Go Beyond Google Ads for PPC Success
As paid search marketers, we have a lot of tools at our disposal to get our campaigns optimized and performing at their peak. Most of those tools are designed with the big elephant in the room in mind – Google Ads (until very recently known as AdWords). However, it’s vital to remember that there are a lot of other paid channels for promoting you and your clients’ business. Today, let’s take a quick refresher on the options you have to generate traffic and business outside of Google Ads.
Bing Ads
The first place you should be sure to expand your marketing presence to is Bing Ads. According to comScore, Microsoft sites own 24.1% of search share across the U.S., compared with 63.5% for Google. While Google obviously dominates, that’s still a large chunk of available traffic that you’ll be missing out on if ignore Bing Ads entirely. And, while Bing Ads may not be quite as well developed and functional as Google Ads, they have done a lot over the years to keep up with many of the changes and improvements that Google has made to its own ad platform. Not to mention, getting started with Bing Ads is simple with their very handy “Import from Google” tool that brings your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads, and extensions directly from Google and sets them up in Bing. So, if you’re used to working in Google’s system and don’t want to duplicate your efforts, you can use that tool to import your initial campaign structure as well as bring in updates on an ongoing basis.
Third-Party Remarketing Tools
Google’s Display Network can get you access to a wide variety of sites and, of course, offers remarketing. However, there are other platforms out there that can also provide you with remarketing and give you access to inventory that Google doesn’t reach, such as Facebook’s ad exchange. There are many out there, so this isn’t an exhaustive list, but a few to start your search are Criteo, AdRoll, and Perfect Audience. Criteo is one of the oldest platforms out there, and while there aren’t too many controls, it does deliver results.
It was also one of the first platforms to offer dynamic ads from a product feed. AdRoll is a similar platform that has gone from site remarketing to allowing you to create audiences based on a large variety of data sources. And Perfect Audience has a lot of campaign tailoring controls and allows you to partner with other businesses to cross-promote to other audiences in addition to your first-party audiences.
The other major player in the digital advertising world is the social media giant. While not a paid search channel. Facebook gives you the flexibility of reaching potential customers with almost endlessly customizable audience targeting. The interface for Facebook advertising is complex and can be daunting to navigate – especially for someone who is used to the layout and workflow of Google Ads. However, once you learn your way around, you’ll find an incredible amount of options when it comes to creating, targeting, and optimizing your campaigns. In addition to a myriad of interest and demographic targeting options, you can use Facebook’s tracking pixels to create audience lists based on minute details of user behavior on your site.
Other Advertising Platforms
The above are the major options out there, but there are other opportunities to get in front of your potential customers. LinkedIn has a lot of options for targeting professionals, and the recent acquisition by Microsoft may lead to some interesting opportunities. There are a number of programmatic display platforms for placing your ads on site across the web outside of the Google Display Network.
If you feel like you’ve been putting all of your digital marketing eggs into Google’s basket, this should give you a basis from which to branch out into some other online advertising channels.