To help you out, we’ve put together this comprehensive online advertising guide for business. Throughout this post, we’ve covered everything you need to know about online advertising.

If you’re only interested in learning about a certain type of online advertising, you can use the table of contents below to navigate to each section.

How to Advertise Online

Whether you’re on the lookout for the best Indian restaurant in your neighborhood or looking for a specific SaaS tool, you’re likely going to turn to a search engine to find what you need.

And the same goes for your audience.

With search engines like Google, Bing, and many others being a core part of almost everyone’s daily routine, it’s important to ensure you’re running paid ads to catch their attention on these platforms.

And let’s not overlook how much time people spend on social media platforms.

According to Data Reportal’s Digital 2023 report, the average time people spend on social media stands at 2 hours 31 minutes daily. This means you should also incorporate social media into your online advertising strategy.

There are plenty of ways to advertise your business strategically. Think about who you’re trying to reach when you start.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What target demographic am I advertising to?
• How can I place my product or service offering in front of my target?

The answer is to see where your target demographic spends the most time online. Research their most frequented social media channels and the keywords they look up the most.

If you want to run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on social media, it’s important to note that most social media platforms offer business pages the ability to pay a fee to promote posts/ads within the interface.

Or, if you are looking to advertise on a search engine for targeted keywords, Google Ads or Sixads can guide you through the process of payment and execution.

Benefits of Online Advertising

There are three key ways that digital advertising can help you improve the performance of your organic marketing efforts.

With digital ads, organic performance can benefit from:

1. An increase in brand awareness by displaying your content to individuals within and outside of your networks.
2. A better understanding of your audiences by leveraging the targeting and analytics of the ads platforms.
3. The creation of higher-performing content by understanding what ad content helps you achieve your business goals and what doesn’t.

The goal of any advertising strategy should be to get a positive return on your investment, which comes down to whether you’re getting more revenue out of the ad campaign than the cost you’re putting in.

How Paid Advertising Works

How can you determine what your ad spend should be to get the most return on your investment? To start answering that question, we’ll need to understand the bidding system used by the ad networks.

What’s a bid?

A bid is the maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for the desired action on your ad. If it sounds like an auction, that’s because it is an auction.

Ad networks have a limited amount of ad space, and to determine whether or not your ads are shown to your target audience, they run an auction to see how much each advertiser is willing to pay for ad space.

Just like in an auction, the highest bidder wins. Let’s say you bid $10 for a click on your ad, and the next highest bidder only pays $5 for a click.

Each ad network will only make you pay the lowest amount possible to win the bid. In this example, you might be willing to pay $10. However, in reality, you’ll only have to pay $5.01 to win the bid.

Winning this “auction,” in addition to the overall quality of your ads, will determine how your ads are displayed on the different ad networks.

Here’s another example of how the ad auction works from WordStream.

How much should I spend?

At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, I get how the auction system works. But how do I figure out how much I should actually spend to see a return on my investment?”

My advice is to work backward from your revenue to determine what your maximum bid should be.

Use this equation:

Lifetime Value (LTV) x Average Lead-to-Customer Rate x Average Conversion Rate

Your LTV is how much a customer is worth to you throughout their relationship with your business. The average lead-to-customer rate is the rate at which your leads become paying customers.

Your conversion rate is the rate at which new contacts convert on your content offers by filling out a form.

When combined, these metrics show you how much you should spend on your paid ads to break even.

Let’s say you want to use digital ads to promote your new content offer. You will need to know what your maximum ad spend should be to see a positive return on your investment.

Assume that you know the following about your business:

• Lifetime value: $500.
• Average lead-to-customer rate: 10%.
• Average conversion rate: 20%.

Plug these numbers into the equation above to determine your maximum ad spend: $500 x 0.10 x 0.20 = $10. This means you can spend a maximum of $10 per click on your ad to break even.

Your goal should be to spend less than $10 to see a positive return on your investment.

Types of Online Advertising

Now that we know more about how to advertise online, let’s dive into the different types of online advertising.

Social Media Advertising

Whether it’s to chat with friends, stay connected to people across the globe, or for business and/or networking purposes, consumers are on social media for a multitude of reasons — and marketers know it.

Because of the sheer number of active users on these platforms, advertising spending invested in social media channels is at an all-time high. The global digital advertising spend is projected to exceed $243.7 billion by 2027.

