Online Advertising: All You Need to Know in 2023

It’s no accident that Google generated $224.47 Billion in advertising in 2022, or Meta over $100 billion.

Every year, millions of companies invest in advertising to reach as many customers as possible. They do it because, done correctly, online advertising delivers excellent results.

If you are not careful, your money can be flushed down the drain. It’s more crucial than ever today because of the constantly changing online landscape. New platforms, types of ads, and targeting abilities are popping up every day.

We’ve created this online marketing guide to help your business. We’ve included everything that you need to learn about online marketing in this article.

You can navigate through the sections using the contents table below.

Advertising Online

Search engines are the starting point for 93% of all online activities.

You’ll likely turn to search engines to locate what you are looking for, whether you want to know the best Indian restaurants in your area or a particular SaaS application.

The same is true for your target audience.

Search engines such as Google, Bing and others are a part of nearly everyone’s everyday routine. It’s vital that you run paid advertisements to grab their attention.

Let’s also not forget how much time users spend on Facebook and other social media.

Data Reportal’s Digital 2023 Report states that the average amount of time spent on social media is 2 hours and 31 minutes per day. You should therefore include social media in your online marketing strategy.

You can advertise your company in many ways. When you first start, consider who you want to reach.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Which demographic do I want to target with my advertising?
• What is the best way to get my service or product in front of your target audience?

Find out where they spend the most online time. Find out which social media platforms they use and what keywords are most searched.

You can pay to have your social media ads promoted by paying a small fee.

If you want to pay for and execute an ad on a targeted search engine, Google Ads, or Sixads, can help you.

Online Advertising: Benefits

Digital advertising has three main ways to improve your organic marketing.

Organic performance of digital advertising can be improved:

1. Increased brand recognition by showing your content both to people within your network and those outside.
2. You can gain a better understanding of who your audience is by using the analytics and targeting of the ad platforms.
3. Create better-performing ad copy by understanding which ad content will help you reach your business objectives and which won’t.

Advertising strategies should aim to generate a return on investment. This means that you need to make sure you get more money out of your ad campaigns than you spend.

What is Paid Advertising?

What is the best way to determine your advertising budget in order to maximize your return? We’ll first need to know the way ad networks use their bidding systems in order to answer that question.

What is a bid, exactly?

The bid you place is how much money are willing to spend on the action that your advertisement wants. It’s an auction if it sounds that way.

The ad networks only have limited ad spaces. To determine if your ads will be shown to the right audience, an auction is held to find out how much advertisers are willing to spend for advertising space.

The highest bidder is the winner, just like an auction. Say you pay $10 to have your ad clicked, but the highest bidder pays only $5.

You will be required to pay only the minimum amount necessary in order to place the winning bid. You might have been willing to spend $10 in this case. In reality, however, the winning bidder will only need to pay you $5.01.

The quality of the ads you submit and the “auction” that results will affect how they are shown on different advertising networks.

WordStream has provided another example to show how the auction system works.

What should I be spending?

You might think, “Okay I understand how the auction works.” How do I determine how much to spend in order to get a good return?

I would suggest that you work your way backwards from your income to find out what your bid maximum should be.

You can use this formula:

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

The LTV represents how much you value a client throughout the relationship they have with your company. Lead-to-customer conversion rate measures the average rate of your leads becoming paying customers.

The conversion rate measures the number of new contacts who fill out your form after viewing content.

These metrics combined will show you the amount you need to spend for your ads in order to breakeven.

Imagine you’re looking to advertise your latest content via digital ads. To see positive returns on investment, you will need to determine your maximum advertising budget.

You should know about the following:

• Value of lifetime: $500
• The average lead to customer conversion rate is 10%.
• Conversion rate average: 20 %

Input these figures into the above equation to find your maximum advertising spend: 500 x 0,10 x 0,20 = 10. You can only spend $10 on each click to make your ads profitable.

You should aim to invest less than $10 in order to get a good return.

Different Types of Internet Advertising

Let’s explore the various types of advertising online now that you know how to do it.

Advertising on Social Media

Each month, nearly 2,96 billion people are active on Facebook. 2 billion users use and Instagram.

Marketers know that consumers use social media to a variety of purposes. They may be on it to stay in touch with their friends or to network and/or do business.

Advertising spending on social media is at an unprecedented high due to the large number of users. Global digital advertising expenditure is expected to surpass $243.7 billion in 2027.

Social media advertising has many benefits. You can:

• Use the targeting options to reach very specific audiences and target different audiences on all social media platforms.
• Use a range of advertising formats that are aligned with your goals.
• Investing in specific marketing efforts will drive sales and leads for your company.

We’ll look at the eight most popular social networks: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X Pintrest, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. Each network has different audiences and advertising types.

1. Facebook

Facebook has been used by marketers in large numbers. 64% use it. HubSpot Blog’s 2023 marketing strategy & trends report indicates that Facebook provides the best ROI.

Facebook is used by almost 2,96 billion users worldwide. