The Ultimate Guide to Online Advertising

Online advertising plays an important role in B2B digital marketing strategy. Advanced targeting capabilities have given brands an unprecedented ability to reach their audience at key points along their customer journey. More than ever, ad offers can be contextualised to better engage B2B buyers on a personal level.

However, digital advertising can be difficult to make sense of at first. The paid advertising field is full of industry-specific jargon. And the tremendous variety of different platforms and formats can make it confusing to know where to focus your attention.

This primer aims to help ground you so you can have meaningful conversations with your agency about paid advertising. We want you to know about your options so you can integrate online ads into your B2B digital marketing strategy effectively.

To start, we’ll give you a bird’s eye view of the current paid digital marketing landscape. You’ll learn the basics of online advertising and how it’s part of your overall customer journey, map and experience. We’ll delve into frequently asked questions like what is paid search? What is paid social? What is PPC marketing and how does the digital ad buying process work? We’ll also cover the basics for building effective campaigns that blend into your overall marketing strategy.

Ready to learn how to advertise online? Let’s get started!

Online advertising is a targeted, data-driven strategy aimed at reaching consumers online and encouraging them along the buyer's journey

What Is Online Advertising?

Online advertising is a targeted, data-driven strategy aimed at reaching consumers online and encouraging them along the buyer's journey. By promoting themselves across digital platforms, brands can make sure they’re visible to their desired audience.

Organic vs. Paid Marketing

Many people treat paid online advertising as somehow being separate from organic strategies like content marketing. However, we need to stop thinking of them as separate entities. The integrated cross-channel nature of the modern B2B buying journey means that paid advertising and organic marketing feed into, compliment and support each other.

Paid advertising is a flexible tool in your arsenal for getting seen by and engaging with your potential customers. You can use it to generate an ambient brand awareness that drives traffic to your home page. You can also be extremely pointed and use adverts to direct your audience, or sections of your audience, towards lead capture or specific promotions. It needs to be part of your overall customer journey planning. 

Your paid and organic strategies should fit together and support each other. Paid advertising is an important discipline with a distinct skill set, but it's not a separate thing from your other activities. You've got to think about it in the context of the customer journey and the context of other content that you're putting out.

Consider the marketing ‘rule of seven’. The chances of converting a prospect to a customer at their first impression of your brand are low. Rather, it takes a certain number of interactions across different platforms to nudge a prospect into a sale. This is especially true for B2B marketing, which often requires an even greater number of touches because of the more complex decision process. Online ads serve a foundational role in creating these impressions.

By understanding how your online advertising campaigns operate within your broader marketing strategy, you can further improve both paid and organic performance.

Why Advertise Online?

As digital marketers, one of our biggest challenges is traffic. We face the question of how to reach the largest number of qualified prospects possible, using the smallest amount of resources. Here are three important ways in which online advertising can help:

  • Increase brand awareness – Online advertising increases the reach of your business beyond your existing audience. Your brand becomes visible to thousands of people who are looking for the goods or services you provide.

  • Audience intelligence – You can use digital ad campaigns to gather audience intelligence for your other marketing efforts. The data-driven nature of online advertising means you can continuously test ideas to improve performance. For instance, different content ideas to figure out what does and doesn’t resonate with your audience.

  • Targeting – Online advertising campaigns can be highly customised. You’re able to reach specific and interested audiences that fit your buyer persona. This means a better experience for them and qualified leads for you.

Research shows that online advertising can be highly effective in getting your products in front of potential customers. For example, when someone is looking online with high commercial intent, paid ads drive 65% of all clicks. In a 2019 survey, 75% of respondents said that search ads made it easier to find the information they wanted.

While online advertising has the potential to deliver a strong ROI, it depends on how you manage your strategy. One important factor for success is how strongly your ads link to various points along the customer journey.

Another important consideration is the quality of your ad copy. Competition for attention is fierce, so creativity matters. Your advertising has to be compelling and striking. It also has to have a clear call to action.

Driving a good ROI from online advertising depends on research, targeting, messaging, testing, and the quality of the offer. It can take quite a bit of work. This is one reason organisations often work with qualified digital advertising agencies to manage their campaigns. However, as with any marketing, when done correctly, the results are worth it.

Online Engagement

Knowing where, when, and how people will look for your ads is an important part of developing your strategy

Knowing where, when, and how people will look for your ads is an important part of developing your strategy. It’s useful to have a basic understanding of how people use the internet when making purchase decisions.