Advertising on social media comes with many advantages. You can:

• Reach very specific target audiences with the help of targeting features and different audiences across all of the social media platforms.
• Leverage a variety of ad formats to advertise in a way that aligns with your business goals.
• Invest in the specific advertising efforts that drive leads and sales for your business.

Let’s look at eight popular social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. We’ll cover the audiences and ad types available on each one.

1. Facebook

Facebook is, hands down, the most widely used social media network, leveraged by 64% of marketers. HubSpot Blog’s 2023 Marketing Strategy & Trends Report indicates that Facebook offers the highest ROI.

I’d also like to shed light on the fact that almost 2.96 billion people worldwide use Facebook. Just think about it — that’s more than 35% of the world’s population.

With so many people using Facebook and the platform taking the throne as the highest-ROI social media platform, you’re almost guaranteed to reach an audience that’s relevant to any type of business.

That’s where one of the most powerful features of advertising on Facebook comes in: audience targeting. The targeting capabilities on Facebook are unmatched by any other social media network.

There are three types of audiences that you can target on Facebook:

1. Core audiences — an audience based on criteria like age, interests, and geography.
2. Custom audiences — get back in touch with people who have previously engaged with your business.
3. Lookalike audiences — reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers.

Facebook’s advanced targeting can target your ads to the most relevant audience — and even tap into new audiences you’d otherwise never reach with organic content alone.

Advertising on Facebook includes a range of ad types, including:

• Photo ads.
• Video ads.
• Story ads.
• Lead ads.
• Poll ads.
• Carousel ads.
• Instant experience ads.

Photo ads are great for sharing collections of image content. Monday.com’s Facebook photo ad is a great example:

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Video ads are great for product explainer videos and branding, and you can use a simple video ad maker to create eye-catching and engaging videos.

Kay Jewelers’ Facebook video ad is one of my favorites — as it tells a quick yet moving story of a woman smiling and being super-happy after receiving a gift in the ad.

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Story ads allow you to combine photo and short-form video content. Similarly, there are different ad types, which you can dive deep into through the Facebook advertising course on HubSpot Academy.

Personally, my favorite way to advertise on Facebook is with lead ads because they give you the best of both worlds: sharing visual content and generating leads simultaneously. Facebook Lead Ads allow you to capture lead information without directing people out of the Facebook platform.

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No matter your business’s size or industry, you can use lead ads to find potential customers who are likely interested in your products or services.

With lead ads, you provide a helpful piece of content that encourages viewers to sign up for a newsletter, receive a price estimate, or request additional business information. In return, when the viewer fills out the form, the business receives a new lead.

Another way to advertise on Facebook is through Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Messenger is a separate messaging app that comes with its own advertising opportunities. Facebook Messenger is the go-to messaging app in countries including the US, Canada, and Australia.

Other messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat are the more popular choice in countries throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

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Billions of messages are exchanged between people and businesses monthly on Facebook Messenger. Ads play a big part in initiating conversations on Facebook Messenger.

You can use Facebook Messenger as part of your advertising strategy in a few different ways.

• Facebook Messenger call-to-action in ads: Start conversations with ads on Facebook that include a call-to-action (CTA) to send a message.
• Facebook Messenger Story Ads: Run story ads on Messenger Stories.
• Facebook Messenger Ads: Use messenger ads to deliver content directly into users’ Facebook Messenger chats.

All of these ad types come together to encourage your audience to kick off conversations with your business. They can be used to contact a sales team, request more information on a product, or even share other content like blog posts or ebooks.

My favorite way to advertise on Facebook Messenger is retargeting. Retargeting ads in Facebook Messenger are a great way to start targeted conversations and send personalized offers and content.

Sponsored messages allow you to advertise to people who have already interacted with your business in Messenger. This is a great way to re-engage your audience in a personalized way.

Here’s an interesting example:

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As you can see, this ad is visible in the user’s feed. When they click on the CTA (“Learn More”), rather than being redirected to any website or dedicated landing page, they are redirected to Facebook Messenger.

2. Instagram

You can also advertise on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. Instagram has over 2 billion monthly users globally. The majority of users are between the ages of 18 and 34.

There are three ways that you can advertise on Instagram:

• Promote posts and stories directly from your Instagram professional account.
• Create ads from your Facebook Page and promote them on both Facebook and Instagram.
• Create ad campaigns in the Facebook Ads Manager to access full targeting capabilities.

