Digital Advertising Platforms: Easy Guide for 2020

Author: Shruti Garg

Introduction

It’s a fact that people only buy things they know about. It does not matter how amazing your product is, no one is going to buy it unless they know about it. This is exactly why advertising is so important. Advertising lets you educate and tell your customers about your product and its features. Now that we have established the importance of advertising, it is equally important to choose the right platform to do it. There are many such digital advertising platforms available in the market and choosing the right one can be daunting.

Don’t worry, in this article, we will take you through the 5 most popular digital advertising platforms out there so that you can choose the right fit for your business. Having said that, it is often beneficial to use a combination of multiple platforms to reach a wider audience. In this blog post, you will also learn how to integrate data from these multiple sources and use it to your advantage.

You will be looking at the following:

• Top 5 Digital Advertising Platforms
• Facebook Ads
• Google Ads
• Linkedin Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Bing Ads
• Why Integrate Data Across Different Platforms?
• Manual Methods to Integrate Data
• HevoIQ: Analysis-ready Data at your Finger Tips
• Conclusion

Top 5 Digital Advertising Platforms

1. Facebook Ads

Wondering how Facebook Ads work? Facebook collects customer data when they interact with any Facebook service. When you give your email id or phone number to a company it is matched with your Facebook profile, Facebook then uses this data to show you customised ads that you might be interested in. It also collects location data to show you products available in your area.

If you’re an advertiser all you have to do is tell Facebook a few things:

• Your business goal — Are you looking to sell a product? Do you want to create awareness about a new proWhduct?
• Your desired audience — Who is the target audience? o are the people who will be most interested in your business? What age group do they belong to? Which location are they based in?
• Decide where to run the add — Choose where you want to run your ad, on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network or across them all?
• Your budget — You can set a budget and lifetime for your ad. Never pay more than your budget.
• Pick a format — You can choose from six versatile ad formats — they’re designed to work on every device and connection speed. You can see the available formats here.

Facebook then places your ad to its ad auction which helps it display your ad to potential customers. You can monitor and track the process of your ads through Facebook’s Ads Manager.

2. Google Ads

Google is the most popular search engine in the world. People search for what to do, where to go and what to buy everyday on Google. Your ad can pop up on Google the moment someone searches for products or services like yours. When you are trying to get new customers, good timing is your best friend. A well-timed and well-placed ad can make all the difference. Google lets you reach people looking for a product like yours thus improving your chance of converting them to a customer.

Google Ads provide a number of features that make them part of out top 5 list:

• Promotion Extensions — This is excellent for E-Commerce businesses or any other company trying to run a promotional offer.
• Message Extensions — This helps you connect to your customers without them having to end up on your page.
• Call Only Ads — This can be used on call-enabled ads, it provides clickable links which will directly place calls.
• Ad Variations — Google provides the flexibility to change your ads easily and see which ones run better.
• Custom Intent Audiences — Google’s machine learning models ensure that your ad gets displayed to the right audience.

3. Linkedin Ads

Linkedin is a great platform to meet people for business. It is the right choice for you if you are trying to target people in the business world, people looking for jobs, corporate employees, entrepreneurs, etc.

Linkedin Ads can be of four types:

• Sponsored Content — Display ads in a business and professional news feed. This helps you target professionals who are interested in your business.
• Sponsored Messaging — It allows you to send direct, one-on-one messages to your audience’s LinkedIn Messaging enabling you to communicate with them at a personal level.
• Text Ads — They let you create your own ads, decide your own budget and get in front of the audience that matters the most. It also provides a pay per click option.
• Dynamic Ads — These ads feature personalized information from a professional’s Linkedin profile to curate ads to capture their attention. job title, and more.

4. Twitter Ads

Twitter ads help you advertise easily and economically. Twitter provides reasonable rates per click. You only pay for your promoted tweets when you have achieved your marketing objectives. It improves your online marketing ROI. Twitter provides different kinds of ads, including Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends. These ads may be displayed to users whether they are logged in or logged out of Twitter. Working with Twitter Ads is super easy — choose your target audience, amplify your message and pay for performance.

5. Bing Ads

Bing Ads, better known as Microsoft Ads is a platform that lets you reach customers based on your preference. Reach millions of unique searchers on Bing — by country, city or within a specific distance. It also provides support for other ad campaigns. If you already have a campaign on Google ads, you can easily pull that campaign into Bing. You can also optimize your ROI by leveraging its flexible payment structure. Bing Ads does not require any minimum fee, only pay for clicks. It also allows you to track your advertisement campaign closely and tweak it accordingly.

Why Integrate Data Across Different Platforms?

As the number of marketing and advertising applications increase, the amount of data a company needs to handle, manage, store and analyse also increases. To make the best possible decision and understand the whole picture it is important to look at all this data together. To look at these data items individually and then try to connect the dots would be a waste of time. It is thus important to integrate data from multiple sources into a central storage, gain actionable insights and act accordingly.

Bringing data from different advertising platforms would enable you to decide which advertisements are working, which campaigns are driving the most number of customers, what changes should be made, etc. Integrated marketing data is thus the key to augment and optimize your marketing ROI. Integrating data delivers a single source of truth for all your marketing analysis and strategies. Every team in the company can leverage this data to improve their performance and achieve their goals.

Manual Methods to Integrate Data

Integrating data manually is a herculean task and anyone willing to take it up must consider all its challenges. Data integration is done manually by using spreadsheets, writing custom scripts, running macros, etc

This poses some serious challenges:

• It is extremely time-consuming. Companies now require dashboards and reports to be updated in real-time which is not possible to achieve manually.
• Any data loss or corruption must be located and troubleshooted manually which is not efficient and there is an increased chance of error.
• Data silos make managing data even more difficult.
• Data from different sources are in different formats and may require different skill sets to comprehend and handle.

HevoIQ: Analysis-ready Data at your Finger Tips

All the challenges of using manual methods for data integration can be easily solved by using a data integration platform like HevoIQ. Now integrate data from different platforms in 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Connect: Connect your sales & marketing data sources with HevoIQ just by providing the credentials.

Step 2: Integrate: Integrate your data from multiple sources, store it in our fully-managed data storage and make it analytics-ready.

Step 3: Analyze: Connect & visualize your unified data in your preferred BI tool and derive actionable insights in minutes.

How HevoIQ helps:

1. Connect with a range of marketing applications and pull data in minutes.
2. Zero maintenance required.
3. Provides a single source of truth for your marketing data.
4. Provides access to the most accurate and real-time data without any coding.
5. Flexibility to choose your data warehouse and BI tools. It’s okay to not have a data warehouse too, HevoIQ provides you with a managed data storage.

Try HevoIQ today by signing up for a 14-day free trial!

Conclusion

You now have in your arsenal knowledge about the top 5 advertising platforms available in the market. You also have a tool that will bring all your data together. What are you waiting for? Try HevoIQ today.

Have any other questions? Get in touch with us in the comments section below.