To start, internet use is pervasive. Over the last 20 years, the internet penetration rate has increased nearly three-fold in the UK. In 2019, over 87% of people in the UK accessed the internet at least once a day.

The time spent online has also been steadily climbing. In 2019, Brits spent an average of 3 hours and 29 minutes online each day (this jumped to over 4 hours in 2020 because of Covid-19 lockdowns). A growing number of different devices are being used to access the web, especially smartphones.

Reflecting the increasing internet use, the amount of online shopping that people in Great Britain are doing has balloned in recent years. For instance, the online shopping penetration rate reached 66% in the first quarter of 2019.

Importance of Online Advertising

The internet has turned into an important resource throughout all phases of the consumer journey. People use their computers and smartphones throughout the day to get inspired, compare brands, read reviews, find local businesses, etc.

For example, when searching for more information in-store, many consumers prefer to use their smartphone. In a 2019 study, 69% of respondents said they would look for reviews on their phone first. Another 53% said they would search for deals before speaking with an employee.

B2B Online recently released a joint study on how B2B purchasing channel preferences are changing. In surveying B2B buyers across three age groups (Baby Boomers, Gen-X, and Millennials) the study found:

...a majority of buyers in all age groups are prioritizing digital channels for greater flexibility and personalization, as well as capabilities that help them manage the full life cycle of the buying process.

Having an integrated digital advertising strategy is critical for marketers and planners. Buyers now expect brands to be available online, and this expectation is being carried over to the B2B world.

How Does Online Advertising Work?

We believe it’s important for business owners to understand how online advertising works so that they can make smarter decisions about their campaigns. So, let’s go over the major components of online advertising and how they work together to help you reach your marketing goals.

Targetting

There are three major ways that brands can target audiences using online advertising networks:

  • Keyword research – Keywords are generalised abstractions marketers use to match ads to desired search queries and particularly useful for creating ambient brand awareness. For example, a person searches ‘where to buy a coffee maker?’ The keyword phrase ‘coffee maker buy’ roughly matches this search query, triggering your ad to show in the search results.

  • Search intent – Search intent is the why behind a search. Is someone hunting for information or looking to buy immediately? Different intents will have a different purpose for your ad, so you need to target your creative and content carefully. For instance, does someone want to get the white paper, book a meeting, get the free trial, etc? Matching search intent links your content and advertising strategies to the customer journey.

  • Demographics – Another option available is to target campaigns using demographic and behavioural data. Advertisers can use audience intelligence to target specific, narrow audiences to improve ROI. For instance, members of a particular industry or users within a certain radius of a location.

Bidding For Ads

Most ad platforms use an auction bidding system to determine which ads run. A bid is the maximum amount of money you're willing to pay for the desired action, such as getting a click.

Ad networks will only make you pay the lowest amount needed to win the bid. Let's say you bid £5 for a click on your ad, and the next highest bid is £3. Because you will pay more, you win the bid. But, in reality, you'll only have to pay £3.01 for each click instead of the full £5.

It’s important to note that winning a bid isn’t the sole factor determining ad placement – for instance, appearing top-of-page. From the ad network’s perspective, they want to serve the most relevant ads possible to audiences. After all, they earn their revenue when people click or view the ad. Therefore, the overall quality of your ad, in addition to your bid, will decide the placement.

Online Advertising Costs

You must define what you want to achieve with your ad campaign to determine an appropriate budget. You want to ensure your campaign is generating more value than the cost of maintaining it.

To figure out how much you should spend to break even, use the equation: LTV x Lead to Customer Rate x Conversion Rate.

  • Lifetime Value (LTV) – On average, how valuable is a single customer?

  • Lead to Customer Rate – What percentage of your leads turn into paying customers?

  • Conversion Rate – How often does a new contact from an ad convert into a lead?

Imagine you want to start a new ad campaign and you know that your LTV is £200, the average lead-to-customer rate is 30%, and your average conversion rate is 15%. Plugging these numbers into the equation returns: £200 x 0.30 x 0.15 = £9.

Here, your break-even point is £9 per click/view. This means your goal should be to spend less than £9 per action to see a positive ROI for your ad campaign.

Online Advertising Methods

Online advertising is a diverse field. There are a multitude of networks, formats, and solutions to choose from, each offering their own unique benefits.

Online advertising is a diverse field. There are a multitude of networks, formats, and solutions to choose from, each offering their own unique benefits. So it's difficult to know where to advertise online. To help, we have highlighted some of the most important types of online advertising for you to consider.