I recommend taking the third option and creating custom campaigns for your audience on Instagram.

Instagram has similar ad types to Facebook, including:

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Story ads
• Carousel ads
• Reel ads

By far, the most interesting ad types right now are in-feed and explore.

Ads that appear while scrolling your feed are called in-feed ads. The ads that you see in the “Explore” section while exploring your interests and discovering new content creators are Explore ads.

Ads in Instagram Explore are a great opportunity to put your brand in front of people looking for new creators or content.

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Here’s an example of explore ad by Harvard:

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3. LinkedIn

The LinkedIn platform has over 900 million monthly active users worldwide.

Users on the platform are largely working professionals, which makes LinkedIn a great place for B2B (business-to-business) advertising.

LinkedIn is the go-to platform for working professionals, which provides B2B advertisers with a large audience pool to reach.

Plus, the advantage of advertising on LinkedIn is its unique targeting capabilities. On LinkedIn, you’ll have access to unique targeting criteria that are unavailable on other platforms.

You can target users on LinkedIn by unique demographics, including job title, job function, and industry.

Maybe you only want to advertise to potential customers at the director level who work in customer service within the recruiting industry. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities make that possible.

Plus, with the option to include lead gen forms in your LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn can be a lead generation machine. This will allow you to reach a very specific audience and drive leads without directing them outside of the LinkedIn platform.

The most interesting ad type of LinkedIn is Message Ads. Message Ads allow you to send direct messages to your prospects to spark immediate action.

How to use LinkedIn Message Ads:

• Deliver a targeted message with a single CTA.
• Drive stronger engagement and response than traditional emails.
• Measure the impact of your messages.

But a word of warning: Don’t send too many Message Ads to the same people, or it will come off like spam. And make sure the messages sound authentic — if you were writing a LinkedIn message to a friend, what would you write in it?

If your Message Ads are too stiff, they’ll come off as spammy, too. Remember: This channel is a one-to-one conversation.

Direct messages are sacred spaces — if you’re going to advertise there, you need to be extra careful about taking the time to make your Message Ads feel personal and relevant to your end users.

Make sure you’re delivering value to them in a way that feels authentic.

4. X (Formerly Twitter)

Digital advertising is less common on X (formerly Twitter) because organic reach is still a significant driver of a brand’s performance on X.

This is very unique to X — but even so, ads can still deliver strong results depending on what your goals are. X has over 556 million monthly users globally.

The majority of users are between 35–65 years old.

Advertisers have discovered a few niches that have high engagement on X: B2B and ecommerce. Many B2B companies are using X as a digital marketing tool, and X users are known to spend a lot of money online.

This makes advertising specifically to these audiences a great strategy.

Climate Group, an international climate non-profit, ran an X advertising campaign to educate business owners on climate-friendly innovations.

Paid search promoting permits advertisers to seize the eye of their viewers in a extra focused means than with natural search alone.

Search advertisements will let you anticipate the desires, wants, and wishes of your potential clients and serve advertisements to them which are extremely contextual.

Over time, the analytics of your search advertisements can assist you analyze and enhance these advertisements to achieve much more individuals.

However how does Google know ship the precise advert to the precise particular person? That is the place key phrases come into play.

Key phrases

A key phrase is one phrase or phrase that somebody makes use of to explain what they want in search.

Promoting on search platforms takes the concentrating on capabilities accessible on social media platforms, like demographics and placement, and layers it with the addition of key phrases.

When a Google consumer sorts a question into the search subject, Google returns a spread of outcomes that match the searcher’s intent.

Key phrases align with what a searcher desires and can fulfill their question. You choose key phrases primarily based on which queries you wish to show your advert alongside.

Key phrase analysis is simply as necessary for paid advertisements as it’s for natural search.

That is as a result of Google matches your advert with search queries primarily based on the key phrases you chose.

Every advert group you create inside your marketing campaign will goal a small set of key phrases, and Google will show your advert primarily based on these choices.

To illustrate Mary is transferring to a distinct home and is in search of a house mover. So she goes into Google and kinds “who’re the very best movers.”

By looking out “greatest movers,” she’s going to see outcomes for advertisers that focused key phrases like “transferring corporations” and “top-rated movers.”

Search engines like google additionally take into account your intent when selecting the kinds of advertisements to show.

