside to invest and you want (or need) to begin scaling your business to the next level.