Search Advertising

Search engines are powerful advertising platforms. When someone is looking to buy, their first move is almost always to jump online to do some research. By running search ads, brands capture the attention of these prospects in a highly targeted way.

Why Would You Use Paid Search?

Search networks allow you to serve ads that are highly contextual to the wants and needs of your target audience. The analytical tools offered by these platforms can also help you identify new audiences to further improve campaign reach.

A PPC strategy is also an excellent partner to SEO. While you’re working on increasing your organic rankings, paid search helps you establish an immediate presence to get traffic flowing. Search ads appear before organic results. Most people will never look past the first page, so appearing near the top of the search results page (SERPs) is critical. This effect is even more pronounced on mobile, where over 90% of people only look at the first two or three results.

These are just some reasons paid search can provide such a great ROI. According to Google, advertisers make, on average, a return of 8:1 for money spent on Google PPC ads. More conservative estimates are 2:1. However, it should be mentioned that these numbers are based on US data.

Paid Search Platforms

There are two major players on the search advertising scene: Google and Bing.

Google Ads (formally Google Adwords) is the most popular network because of the sheer enormity of their search volume (over 3.5 billion per day). Google accounts for approximately 86% of the search engine market in the UK.

Microsoft owns the Bing Ads search engine and also exclusively serves ads for Yahoo search traffic. It is the second most popular search engine making up roughly 10% of the UK market – a share which has been growing steadily.

Fortunately, search advertising on both platforms more or less operates in the same manner. So if you know how to advertise on one, you will quickly be able to navigate advertising on the other.

Keyword Research and Search Intent

When you create ads for PPC, you want to target specific keywords that match the user’s search intent. For instance, including keywords like ‘buy’ for ads intended for transactional searches.

There are two major categories of pay per click keywords: brand and non-brand. The former are keywords that include your brand name or variations of the name. The latter are all other relevant keywords that don’t include your brand name – for instance, product or service descriptors. Combined, these keywords make it easy for searchers to see who you are and that you offer what they want.

There is an infinite number of ways that people can word search queries, from broad to specific. For this reason, Google and Bing let you set a parameter, called a match type, for how closely a search query must fit your keyword. There are three main match types: broad match, phrase match, and exact match.

  • Broad match – your ads are triggered when a search query contains – in any order – the individual parts in your keyword phrase, variations, or related words.

  • Phrase match – your ads are triggered when a search contains the same order of words, or close variants, as your keyword phrase. The query can also contain additional words, provided the search intent remains the same.

  • Exact match – your ads are triggered only if the search query includes your exact keyword or a very close variation. Close variants can include singulars, plurals, abbreviations, common misspellings, etc.

You can also use broad match modifiers and negative keywords to optimise ad delivery. The broad match modifier allows you to select keywords that must be included in the search query (instead of terms related to your keyword). Meanwhile, negative keywords exclude your ads from being shown in searches with that term.

For example, suppose you create a broad match keyword ‘London hotels’. A query for ‘London rentals’ might also trigger your ad, since ‘rentals’ is related to hotels. However, you don't want traffic from people looking for rental properties. Here, you can use a broad match modifier to specify that the search query must contain ‘hotel’. Another option is to make ‘rental’ a negative keyword.

The difference is that using a broad match modifier will allow your ad to run for searches like ‘London hotel or rental’. A negative keyword will prevent your ad from running in this search since it contains the word ‘rental’.

Social media offers a tremendous opportunity for B2B brands to reach and connect with their target audience

Social Media Advertising

Social media offers a tremendous opportunity for B2B brands to reach and connect with their target audience. Recognising this, most social networks offer ways to create advertisements right on their platform.

Why Should You Use Social Media Advertising?

A major benefit of social media advertising is the potential for global reach. Approximately 3.6 billion people are on social media. Leading networks are usually available in multiple languages, enabling social media marketers to connect with audiences across the world.

When done well, social advertising can be effective making it a popular choice. Even factoring in the pandemic, social media ad spend is forecasted to see positive growth in 2020.

Social networks give you access to user demographic information like age, gender, location, interests and behaviours. This lets you create highly targeted campaigns to reach the users most likely to engage with your brand.

Social platforms also offer a wide range of different ad formats, such as sponsored content, text ads, message ads, video ads, lead generation ads, and more. You can leverage these different formats to connect with your audience in a way that aligns with your business goals. Another benefit of social media advertising is the ability to remarket and retarget your ads (more on this later).

Now that you understand some reasons to consider social media advertising, let’s look at some specific platforms.

