Should You Use Paid Ads to Promote Your Small Business?

Paid advertising can be a great way to guide more traffic to your site and increase business, however it can be an expensive endeavor if you don’t really know what you are doing. This article tackles the three most popular platforms for online advertising, and whether they are worth it for small businesses to invest in. Find out everything you need to know about using paid ads to promote your small business.

Let’s start with the most obvious one, Google! According to Statista, “in November 2016, Google was ranked first amongst the most visited multi-platform web properties in the United States with 246 million U.S. unique visitors and a market share of 63.4% among the leading U.S. search engine providers.”

Regarding Google’s paid advertising:

Google has tracked 4 billion store visits from ad clicks.
39.6% of those Global Search Ad clicks come from desktops, and 48.9% comes from smartphones.
The clickthrough rate for mobile search ads on Google’s first place is 27.7%.

Google offers two types of paid ads through Google AdWords, namely display ads and text ads. Display ads will appear while you are browsing on various websites and targeted through past searches. Text ads appear at the top or the side of every Google search page. These are ads that a company pays for so that people will notice their business whenever they’re searching Google. The company only has to pay whenever someone clicks on the ad, also known as pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Given the vast influence this search engine has, it is important to take time to consider whether Google AdWords can be beneficial to your small business.

Should you use Google’s paid ads?

Overall, pursuing Google AdWords can be an expensive online advertising channel for small businesses. It all depends on your industry, as well as the budget you have for acquiring new customers. If you have decided to pursue this advertising strategy, check out Entrepreneur’s starter guide to setting up your Google AdWords campaigns. But if this is a little out of your league, Facebook and Instagram provide cheaper options for online advertising.

Facebook Paid Ads

Facebook ads run on the same pay-per-click (or pay-per-impression) idea as Google’s ads. According to the Huffington Post, “thanks to amount of personal information in Facebook’s database, they allow you to get ridiculously detailed with your targeting. Anything a user can put into their profile—age, sex, location, education, religion, interests, politics, job title, marital status, etc.—can be used as a filter for your ads.” The best part is that Facebook Ads are surprisingly affordable!

Instagram Paid Ads

Since it launch 7 years ago, it has become clear that Instagram isn’t just for selfies and animal pictures. Instagram is one of the leading social media platforms for image-based content, with over 600 million active monthly users. But where this platform really shines is its level of user engagement: Engagement with brand on Instagram is 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest, and 84 times higher than Twitter.

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