Businesses spend billions on direct mail, TV, radio, and print advertising. Unfortunately, many small businesses are left frustrated by the lack of sales and return on their advertising dollars.
Considering the average attention span of adults is under 10 seconds these days, it’s no wonder people are frustrated.
There’s still some good news. Consumers are shifting more of their time researching and searching for products online. To find those customers businesses have to be more proactive in searching out and using the best advertising platforms for their market.
If no one can find your website you can’t expect it to generate sales, right?
Many different types of advertising outlets provide different forms of ads from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) to media buys. In this multi-post series, I’m going to start with the PPC platforms.
Pay-Per-Click/PPC Advertising Networks
Google Adwords https://adwords.google.com
Largest PPC network. Ads are displayed on the top and right sides of Google.com’s search results page. Target by keyword, time of day, keyword search terms, and others.
Text, image, and local search-based ads. Can be a bit overwhelming to get started. Google Adwords Express http://www.google.com/adwords/express/ helps you.
Advertise.com http://www.advertise.com
Your contextual ads appear on publisher websites that offer intext, content, mobile, toolbar, domain parking, interstitials, email, search, and retargeting. Claims 180 million people delivered per month and 10 billion monthly ad impressions.
Media.net http://media.net/
PPC ads are displayed on Bing.com and Yahoo.com. Claims 151 million searchers in the U.S. Targeting by keyword search terms.
7search.com http://7search.com/
Provides a search engine to smaller niche website partners. Traffic comes from the people searching for the target keywords you define.
Bidvertiser.com http://www.bidvertiser.com/
Target your ads by channels, keywords, and geographic location. Ads are displayed on websites within the Bidvertiser network; you choose the category of sites you’d like to place ads on.
TLVMedia http://www.tlvmedia.com/
20 billion global impressions per month. Automatic and manual real-time campaign optimization. Covers multiple verticals with targeting and re-targeting.
Chitika http://chitika.com/
300,000 publisher websites to advertise on. Target customers based upon their recent searches on the search engines, mobile, and locally targeted ads.
AdEngage http://www.adengage.com/
Unique ad inventory not available elsewhere. Buy only the traffic you want. Split test 10,000 ad combinations in just over 1 minute. Over 7 Billion ad impressions per month. Real-time traffic monitoring.
LookSmart http://www.looksmart.com/
Claims 2 billion monthly searches on their search engine. Create PPC ads via their self-serve platform.
50OnRed http://www.50onred.com/
Contextual inline text ads. Bid on specific keywords that get converted into contextually relevant links on Publishers’ pages. Ads are activated by the end-user and can expand to reveal more details when a user hovers their mouse over the link.
eZanga.com http://www.ezanga.com/advertisers
Get found by new audiences, specific verticals, or niche markets that are difficult to reach on the major search engines. Uses an intuitive algorithm based on keywords, relevancy, and website content to place your ads in front of people actively seeking your type of good or service.
AOL Advertising http://advertising.aol.com/audiences
Target a wide range of dynamic and influential audiences.
IndustryBrains.com http://www.industrybrains.com/
Target pay-per-click or display ads to a specific category or premium branded Web site of your choice.
Matomy.com http://www.matomy.com
Global display advertising network delivering 60 billion monthly impressions. Audience-based buying & retargeting. Automatic trading and campaign optimization tools.
Also, read:35 Google Adwords Calculation Formula to Get Better ROI & Campaign Understanding
Read more:A Brief Guide to Google Ads
Affinity.com http://www.affinity.com/
Contextual, geographical, domain, and audience targeting. 30,000+ premium publishers & syndication channels.
AdManage.com http://www.admanage.com/
Serves over 4.5 billion + impressions per month. Ad units include text ads with thumbnails, CPC banner ads, sponsored listings, interstitials, and domain parking.
Criteo http://www.criteo.com/
Automatic and real-time audience segmentation and personalized creatives with a self-service platform.
InfoLinks.com http://www.infolinks.com/
Self-service contextual ads targeted to user’s search intent, the context of the publisher page, and tag clouds.
Clicksor http://www.clicksor.com/
Contextual PPC advertising network serves ads on websites that are relevant to your offerings.
Pulse360 http://www.pulse360.com/
Demographic and interests targeting. Targets users visiting hundreds of partner sites including top hubs like NBCNews.com, Weather.com, Gannett Digital, USAToday.com, Newsweek.com, CBS Television Stations and Comcast.net
The advantage of PPC is that you can get started very quickly. The downside is that if you go too broad on defining your ad reach, you’ll waste money with unnecessary clicks.
If you narrow it too much, you’ll never get any traffic. You have to find the right balance between the “buy” mindset and your website content.
Conclusion: Having a digital presence is not enough until you attract traffic to your website these Ad networks could bring more and more interested customers to your website and you only need to pay for the potential leads and they also help you to get an advantage over your market competition.
