Online advertising: A complete guide (2024)

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Online advertising is your ticket to putting products and services in front of motivated shoppers at every stage of their buying journey. 

Platforms like Google Ads, TikTok, and YouTube are obvious pickings for internet advertising, but plenty more fantastic options exist.

In fact, you’ll see better results if you actively participate, experiment, and adapt your advertising strategy. The more you advertise on digital platforms, the more data you collect about your audience, their behaviors, and what works best.

You can refine and optimize your advertising efforts using that unique information to maximize return on investment. 

Want to know more? Join us below for a complete guide to online advertising. 

What is online advertising?

Online advertising involves using paid digital channels like Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok, podcasts, and sponsored emails to promote your products or services to targeted audiences online and increase sales. 

The right ads can drive immediate, targeted traffic to your site and help you reach potential customers at crucial moments in their buying journey.

Your online advertising strategy should test and analyze multiple ad formats, such as search ads, display banners, social media posts, video content, and email, to determine which combinations yield the best ROI.

If you have an ecommerce business, online advertising can help you build personalized customer experiences from initial awareness to purchase and retention, using channels like dynamic product ads and product recommendations in email. 

For instance, Omnisend provides tools and automated workflows to create personalized, omnichannel advertising experiences across email, SMS, and push notifications. 

Imagine creating a dynamic segment of recent cart abandoners using automation workflows, which can then be synced to Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Ads Customer Match for seamless retargeting.

Or building targeted ad campaigns based on past purchase behavior and following-up with post-purchase emails recommending complementary products.

That’s just one dynamic tool for digital advertising, and there’s so much more to uncover. Let’s explore!

Types of online advertising

There are six main types of online advertising you can use to drive sales:

Search engine advertising (PPC)

PPC is an online advertising marketing strategy where you bid on keywords and pay when someone clicks on your ad.

With platforms like Google Ads, you create campaigns by bidding on specific keywords related to your business. By setting a budget and a maximum bid per click, you can attract targeted traffic to your site efficiently, avoiding overspending while reaching the right audience. 

Here’s an example of Google Ads showing in a Google search:

Learning how to advertise online with PPC is still crucial, though, because placing bids and letting the traffic roll in isn’t necessarily enough to yield a successful ROI. 

Successful PPC campaigns require strategic keyword selection, compelling ad copy, and well-optimized landing pages to drive targeted traffic to your site and convert it. 

Getting clicks is easy — the true test is whether your PPC ads generate leads, sales, or other desired actions once visitors reach your website. 

Display advertising

Display ads are visual online advertisements that promote products or services on websites by combining compelling copy, imagery, and a call to action.

Formats include static banners, dynamic rich media, and native placements that blend with surrounding content. 

For instance, here’s a static banner on the magazine Wired:

You can purchase display ad space through direct deals with major publishers, by buying through ad networks that aggregate multiple publisher inventories, or with programmatic exchanges that automate bidding like a stock market for digital ad space.

Your campaigns can use multiple bidding strategies depending on the platform. Cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM) are the most common. 

Beyond these purchasing methods, display advertising offers tailored targeting strategies for every stage of your customer journey. 

For instance, demographic and interest-based targeting helps reach new potential customers at the awareness stage. For those further along the funnel, retargeting campaigns show ads to users who have previously interacted with your website, keeping your brand top-of-mind.

Social media advertising

Social media advertising connects you with targeted audiences across popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X.

Your ads can take many forms, from sponsored posts and carousel displays to pre-roll videos and interactive polls, strategically appearing in news feeds, stories, or emerging formats like augmented and virtual reality experiences.

Here’s an example of an in-feed video ad on Facebook:

Unlike search ads, which rely on keyword targeting, social ads leverage detailed user data to precisely target audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. 

PPC and CPM are popular billing strategies, but most companies choose a PPC model because it better aligns with their advertising goals.

PPC is usually more cost-effective for direct response campaigns focused on conversions, as you only pay when users click.

CPM is best for brand awareness campaigns where you want to maximize visibility, regardless of immediate engagement. 

Video advertising

Video advertising falls into two categories: videos you produce to advertise your business and ads you purchase to show on other people’s videos. 

Self-produced videos showcase your business directly and have an opportunity to show in Google search results, while purchased ads leverage existing audiences. 