LinkedIn

With over 706 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is the go-to platform for working professionals, making it a great option for B2B advertisers. One of the major advantages of LinkedIn Advertising is that it provides unique targeting criteria specifically for the professional context.

For instance, you can target audiences based on demographics like job title, job function, and industry. Maybe you only want to advertise to potential customers employed at a certain company. Or C-level executives in your target industry who follow a specific person on the platform. Creating these types of granular B2B audiences is possible with LinkedIn's targeting capabilities.

Facebook

As the world’s largest social network, you're almost guaranteed to reach an audience that's relevant to your business on Facebook. The platform’s micro-targeting features are unmatched by any other social media network.

Want to target Birmingham residents older than 25 that own small enterprises? Or office workers in London's commercial centres that are already connected to your business page? Facebook ad targeting can get your message in front of the people who are most likely to want your products or services.

Facebook also offers marketers a vast range of ad types, including photo, video, and lead ads. Facebook Ads campaigns can also connect to Instagram Business and Facebook Messenger Ads. From a single ad manager, you can create campaigns that connect you to audiences on all three platforms.

Instagram

Instagram is a highly visually appealing platform that's popular with the Millennial and Gen Z age groups (ages 18-34). B2B brands rarely consider Instagram. However, if you’re certain that your audience is there or are in a visually led sector, it can be a suitable tool for awareness building. As with Facebook, Instagram offers several ad formats, such as story ads, photo ads, and video ads.

Instagram also offers some unique formats particularly suited for e-commerce. For instance, Instagram Shopping ads include tags showing the product's name and price within the image. Clicking on the tag takes the prospect to a product page within the Instagram app where they can purchase the item. This creates a seamless shopping experience for users, as they don’t have to navigate between different platforms.

YouTube

YouTube has over 2 billion monthly active users (for context, that’s roughly one-third of the internet). YouTube's vast reach offers advertisers a way to connect with audiences across the customer journey. As a part of Google Ads, you can fine-tune YouTube campaign targeting based on demographic information, keywords, behaviours and interests.

YouTube Ads can appear after a search as stand-alone promoted video content, or before and during other YouTube videos. Formats include skippable and non-skippable in-stream ads, bumper ads, and video discovery ads. YouTube video advertising differs from other social platforms in the way they count a view: you only pay if the user passes the 30-second mark or watches the entire video.

For advertisers without a budget for video, YouTube offers non-video ad formats like display ads and in-video overlay ads.

Twitter

While it lacks the same reach as Facebook or YouTube, Twitter can still be a great advertising platform – particularly for the B2B and e-commerce niches. Twitter has around 326 million monthly users globally, 15 million of which live in the UK. The age distribution on the platform leans towards Millennials (25-34 years of age).

Twitter offers a variety of ad formats to showcase brands, including promoted tweets, website or app cards, and video ads. Although you can use these different formats interchangeably, Twitter has also mapped them to specific campaign objectives, such as awareness, engagement, and app downloads. Doing so allows businesses to set up ad campaigns quickly that are already optimised for specific marketing goals.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a unique social media platform specifically centred on visual content and shopping. In other words, Pinterest is a platform where users want to see ads from brands. With 400 million monthly global users, it can be a valuable channel for e-commerce brands and small businesses.

You can create targeted Pinterest ads (called Promoted Pins) with the goals of growing your audience, driving traffic, and increasing sales. Formats include standard image ads, video ads, carousel, collection, and shopping ads. Besides paid advertising, you can also encourage shopping using organic content formats like Product Pins – which show real-time pricing and availability, plus a link to your website.

Snapchat/TikTok

While perhaps less important for B2B focused companies, these two networks are popular among younger demographics. They could provide valuable opportunities to engage with students and young professionals.

Snapchat's advertising options are like what’s offered on Instagram. A unique feature is its augmented reality (AR) lenses. A business can sponsor these lenses to create interactive moments that users can share with their friends.

At the time of writing this, advertising options on TikTok are still limited compared to other networks. And what they do offer is mainly geared towards driving awareness with younger audiences. However, the platform is poised to become an advertising powerhouse, particularly for B2C brands.

Essentially the billboards of the internet, display ads are placed on websites, email clients, apps, etc., to increase brand exposure

Display Advertising

Display or banner ads are visually appealing images or graphics that feature your branding and a quick call to action. Essentially the billboards of the internet, display ads are placed on websites, email clients, apps, etc., to increase brand exposure. The crucial difference between display and other ad types is that display ads do not show up on search results.

