Most of advertisers tend to look towards Google Adwords. Well, no surprise in that. This system has the biggest reach in many countries. It also gives a multitude of handy tools for adjusting your advertising campaigns and improving their efficiency.
However, this article is not about the benefits of Adwords. It is about other PPC channels, enabling you to enlarge your clientele. After reading this material you can become one of the few advertisers, who try to widen the range of the channels they use to promote their products and improve the conversion.
Different sources of traffic can become an alternative to Adwords. They all have their unique targeting capacities, and can become both an effective tool to increase the profits and a failed investment. The goals of your advertising campaign decide whether to use them or not.
Bing / Yahoo Advertising Network
Yahoo! Bing advertising network is a system that unites such search engines as Bing and Yahoo! (You can see it from its name, right?), and also a number of partner websites, such as AOL, Facebook and Amazon. Besides, it also includes a number of networks, such as The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. Total reach of Yahoo! Bing network in February of 2013 reached 30% from the overall online searches in USA.
The proportion of Bing advertisements for desktop computers has decreased from 100% to 51% since April of 2015, because of a new agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo. The rest of the ads can contain the content that Yahoo wants – either from its own system, called Gemini, or from a system provided by other partners. That said, Bing still provides Yahoo its search results and technologies for free. By that moment the Bing’s share in overall searches reached 20% in USA, and Yahoo’s share was 12,7%.
The main advantage of advertising in Bing, as opposed to Google Adwords, is Bing’s excellent support services: there are no automated answering patterns, effective solutions for your problems are provided by real people. Bing Ads also are cheaper, compared to Google Adwords. The traffic is often lower, but it is really high quality. Also, it should be mentioned that AOL and Yahoo! Networks have limited services.
Yahoo! Gemini Ads
This advertising platforms is Yahoo’s response to native ads. Yahoo! Gemini Ads was officially announced in February 2014 as “The first united advertising market for mobile search and simple advertising”. In over a year Microsoft and Yahoo have amended their partner agreement, so that Yahoo could handle up to 50% of Yahoo’s desktop traffic with Gemini search ads or any other.
Here you can set your direct your campaign to one of three goals:
- Visit my website;
- Meet my brand;
- Download my app.
For each of them you can choose a targeting method, to suit certain audience. Also you can use keyword search in Yahoo! search engine.
Your advertisements in Yahoo! Gemini Ads works best after fine-tuning the show conditions, when its topic comes as nearly as possible to the content of the pages, which the users are currently visiting.
Facebook Advertising
If your target audience uses social media, commercial ads in Facebook can be a good starting point for your next PPC campaign. The ads in this social network allow the brands to reach certain segments within the general user base, that contains over 1 billion people.
After creating their page on Facebook, companies can target certain audiences and demography, while testing various versions of each advertisement. The facebook ads are simple and effective for small businesses, that try to create their advertising campaign. To increase feedbacks, advertisers on Facebook can create custom audience (by e-mail lists, phone numbers, Facebook IDs or website visitors) and look alight audience (users with a behavior, similar to that of the website visitors).
LinkedIn Advertisements
This social network targets business contacts and can be extremely helpful in promoting certain categories of products. By the end of 2015 LinkedIn had over 400 million users, and audience this huge definitely should not be neglected.
It would be a good decision to advertise professional oriented goods and services here. Classes for professionals, guidelines on introducing new sales channels can be quite popular among LinkedIn users.
Speaking about the peculiarities of targeting settings in this system, one can point out job titles targeting, skills targeting, company position targeting, interest group targeting, and many others.
Twitter Advertising
Due to vast reach, Twitter is one of the most interesting alternatives to AdWords. Commercial ads and prepaid twits in popular blogs allow to achieve amazing results, attracting a lot of potential clients.
Twitter has an active audience that shows real interest to the products, advertised there. In most cases, targeting the visitors of most popular interest blogs can provide good results, however, in some cases one can attract much more clients by using more universal settings for his advertisements.
Twitter popularity is not fading, therefore it still is a constantly growing advertising platform.
Reddit Ads
Reddit has a great audience of smart and curious users. When working with the advertising platform of this system, you can decide, what subreddit you want to target. As a rule, your ads will be most effective, when targeted on small niche communities, rotating around certain topics.
The limitations that Reddit has don’t allow advertisers to occupy more than one ads spots per subreddit, therefore the spots can be occupied for quite a long period of time. So, it can be reasonable to start a campaign there, only if it causes a great interest at the baseline of the campaign.
StumbleUpon Ads
StumbleUpon is a search engine that finds and offers users web content , based on their likes and interests. It allows to evaluate pictures, videos and web pages and to share them with other users.
The best thing in StumbleUpon is that you can really get a lot of interested users, if you find your audience. The most efficient solution would be to use ads in StumbleUpon for promoting a blog or other resources with cognitive or entertaining content.
AdRoll
AdRoll is a retargeting platform, which is one of the main secondary tools , officially established by Facebook to give access to FBX. Apart from FBX, AdRoll also supports Googls AdWords and has its own advertising network. Nevertheless, the strong suit of the platform is FBX.
The prices in AdRoll are relatively high, however the advertisement conversion ratios on the platform are also very good.
7Search
7Search is one of the oldest second tier advertising platforms. Minimal deposit in 7Search is only $25. Low traffic prices enable to launch good testing for your keywords even with such amount of money. On the other hand, the traffic quality in the system is low, and for a long tail of keywords it will not be enough to carry out authentic experiment.
However, working with this system can give a good yield, especially if your goal is to promote a brand.
BuySellAds
BuySellAds platform is one of the biggest networks, that can be used for effective promotion of your advertising banners in Internet. The system’s turnover is more than 6 billion of shows every month. It is a very comfortable tool with transparent mechanisms. It provides a good selection of high quality websites, especially related to Internet and cutting edge technology.
BuySellAds offers fully automated interface, comfortable accountability and a possibility to pause your advertising campaign. Live support is aimed at solving the users’ problems quickly. BuySellAds is an excellent starting point for many marketing experts and advertisers.
However, one shouldn’t take this platform for a solution to all problems. In any advertising campaign it is important to understand what its target audience is, otherwise even on BuySellAds one can have minimal feedback from advertisements.
Summary
If you tried Google AdWords in the past and failed or you just look for moderate-priced alternatives for advertising, you always have a wide range of tools. Set your goals for advertising in the Internet, and then choose your optimal solution correspondingly.
As you can see, AdWords alternatives are very divergent. Some of them are mostly targeted on social media, other give access to professional audience or allow to reach very wide-range audience. Their efficiency is also divergent. Therefore, advertising in alternative networks can give you an opportunity to conduct a number of experiments in increasing the feedback. You shouldn’t diffuse your efforts to many channels –each of them requires a lot of time to do everything perfectly, and it is better to concentrate your attention on those, that really seem promising in helping you achieve your goals.