Within the instance above, search advertisements had been essentially the most useful useful resource. However what should you’re in search of a location-based enterprise, like a espresso store?

In Google Maps, you may see “Promoted Pins” like these, proven in purple on the map and within the search outcomes on the left. Promoted Pins are a good way for companies to draw clients to their enterprise primarily based on

What should you’re seeking to make a purchase order? Properly, Google may present you a distinct sort of put up to match your intent, equivalent to Procuring Put up Adverts.

On this instance under, Google exhibits you procuring put up advertisements for the key phrase “purchase snowboard.”

Since my question contains the phrase “purchase,” Google is aware of that I am eager about making a purchase order, so I’m proven advertisements for merchandise I is perhaps eager about.

So, how do you choose your key phrases?

Key phrases sometimes fall underneath two classes: model and non-brand.

A model key phrase is a phrase or phrase that features a model’s identify or variations of a model’s identify. For instance, a few of HubSpot’s model key phrases embrace HubSpot, HubSpot Free CRM, and HubSpot Advertising and marketing Hub.

These are all variations of the HubSpot model and the instruments that we provide.

Non-brand key phrases are all different related key phrases that do not embrace a model’s identify or variations of a model’s identify.

A few of HubSpot’s non-brand key phrases embrace “inbound advertising and marketing,” “gross sales software program,” and “buyer relationship administration.”

Whereas these key phrases usually are not a part of HubSpot’s model identify, they’re related phrases that enable HubSpot to achieve audiences eager about finally making a purchase order.

Model and non-brand key phrases play a job in your digital promoting technique. Model key phrases enable you to shield your model out of your competitor’s advertisements.

If you happen to do not run advert campaigns for model key phrases, you may go away your corporation susceptible to shedding web site site visitors to the competitors who’s bidding in your model key phrases.

Non-brand key phrases nonetheless have a job to play, too. Non-brand key phrases will let you attain new audiences unfamiliar together with your model.

Match Sort

In terms of when your advert is displayed, you do not simply wish to choose a sure group of key phrases and have the advert proven solely when these key phrases are entered into the search engine.

That is the place match sort is available in. Since there’s an infinite variety of ways in which individuals can truly seek for one time period, Google provides you three match sorts to select from: precise match, phrase match, and broad match.

You’ll be able to even use a broad match modifier and exclude destructive key phrases to optimize the place your advertisements are delivered.

Let’s check out every match sort:

• Precise match: A key phrase set to precise match will solely show your advert if the search time period contains that precise key phrase or a really shut variation. Precise match key phrases are surrounded in [brackets].
• Phrase match: A key phrase set to phrase match will show your advert if the search time period incorporates the identical order of the phrases, however it will possibly additionally comprise extra phrases. Phrase match key phrases are surrounded by “quotes.”
• Broad match: A key phrase set to broad match shows your advert when the search time period incorporates any or some mixture or variations of the phrases in your key phrase, in any order. Broad match key phrases do not embrace any symbols.
• Broad match modifier: The broad match modifier means that you can choose key phrases that should be included within the search question to your advert to be displayed. Key phrases with a broad match modifier use a +plus signal.
• Detrimental key phrases: Excludes your advertisements from being proven on searches with that time period. Detrimental key phrases embrace a -minus signal.

Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo

There are just a few promoting platforms on the market for search, together with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. However Google is by far essentially the most used search engine on the market.

Google processes greater than 90,000 search queries every second. With Google main the search engine market and accounting for 85.53% of the search engine market share, it is sensible for companies to run Google Adverts campaigns.

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However this doesn’t suggest it is best to totally rule out promoting on these different platforms.

In some circumstances, you’ll be able to obtain spectacular outcomes with a smaller advert spend on Bing and Yahoo than you possibly can on Google since there’s much less competitors from advertisers.

My advice is to dig into your natural site visitors to establish if Bing or Yahoo make up a big quantity of site visitors for any given key phrases or subjects.

This may point out that promoting for these key phrases on Bing or Yahoo might be worthwhile.

No matter the place you promote, the excellent news is that promoting on all of those platforms roughly work and look the identical. So understanding promote on one will make promoting on the others simpler.

Native Promoting

Publishers like BuzzFeed and The Dodo produce content material that snowballs in recognition on social media nearly each day.