The two leaders in display advertising are the Google Display Network (GDN) and Facebook's Audience Network. They can leverage data and machine learning to display your ads to the right target audience in the right context. If you want more control over your campaign, you can also specify where to place your display ads across their affiliate network of website and apps.

Mobile Ads

In the UK, over 79% of adults own a smartphone and spend, on average, 2 hours and 34 minutes online with it every day. In 2020 there were as many unique visitors to LinkedIn from mobile devices as there were from desktop devices. This shows that mobile ads are important for B2B organisations, since people are clearly using their mobiles in a business context and mindset.

In 2020 there were as many unique visitors to LinkedIn from mobile devices as there were from desktop devices

In 2020 there were as many unique visitors to LinkedIn from mobile devices as there were from desktop devices

It’s no wonder more and more advertisers are using mobile to reach their customers. To meet the needs of this growing market, platforms – such as Google AdMob – are now offering mobile-centric advertising options.

Mobile ad formats today include SMS text messages, push notifications, interactive ads, rich-media ads, click-to-call ads and in-app interstitials. An important development in mobile advertising has been the rise of ‘gamified ads’. People can interact with these ads as though they’re playing a game, making them an effective format for encouraging app downloads.

Video Network Ads

Similar to display ads, you can also use video advertising networks to place your video ads across the internet – not just on social platforms. For instance, think about the ads that run on streaming services like My5 or Now TV. Beyond acting as mini-commercials before other content, they can also integrate your video ads as native or display ads on websites.

Besides being a social platform, YouTube is also a popular video ad network. As previously discussed, it offers a range of ad formats and sophisticated targeting options. Other well-known video ad networks include SpotX and the Facebook Audience Network.

Shopping Network Ads

Shopping network ads are the lifeblood of e-commerce and shopping marketplaces. They allow businesses to place data-feed product ads in front of bottom-of-the-funnel, ready-to-buy customers. Two of the most popular shopping ad platforms are Google Shopping and Amazon.

Google Product Listing Ads (PLA), also known as Google Shopping Ads, allow businesses to show up across all of Google's properties – search, YouTube, display, and Gmail. Unlike a standard search ad, PLAs include images, reviews, prices, buying options, and more.

With Amazon Advertising, you can promote your business in Amazon search results and product pages. Your ads can also run on Amazon-owned sites to help build brand awareness. Amazon advertising is an especially important platform for e-commerce brands, considering that over 50% of product searches start on Amazon, rather than Google.

Location-based Advertising

The widespread use of smartphones and GPS tracking has given brands an unprecedented ability to serve geo-targeted ads in real-time. You can now send ads with messages that make sense to prospects concerning their location. For instance, how close someone is to a business or even climatic conditions. Location-based advertising has become a popular tactic for businesses aiming to boost in-store traffic and for event marketing.

Native Advertising

Native, or editorial, advertising is when brands pay publishers to distribute sponsored content through their digital channels. 

You collaborate with the publisher to craft sponsored content that looks like a regular piece of content on the publisher's website. This way, even though the post is technically promotional, it’s non-intrusive. The audience will enjoy reading your content without feeling like you (or the publisher) are advertising to them.

Native advertising has proven to be a highly beneficial relationship between publishers and brands. For brands, it can help them win over the publishers' audience and boost engagement. Meanwhile, publishers have another revenue stream that won’t disrupt their audience’s browsing experience.

Remarketing

Many people use the terms ‘remarketing’ and ‘retargeting’ interchangeably, but the two are not the same thing. To clarify, remarketing is the act of promoting your brand to the same person more than once. It is an umbrella term for a variety of online and offline tactics. For instance, the sign you see outside of your local pub every day is a form of remarketing.

Retargetting is a subset of remarketing that specifically involves showing online ads to the same user multiple times. Imagine someone visits your website, puts items in a cart, but then leaves purchasing nothing. Retargeted ads can help guide this customer back to your website to complete the transaction.

How it works is that when someone comes to your site, their web browser picks up a snippet of code, for instance, the Facebook remarketing pixel. Facebook then uses this code snippet to place your ad in front of this same user wherever they are in the digital landscape.

By advertising multiple times to the same people across different channels, you keep your brand top of mind. It can increase consumer confidence, making them more likely to return to you when they’re ready to buy. From their perspective, you’re not a random stranger trying to sell them something. Instead, you’re familiar, someone they already know.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is a method of using technology to buy and sell digital advertising space automatically. It goes by several other names, including real-time bidding (RTB), programmatic display advertising, and programmatic buying. 

