There are a huge number of digital advertising options available these days—something to suit almost any business whether large or small, B2B or B2C. Choosing the right platforms and the right options within that platform (or platforms) can make a huge difference to the end result, as can professional, expert setup and management. The downside of having so many choices is that it has become harder for non-specialists to effectively manage their ads.
Commerce cabin has made a specialty of cleaning up poorly-performing digital advertising campaigns. If you’re not absolutely sure yours is delivering great ROI, let us know. We can take a look and let you know what you’re getting. If you want to create a new campaign, we can get it off to the best possible start.

Here’s a quick rundown of some platform and ad format choices.

• How much competitors are prepared to pay for that click.
• How well the platform thinks your ad and landing page matches the user’s intent. In AdWords, this concept is known as Quality Score. A good quality score will mean you can get the same click cheaper.
• How closely your keyword matches the user’s query.
• Whether or not you own a brand mentioned in the query— some platforms will give you clicks very cheaply when the searcher references your brand. Competitors will have to pay more for the same click.

Most advertising platforms will let you set a maximum bid per click on an ad, keyword or audience basis (or a combination of all three) and a maximum daily budget to control spend.
Another charging format is PPM, where you pay for every 1000 impressions or part thereof (the M is from the Roman number M for 1000). Here, you effectively pay for people to see your ads whether they click or not. It’s possible to get absolutely no clicks from a PPM campaign and still have to pay for impressions, so these campaigns should always be undertaken with care. PPM advertising can have its place, for example in wide-scale brand building. Typically, a thousand impressions might cost a few dollars.
Outside of the major advertising platforms, you might also encounter flat rate offers, where a site or family of sites will run your ad in a particular place for a month or a few months, for a given fee. Promises may or may not be made about how many impressions and clicks the advertiser can expect under these circumstances. We usually recommend running these ads for a short time period with analytics in place, and analyze the results carefully before undertaking a long-term contract for flat rate advertising.

AdWords is the most common choice for new advertisers and probably the richest and most fully featured of ad platforms available today. New features are constantly being added. Search campaigns can be created with text ads and selected keywords. There are also facilities to extend ordinary text ads with additional links to other pages on your site (sitelinks), phone numbers, address information and more.
Bids can also be modified and ad groups targeted to geographical locations or times of day, and bids for mobile devices can be adjusted as a percentage of the given desktop and tablet bid.

• Search and display campaigns.
• Sitelinks.
• Geographical targeting.
• Device targeting
• Phone number extensions
• Product ads.

We mentioned Youtube video advertising in the AdWords section earlier, but you can also advertise on most of the biggest social media platforms in one of two ways: with display ads or promoted posts.
Display ads on social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are quite small, so care has to be taken to provide clear messaging and images that will work in a small format. Click through rates are typically low, but targeting can be very precise and take in user interests and location.
On LinkedIn, you can even target your ads to people with a specific job title in a specific industry. For B2B, clients have found the quality of leads generated with LinkedIn advertising to be very good, but numbers are usually small.
Promoted posts (or sponsored updates) can be undertaken on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. For B2C businesses, these are often the most effective form of social advertising. The social element is always key, and most social media advertising platforms allow you to utilize your existing network to find more followers or visitors.
Take Twitter lead generation for example. It’s possible to specific a target audience, say of your people who follow your strongest competitors, and show them a ‘Card’ that will allow them to sign up to your newsletter or a drip email campaign straight away, within the Twitter interface. You can even link these up to your email management system.