They usually become profitable by serving to different manufacturers do it, too. Manufacturers pays these publishers to craft posts and movies that comply with the publishers’ components for virality.

Additionally they pay publishers to distribute this sponsored content material to their huge viewers by social media and their web site.

That is native promoting.

Take a look at this instance from Walmart. The retail big partnered with BuzzFeed to create this commercial about Walmart Necessities.

While you pay for a writer’s native promoting companies, you can leverage their editorial experience and viewers attain to assist your model inform charming tales to an even bigger and higher viewership.

And every writer goes to assist completely different advert codecs and artistic sorts.

Throughout the artistic course of, you may collaborate with publishers to craft sponsored content material that covers one among their principal subjects and appears like an everyday piece of content material on the writer’s web site.

This manner, though your put up is technically promotional, it will not disrupt their viewers’s searching expertise. They will take pleasure in studying your put up and will not really feel such as you or the writer are promoting to them.

This exposes your work to an enormous, engaged viewership and attracts new followers to your model.

Native promoting creates a symbiotic relationship between publishers and types. Publishers who do sponsored content material proper reap the advantages of one other income stream and acquire extra viewers belief in the event that they promote a local advert from a reliable model.

For manufacturers, collaborating with outstanding publishers can unleash unprecedented quantities of creativity to assist them win over the publishers’ viewers and increase engagement — because the click-through price on native advertisements far exceeds conventional.

For instance, T Model Studio, the New York Occasions native advert enterprise, crafted sponsored posts that captured as a lot engagement as a few of nytimes.com’s highest-performing articles.

To seek out the optimum native promoting alternatives to your model, attempt utilizing StackAdapt or Nativo.

Show Promoting

Show advertisements are a controversial matter within the digital advertising and marketing neighborhood.

For nearly 25 years, advertisers have abused them by tricking web customers into clicking deceptive advertisements — some malicious show advertisements have even contaminated individuals’s computer systems with viruses.

It is easy to see why individuals have developed banner blindness and might’t cease downloading advert blockers: show advertisements have the repute of being intrusive, distracting, and irrelevant.

On the opposite aspect of the spectrum, although, show promoting know-how has superior to the purpose the place advert networks can leverage knowledge and machine studying to supply advertisers simpler concentrating on methods and shoppers extra related advertisements.

Advert networks like Google Show Community and Fb’s Viewers Community are the leaders within the banner advert renaissance.

They will show your advertisements to the precise target market on the proper place and time.

And in order for you extra management of your promoting, they’re going to allow you to determine the place to position your advertisements. Beneath, we’ll cowl every advert community’s options and concentrating on capabilities.

1. Google Show Community

While you use Google’s Show Community, you’ll be able to design visually interesting advertisements and place them on over two million web sites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail.

You can too construct new audiences by concentrating on people who find themselves probably to be eager about your services or products and remarket web site guests simply by importing an inventory of their contact info.

If you happen to do not wish to construct out your ultimate viewers or take care of bidding, you’ll be able to let Google Adverts do it for you. Its automated concentrating on and bidding options can establish your highest-converting viewers for the very best return on funding.

Show advertisements may be handiest when retargeting an viewers that is already aware of your model.

Here is an instance of a show advert on Yahoo Information:

2. Fb’s Viewers Community

With Fb’s Viewers Community, manufacturers can broaden their Fb advert campaigns and use the identical concentrating on knowledge they use on the platform to promote on an enormous assortment of internet sites and apps.

Manufacturers can place native advertisements, banner advertisements, full-screen advertisements, in-stream video advertisements, and rewarded video advertisements (for instance, “Watch this video advert to get extra tokens!”) on the community’s web sites and apps that their Fb viewers incessantly visits.

The sort of promoting may be notably efficient for cellular video games, like within the instance under from 5agame, who was in a position to attribute 80% of their income by their rewarded video.

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If you wish to proceed leveling up your advertisements coaching, try HubSpot Academy’s free course on the Digital Promoting Coaching Course.

Getting Began

In in the present day’s digital work, having the precise internet advertising technique is important for each enterprise.

Now that you recognize about all the digital advert sorts which are accessible, the subsequent step is to learn to leverage the precise advertisements for your corporation to realize your targets.

Begin constructing a technique in the present day, so you’ll be able to enhance your income tomorrow.

Editor’s observe: This put up was initially revealed in April 2020 and has been up to date for comprehensiveness.