TikTok and YouTube lead in video advertising, but platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Vimeo offer valuable opportunities to reach niche audiences.

Below is an example of the TikTok Ads Manager dashboard:

Video-based social media platforms present compelling advertising opportunities because they have engaged audiences who actively consume content, potentially amplifying your ad’s impact and reach compared to traditional marketing channels.

Advertising on TikTok, YouTube, and other video platforms involves creating an account, setting campaign objectives, choosing a bidding strategy (like CPM or CPC), and launching your ad through their respective auction-based systems.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing connects your ecommerce business with influential partners who promote your products to their audiences. 

You provide unique tracking links for affiliates to share, enabling accurate commission calculations based on resulting sales. 

This strategy offers low-risk expansion as you only pay for successful conversions and benefit from additional brand exposure even without sales. 

To succeed with affiliate marketing, carefully vet potential partners for brand alignment and audience relevance. Offer competitive commissions and provide affiliates with high-quality marketing materials to support their promotional efforts. 

Regularly analyze performance data to optimize your program and cultivate strong relationships with top-performing affiliates.

Email advertising

Email advertising is a promotional email strategy for showcasing products or services with paid placements within newsletters or dedicated promotional emails.

You can use targeted email ads to showcase products, offer discounts, or announce new services to interested customers. 

For instance, you might send an email ad showcasing a limited-time 30% off coupon for a bestselling product, with vibrant product images and a prominent “Shop Now” button. 

Segmenting your audience allows you to deliver personalized content and ads that resonate with specific customer groups, significantly boosting your sales and conversions. 

You can also insert banner ads and text links within emails to drive targeted traffic to your ecommerce store. The “advertising” aspect comes from paying other companies to include your ads in their email campaigns. 

How online advertising works

Online advertising is a complex, data-driven ecosystem where algorithms, bidding, and targeting converge to deliver personalized ads to your potential customers.

Here’s how it works:

Ad auctions

The ad auction is at the heart of online advertising — a real-time bidding system that matches your bids with available ad inventory. As an advertiser, you’ll compete to have your ads displayed, with the highest bidder winning the ad placement.

Some platforms also go beyond the highest bid with algorithms for ad relevance, user engagement, and real-time market conditions determining the winning bid.

Targeting 

Tapping into detailed data about your audience’s demographics, browsing habits, and interests helps you deliver ads that speak directly to their needs and preferences. 

Case in point, Google Ads offers a variety of targeting methods:

• Demographics: Target by attributes like age, gender, income, and parental status 
• Interests: Reach people based on their hobbies, shopping habits, and online activities
• In-market audiences: Find users actively considering your products/services
• Remarketing: Reconnect with people who have interacted with your website or ads
• Topics: Serve display ads on web pages covering particular themes or subject areas

Billing models

You can choose from various cost models, such as CPC, CPM, or cost per acquisition (CPA), to align your advertising strategy with your specific business goals.

CPC focuses on driving website traffic and leads, while CPM is ideal for building brand awareness. If your priority is measurable conversions, the CPA model may be the right fit, as you only pay when a user completes a desired action.

Tracking and optimizing 

All ad platforms offer tracking and reporting capabilities to help you understand the performance of your online ad campaigns. 

You should monitor impressions, clicks, and conversions to identify opportunities for optimization and track return on ad spend (ROAS) to evaluate your campaigns’ overall effectiveness and profitability.

Online advertising strategies and best practices

Internet advertising is a minefield if you don’t know where to start and what you’re doing. 

Thankfully, there are proven strategies and best practices that can help you build an online advertising strategy that achieves your business goals:

Platform and ad choices

Carefully select the advertising platforms that best fit your target audience. From Google Ads to TikTok and email marketing tools like Omnisend, explore the unique benefits of each channel to ensure your effort (and budget) goes into the right places. 

Audience segmentation

Understand your audience and their behavior with customer segmentation.

With tools like Omnisend, you can segment your email lists to reach the right people at the right time, driving stronger engagement and more impactful results.

Ad copy and design tips

Craft compelling ad copy and visuals that grab attention and convey your key message. Use action words, concise headings and descriptions, high-quality imagery, clear calls to action, and relatable language to encourage clicks. 

