Online Advertising: Everything You Need to Know in 2020

 Have you ever double-tapped on an image on Instagram, reacted to a video on Facebook, or clicked a search result in Google, only to realize afterwards that it was actually an ad?

Maybe you never realized it was an ad at all — you just thought it was a cute picture of a dog.

More than ever, ads can be contextual, relevant, targeted, and helpful in ways they never could before. In short, ads today are content.

But the online advertising landscape is changing.

New platforms, ad types, and targeting capabilities are popping up all the time.

Let's dig into everything you need to know about online advertising across ad platforms for social media, paid search, display, and native advertising.

If you're only interested in learning about a certain type of online advertising, you can use the Table of Contents below to navigate to each section.

  1. How to Advertise Online

  2. Social Media Advertising

  3. Paid Search Advertising

  4. Native Advertising

  5. Display Advertising

How to Advertise Online

It's easy to think of your organic marketing efforts, like blog and content offers, and your paid advertising efforts, like search and social, as separate from one another.

It makes sense why: they're often managed by different internal teams with different goals.

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Social media marketers are focused on building communities, sharing content, and engaging their audience. Bloggers and content marketers optimize their efforts for organic search and are focused on metrics like traffic and conversion.

Meanwhile, advertisers are focused on performance metrics like cost-per-acquisition and return on ad spend. With such different goals, it's no wonder that many marketers view organic and paid as separate from one another.

What if I told you that not only can organic and paid marketing work together, but that digital advertising can help you improve your organic efforts? It's true.

There are three key ways that digital advertising can help you improve the performance of your organic marketing efforts.

With digital ads, organic performance can benefit from:

  1. An increase in brand awareness by displaying your content to individuals within and outside of your networks.
  2. A better understanding of your audiences by leveraging the targeting and analytics of the ads platforms.
  3. The creation of higher-performing content by understanding what ad content helps you achieve your business goals and what doesn't.

The goal of any ads strategy should be to get a positive return on your investment, which comes down to whether you're getting more revenue out of the ad campaign than the cost you're putting in.

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