Online advertising or digital advertising simply refers to any advertising that happens online. You might have used or come across several online advertising options already. However, after reading this blog, you will know the top 7 best online advertising platforms that work great for every business.
Before we list these platforms, let’s briefly see some crucial points about online marketing. Although, if you are already aware of it, you can jump straight to the list.
Understanding online marketing
What are online advertising platforms?
Online advertising uses internet services to transmit the marketing message to its audience. It includes various formats such as search advertising, video advertising, banner advertising, classifieds, etc., published through several platforms, including social media (like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) and search engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc.).
In a broader sense, you can divide online marketing platforms into desktop and mobile devices based on their delivery methods. A successful marketing campaign includes a carefully designed strategy that utilizes different ad formats on relevant platforms.
The role of an online advertising platform is to bring advertisers, publishers, and buyers into one place. The latest technologies merged with these platforms also offer users and marketers to discover various factors that help in improving their efficiency. Based on these factors, we are listing here the top 7 best online advertising platforms.
Top-7 best online advertising platforms for 2023
1) Facebook Ads
Facebook recorded 2.91 billion active monthly users in February 2022. With such a vast user base, Facebook Ads become a great way to engage with your target audience. Majorly, Facebook ads appear on newsfeeds where people spend most of their time.
Facebook Ads allow advertisers to customize ads and target audiences to a great extent resulting in higher returns than many other advertising platforms. Besides location and different demographics, you also can choose an audience based on interests and behavior.
It only takes a compelling image or graphic and a headline to start a Facebook ad. Then, based on the desired outcomes, you can choose your call to action. Facebook ads also let users measure the campaign’s success with relevant analytics and retarget potential customers efficiently.
2) Google Ads
Similar to Facebook, Google is one of the best online advertising platforms that allows marketers to target their audiences based on numerous factors like locations, search histories, and devices. In addition, Google owns or is linked to different properties that reach billions of users worldwide. In 2022, Google properties ranked first among the most visited web platforms in the US, with about 62% of unique visitors.
Google Adwords lets new users create ad campaigns without much difficulty. Besides, it allows you to create campaigns focusing on a particular group of people, even for a niche market. Google also offers a range of analytical tools that measure your ads’ impact and help you improve your performance over time.
3) YouTube Ads
YouTube is another powerful platform that has only improved since it started about fifteen years ago. It’s the most popular video search engine that gets more than 14 billion monthly visits.
Video ads on YouTube are among the most successful ad formats. You can show your ads to people searching for a particular video or as recommendations to those who have previously watched similar content or your videos already. As Google owns YouTube now, it also allows marketers to promote their videos through Google Search.
YouTube also allows you to select your target audience based on their language, location, search history, and devices. YouTube ads are of two types: TrueView (the ads that appear before, during, or after users play a video matching your targeting criteria) and Skippable ads (similar to TrueView ads, but viewers can skip them).
4) LinkedIn Ads
Currently, LinkedIn is the best online platform for professionals. It provides users to create business communities, share job information, recruit & apply for jobs, and follow the latest industry news from influencers & organizations across the globe.
With 810 million users, LinkedIn ads become extremely valuable when it comes to marketing professional events. The best thing about LinkedIn ads is that you do not waste single penny advertising to people not interested in your product or service.
LinkedIn provides so many options for ad customization that it might sometimes be complicated for new users to start with ad campaigns. But, at the same time, these customizations make ad campaigns highly targeted to reach the relevant audience.
5) Instagram Ads
Instagram is also one of the best online advertising platforms for its 2 billion+ colossal user base. In addition, Instagram, a part of Meta Platforms (like Facebook), can be the most effective advertising platform if your business target a young audience, as 64% of Insta-users are below 34 years of age.
Instagram ads help you show your content to people who do not follow you or those who interact with pages similar to yours. In addition, these ads can redirect users to your website or even make in-app purchases.
Instagram ads are also simple to set up, with choosing the audience as the only primary task. You can target people from different demographics and interests and show both videos or images in your ads.
6) TikTok Ads
In the last few years, TikTok has become a social media sensation. TikTok crossed the 1-billion user mark within three years of its working in September 2021. This video-sharing platform has around 52.4% of users aged between 18 and 24.
Being a hit in such a short time span, TikTok has attracted marketers and advertisers. It’s effortless for users to create ads on TikTok by simply selecting an objective of the campaign, setting the budget, demographics, bidding strategy, and uploading the content. You can also customize the audience to target your existing customers or people engaging with your content.
7) Twitter Ads
Twitter is another social media giant that stands 9th in the list of most visited websites worldwide. In 2021, Twitter recorded 2.4 billion sessions. It is also known as one of the most liberal platforms. And it also represents a high-income audience.
Twitter ads are getting more popular by the day. The ad spending on Twitter doubled from 201 to 2021. According to a Twitter report, people spend 26% more time watching ads on Twitter than on other social media platforms, hence more receptive.
Twitter ads are also cheaper compared to its competitors. You can create an ad campaign and target your audience based on who they follow, what they searched for, what type of tweet they posted or engaged with, or create a lookalike audience.
