Small Business Guide to Online Advertising

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How does online advertising help a local business grow?

Digital advertising increases awareness—it’s that simple. Digital advertising consists of a range of services, all of which work to promote a business online.

More and more businesses are increasing the amount that they spend on digital advertising, and experts like Jamie Turner suggest digital advertising on social platforms is well worth the spend.

The best part about digital advertising is that results can be easily monitored and ROI can be easily tracked. You probably don’t want to be spending lots of money without some proof of performance right?

Ease of Tracking

With traditional media channels, there is sometimes no way of tracking the effectiveness of an advertisement in terms of advanced data analytics. With digital advertising, companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, among a few others, allow users to access advanced analytics. This way local businesses know that their money is being well spent and that the digital advertisements are positively impacting their storefront.

When determining the success of an ad, the important factors will differ case by case. For the most part, the success of an ad lies in the indicators listed below.

ROI indicators/measures of a successful campaign:

“If I were to provide one tip to people who are using social media, it would be this — don’t be afraid of paying for social media reach and clicks.”

– Jamie Turner, 60secondmarketer.com

The Best Places to Advertise

Through our team’s extensive work in the digital advertising space, we have come to the same conclusion as pretty much every digital advertising company -- The best places to invest in paid search and social advertising are Google & Facebook.

With digital advertising, not only is a local business visible online, but they are visible to the right people online. Platforms like Facebook and Google allow for advanced targeting, which puts a local business in front of consumers who are more likely to convert into a sale.

Plus, almost 70% of digital ad spending going to Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which is more than two-thirds of all digital spending.

WHY ADVERTISE ON GOOGLE?

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Reach: Google is the largest search network in the world (90.4% of the search market), and consumers are using Google every single day to search for local businesses. Utilizing Google’s massive network capabilities, digital advertisers are able to find ideal prospects and get in front of users looking for their products/services.

In the age of digital, people are not looking at TV commercials or listening to radio ads to find a local business, they are searching for a service and then locating your business online.

With over 63,000 searches per second on any given day and the average person conducts 3-4 searches per day, that's a sh*t ton of search potential and you should WANT to be showing up on Google's search results. [source]

Flexibility: Google allows the local advertiser to spend whatever they want, whenever they want. With flexible options for ad spend, advertisers are able to test what works and what doesn’t work for a business. Spend a bit, wait to see how the campaign performs, and then reinvest in larger budgets for greater prospect reach.

WHY ADVERTISE ON FACEBOOK?

social ads on facebook is great for small business

Audience: The audience on Facebook includes 1.32 billion daily active users (DAUs) on average, at an increase of 17% year-over-year. As a local business, you simply cannot ignore the fact that Facebook is likely an intersection in which you can find prospective customers. If the daily average users' stat doesn’t have you convinced then let’s talk about how often social media is being used. The average person spends nearly 35 minutes every day JUST on Facebook, according to a recent study by Mediakix.

If there is one thing to take away it is that the audience on Facebook is MASSIVE, and they are on Facebook a LOT.

Targeting: Facebook Ad targeting is a marketer’s dream. Facebook allows the ability to focus on users so microscopically that you can basically become a bit of a digital stalker (in a good way?). Target users by their interests, behaviors, age, gender, location, and really anything that their Facebook profile may reveal about them including job title.

The Facebook algorithm has brought about changes to the local advertising landscape, but it remains one of the best environments for local businesses to get the word out about themselves!

Conclusion

By leveraging these two platforms, every local business can easily take their advertising game to the next level, and begin to rake in new revenue—with the data to back their investment.

30 Digital Advertising Statistics for Businesses

While the world of online marketing has expanded far beyond paid advertising, advertising still plays a very important role in generating revenue and business. Digital advertising is the top of the “new advertising stack,” and it’s what can create brand awareness, drive sales, and create visibility across a variety of channels that are oversaturated with businesses trying to stand out.

Although there are many new players in the online marketing landscape like email, social media, and reputation, digital advertising isn’t set to slow down yet—a statement that’s underlined by the fact that ad spend is set to grow from $83 billion in 2017 to over $129 billion by 2021 (DMB Adobe).

We’ve compiled this list of top advertising stats so you can spend your advertising dollars where it matters, and get the ROI you need to thrive in the digital world.