Ad optimization

Continuously test and optimize your ads for maximum performance. Use A/B testing to determine what resonates best, and experiment with different email variations and subject lines using Omnisend’s features.

Landing page optimization

Ensure your landing pages deliver on your ads’ promise and integrate email offers and automated follow-ups through Omnisend workflows. Run split tests on different landing page versions and use your data to build better experiences. 

Heatmaps

Install a heatmap analytics solution like Microsoft Clarity on your website to see how users interact with your landing pages. You can use data like mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, and viewing time to fine-tune your pages for conversions. 

Personalized ad experiences

You can use data and user insights to craft personalized ad experiences, such as product recommendations in emails, social media videos demonstrating how to use your product, and banner ads that mention your viewer’s location. 

Omnichannel synchronization

Integrate your online advertising efforts across all digital channels, including social, search, email, and more. Use Omnisend to synchronize your email marketing and SMS efforts and create a cohesive brand experience from initial awareness to final conversion.

Remarketing and retargeting

Retargeting strategies can help you recapture potential customers who’ve shown interest in your brand but haven’t taken action. For instance, Omnisend’s audience sync feature retargets your contacts on Facebook and Google using their email addresses.

Continuously calculate ROI and ROAS

Analyze ad spend and revenue data to understand what’s working and to calculate your ROI and ROAS. Use that insight to adjust your strategies, reallocate budgets, and make informed decisions that benefit your business. 

Online advertising metrics and KPIs

When learning how to advertise online, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial for understanding and optimizing your advertising and email campaigns. 

Here’s a rundown of the most important metrics in online advertising:

Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR measures the ratio of users who click on your ad to the total number of impressions, i.e., if your ad received 1,000 impressions and 50 clicks, your CTR would be 5%.

Conversion rate

Your conversion rate tracks the percentage of users who take a desired action, such as purchasing or signing up for a newsletter.

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

CPA calculates the average cost to acquire a new customer, taking into account your advertising expenses and the number of conversions.

Let’s say you ran a Facebook Ads campaign with the following results:

• Total ad spend: $2,000
• Number of conversions (new customers): 50

To calculate the CPA, you would divide the total ad spend by the number of conversions:

CPA = $2,000 / 50 = $40

So, your CPA for this Facebook Ads campaign was $40 per new customer.

Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS is the ratio of revenue generated from your advertising to the amount you spent on those advertising efforts.

For example, let’s say you ran a Google Ads campaign with the following results:

• Total ad spend: $1,000
• Revenue generated from the ad campaign: $3,000

To calculate your ROAS, you would divide the revenue by the ad spend:

ROAS = $3,000 / $1,000 = 3

This means your ROAS is 3, which indicates that for every $1 you spent on the Google Ads campaign, you generated $3 in revenue.

Return on investment (ROI)

ROI is the profitability of your advertising campaigns based on the revenue generated and the total cost of your marketing expenses. 

Confused about ROI and ROAS? The difference is simple:

• ROAS focuses on the revenue generated from your ad spend
• ROI looks at the overall profitability of your marketing efforts, considering the total costs beyond just ad spend

Quality score (for PPC)

Quality score is a Google Ads metric that influences the performance and cost of your PPC campaigns based on factors like ad relevance, landing page experience, and click-through rate.

Advantages and disadvantages of online advertising

Advertising on the internet can help grow your business, but it isn’t the best marketing opportunity for everyone. Before you fully commit to an online advertising strategy, consider these advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

• Precise targeting allows for highly personalized and effective campaigns — for instance, Omnisend has email segmentation and targeting based on interests, preferences, and behavioral data for more effective email campaigns
• Scalability lets you reach a broad audience with minimal effort
• Measurability provides valuable data and insights to optimize performance
• Flexibility in ad formats and placements allows for creative and diverse campaigns
• Instant traffic generation, especially with pay-per-click (PPC) models, can drive immediate results
• It can be budget-friendly, although cost-effectiveness is dependent on the platform and campaign setup

Disadvantages

• Your customers can get ad fatigue from repetitive ads
• The learning curve required to navigate multiple online advertising platforms can be steep — you can mitigate this with platforms that have 24/7 support, extensive guides, and documentation
• Competition in crowded spaces can lead to increased costs and reduced visibility
• Budget allocation may be better spent on other marketing channels, such as email marketing and organic SEO
• Multichannel selling and management can be complex when using various online advertising platforms — it’s usually best to target one, two, or three highly effective platforms, such as Google Ads and TikTok

Online advertising: A step-by-step guide

You can build effective online advertising campaigns in just three steps:

1. Set clear goals

Online advertising can achieve multiple business goals:

• Increasing brand awareness and visibility
• Generating high-quality leads for your sales team
• Driving targeted traffic to your website
• Boosting sales and revenue
• Stealing market share from your competitors

You should choose short and long-term advertising goals and build your online strategy around achieving them. 