Programmatic advertising connects publishers (i.e. websites with ad space to sell) with advertisers. You can purchase inventory directly, through private marketplaces, or via public ad exchanges in a fully automated process. It is important to note that programmatic advertising revolves around display ads – it doesn’t (yet) include paid search. 

To break down the process: 

  • Brands use a demand-side platform (DSP) to buy programmatic ad inventory from multiple publishers. This platform ensures the ads target the right audience by using a variety of factors including location, demographics, and user behaviour.

  • When someone lands on a publisher’s website, it sends an ad request to a supply side platform (SSP). If the person matches the brand’s target audience criteria, it will enter their ad inventory into a real-time auction.

  • After bidding is complete, it sends the winning ad to the publisher’s website to be displayed. Because everything is fully automated, it takes just milliseconds to complete the entire process. 

While both centre on display, programmatic advertising is not the same thing as a display advertising network like GDN or Facebook Audience Network. 

These networks act as a middleman between you and publishers – where they handle a lot of the technical aspects for you. With programmatic advertising, there is no such interface. Rather, you invest in a DSP, set targeting parameters, etc. Most DSP providers also require a monthly minimum ad spend, as opposed to display networks where you can set your own budget. 

Because of the complexity and costs involved, programmatic advertising is often considered more suited to larger brands. 

How to Advertise Online

As with any other marketing, your internet advertising campaigns require a plan if they’re going to succeed

As with any other marketing, your internet advertising campaigns require a plan if they’re going to succeed. Now that we’re acquainted with the major concepts, platforms, and formats of online advertising, let’s dive into the strategy.

Mapping Strategy to the Customer Journey

A successful adverting campaign begins with a strategy. You need to know what you want to accomplish, your end goal. Some of the most common goals for digital advertising include:

  • Brand awareness

  • Product and brand consideration

  • Leads

  • Sales

  • Repeat sales

The goals of your ad campaigns should map to the basic sales funnel: awareness, consideration, and purchase. However, scrutinize your customer journey and customise accordingly. For instance, a complex B2B purchase will have a longer sales cycle than something like a routine online purchase for office supplies.

What To Consider When Advertising

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of launching a new campaign and overlook strategic thinking. It’s important to take a step back and invest the time in building solid foundations for your online ads.

Audit

First, you want to ensure your online advertising goals align with the overall digital marketing strategy. You need to consider your budget, what types of knowledge and technology will be required, as well as your performance metrics. Also, if you want to run your campaigns in house or hire an agency.

Research

It’s important to research your audience so you know how to best advertise to them. This includes understanding which platforms they use, demographics, preferred content formats, advertising industry trends, keywords, etc. You also want to analyse the landscape to see what competitors do that makes their ad campaigns successful.

Build

Build out your ad strategy using the information from your audit and research. Start by running a basic traffic campaign to your site to test ad copy and measure how a target based audience responds. Also check that your various platform integrations, automation tools, and tracking codes are working properly.

Launch and Optimise

Once everything looks good, launch your ad campaigns. As real-time data comes in, you can then reiterate your ads, using things like A/B testing to optimise performance.

Report

The success of your ad campaign hinges on good tracking and reporting. Fortunately, the nature of digital advertising makes it easy to collect the analytic data. Some important KPIs you might track for your online advertising include:

  • Impressions – An impression occurs when a person sees your ad. It doesn’t matter whether they click on it. A low impression rate might show that you need to adjust your budget or targeting.

  • Clicks – This KPI measures how many people clicked on your ad, which is an early indicator of campaign performance.

  • Cost per Click (CPC) – This is the amount charged for a click on your ad. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks.

  • Cost per Acquisition – The aggregate cost advertisers pay for every new customer they gain. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of conversions by the number of conversions.

  • Return on Investment (ROI) – The ultimate metric to test the effectiveness of your campaigns. ROI measures how much revenue the campaign generates compared to the cost required to run it.

Realise that KPIs are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they tell different parts of the same story. For this reason, you might assign different KPIs to each campaign based on what makes the most sense for your goals.

What Does 1827 Marketing Offer?

As one of the UK’s leading B2B marketing agencies, we blend online advertising and inbound marketing analytics to create a 360-degree view of your marketing strategy.

Our team members expertly manage highly effective campaigns across multiple channels, including remarketing, display advertising, social and search.

We’re proud to be designated as both a Premier Google Partner and a certified Facebook Marketing Partner – an elite status held only by a handful of UK agencies.

For more information on how we can help you meet your online advertising goals, contact 1827 Marketing today!