Statistics about Digital Advertising

  1. Digital ad spend is set to grow from $83 billion this year to $129+ billion by 2021
  2. Google and Facebook are set to rake in 63.1% of digital ad spend in 2017
  3. Google has +20% y/y advertising revenue growth, Facebook has +62% y/y growth
  4. 39% of marketers list search engine marketing as their top business priority for 2017
  5. Marketers that invest over 10% of their budgets on measurement are three times more likely to beat their sales targets by 25% or more
  6. 56% of advertising use engagement to measure success, 21% use conversion & revenue
  7. 34% of social media marketers list “tying social campaigns to business goals” as a top challenge

Video Advertising Statistics for 2018

  1. 2017’s video advertising spend is $13.23 billion, and projected to reach $22.18 billion by 2021
  2. 68% of consumers feel positive about watching video ads for mobile app rewards
  3. 52% of marketers believe that video is effective for brand awareness
  4. Online shoppers who view demo videos are 1.81x more likely to purchase than non-viewers
  5. 51.9 percent of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI
  6. According to retailers, video can account for a 40% increase in purchases
  7. Mobile shoppers are 3x as likely to watch a video than desktop shoppers
  8. 46% of users act after viewing an ad
  9. 80% of consumers remember a video ad they viewed in the past 30 days
  10. Combining video with full-page ads boosts engagement by 22 percent
  11. Ecommerce sellers find that using product videos increases product purchases by 144%
  12. Video ad completion rate for videos 15 seconds long is 93-95%, with 30 second videos seeing a completion rate of 92-93%
  13. Over half of video advertising is viewed on mobile

Mobile Advertising Statistics

  1. Americans spend 71% of their online time on mobile, with Canada and the UK coming in at 62% and 61% respectively
  2. Average smartphone conversion rates are up by 64%
  3. Mobile advertising accounts for $37 billion of the $73 billion total ad spend (51%)
  4. 81% of consumers feel negative about mobile add pop-ups
  5. Mobile accounts for 60% of click share on Google Search ads, compared to desktop’s 32%
  6. Search ad spending on mobile is set to rise by 25% in 2017

Social Media Advertising Statistics

  1. 70% of advertisers plan to increase their mobile social advertising budget in 2017
  2. 26% of Facebook Users that click ads make a purchase
  3. Images account for 75-90% of Facebook advertising effectivity/performance
  4. The best headline length for a Facebook ad is four words, with 15 for the description.

Sources: DMB Adobe, 2017 | Smart Insights, 2017 | KPCB, 2017 | Digital  Marketing Depot, 2017 | eMarketer, 2017 | CMS Report | WordStream, 2017 | Small Biz Trends, 2016 | WowMakers, 2016

Google's NEW Expanded Text Ads Are Finally Here (For All!)

Since they were announced earlier this year, we've been waiting until today to get access to expanded text ads in Google AdWords. As many of you may have seen in the past couple months, Google has removed the right-hand side ads to help improve the user and search experience across a multi-platform world. With these side ads now gone, this created additional space and width for search results and four top-of-page ads.

These ad spaces are now able to use expanded text ads which allow longer ad headline -- actually two headlines of 30 characters (instead of one with only 25 characters), one large description of 80 characters giving advertisers more wiggle room to create effective ad copy to highlight your products and services.

Here's an example of how the ads will look in comparison to standard/old ads:

google adwords expanded text ads

As you can see, the new ad (on the right) is much more predominant in the SERPs and stands out more on mobile devices. This is a big thing that Google's been pushing for a while now -- getting ads ready for the mobile first world.

Best Practices for Extended Ad Text

Here are a few best practices from the Google Inside AdWords blog:

To help you get started, we’ve published a best practices guide that walks through tips and tricks for creating and optimizing expanded text ads. Specifically:

  • Create and test multiple expanded text ads for each ad group, and evaluate performance before pausing or deleting your standard text ad
  • Remember to include important information about your business and other tried-and-true components from your standard text ads, like price and keyword insertion
  • Focus on your headlines: they’re the most prominent part of your text ad

Google also announced that starting on October 26, 2016 advertisers will not be able to create or edit standard text ads and will only be able to create ads using the new expanded text. However, existing standard text ads will continue to serve alongside expanded text ads.

We've already begun making the changes to our client's PPC ads to take full advantage of these new features -- we highly encourage if you use AdWords to do the same!