Just remember that while short-term wins like sudden spikes in website traffic or immediate sales can be enticing, they may not necessarily align with or contribute to your broader, more sustainable business objectives.

2. Select the right platform

If you’re buying ads, you need to know what audiences you can tap into.

For instance, Google Ads lets you target anyone because it’s such a widely used tool, but Instagram and TikTok have young audiences.

A platform’s audience’s income levels and purchasing habits can also help determine the effectiveness of luxury versus budget-friendly product advertising.

Some marketing platforms also specialize in an area, like Omnisend, which is primarily built for ecommerce email marketing, while AWeber is for SMEs. 

There’s an online advertising platform best suited for every channel, from email and social media to PPC and affiliate marketing. Do your research and read the reviews. 

3. Create effective ads

The quality and relevance of your ads will make or break your internet advertising strategy. The good news is poor headlines, typos, low-quality media, improper targeting, and poor timing are easy to avoid.

Follow these steps to create effective ads:

• Identify and thoroughly research your target audience to understand their demographics, interests, and behaviors
• Develop a unique selling proposition (USP) that highlights what makes your product or service stand out from competitors
• Craft a powerful, attention-grabbing headline so people notice your ad
• Add compelling visuals, such as exciting graphics, images, or video, to catch people’s attention and convey your message
• Emphasize the benefits of your product or service, explaining how it will solve customers’ problems or improve their lives rather than just listing features
• Include a call to action that tells people exactly what you want them to do next, such as “CLICK HERE” or “CALL NOW”
• Create a sense of urgency by giving people a reason to act now rather than later
• Build trust with social proof
• Make an irresistible offer by providing a deal or discount that’s hard to refuse
• Use clear, persuasive language to make your copy exciting and compelling
• Analyze your ad performance and split test ads to see which versions work best
• Address customer fears or objections by offering guarantees or risk-free trials to reduce perceived risk and increase trust

4. Set budgets and bid strategies 

For many marketers, creating ads and setting up campaigns is the easy part of online advertising. The tricky part is managing ad spend.

It is all to easy to waste your advertising budget on ineffective strategies. For example, even if you set daily limits with Google Ads, a poor bidding strategy can drain your budget on low-quality clicks that don’t convert.

Setting budgets and knowing your bid strategies will help you maximize your ad spend, improve campaign performance, and achieve better results across your digital marketing channels.

Here are a few tips to help you do just that:

Start small and scale smart 

Start your campaigns with a modest budget and gradually increase spending on promising ads while quickly cutting those underperforming. 

Approaching online ads in this way will minimize risk and help you identify winning strategies before committing to larger budgets.

Research bid types on your platform

Some advertising platforms like Google Ads and TikTok Ads offer multiple bid types. For instance, TikTok provides four bidding methods: CPM, oCPM (optimized cost per mille), CPC, and CPV (total cost or total focused views).

Different bidding strategies can help you align your campaigns with marketing objectives and maximize your budget’s effectiveness.

Some trial and error is expected as you test different bid types, but the insights gained from this experimentation can significantly improve your campaign performance and ROI over time.

Calculate platform costs 

While Google Ads, TikTok, Facebook, and other ad platforms bill you for ads, subscription-based marketing platforms like Omnisend have fixed costs. 

For instance, Omnisend offers a generous free plan that allows you to send 500 emails to 250 contacts/month, and for businesses needing more, the Standard plan starts from $16/month. 

Some email marketing platforms are considerably more expensive, and the same rule applies to other subscription platforms, regardless of industry. 

You should calculate the monthly cost of the tools that interest you and consider how quickly you can achieve an ROI with them. 

Omnisend offers excellent ROI potential by helping you build your contact list to expand your marketing reach while enabling professional email, SMS, and push messaging campaigns.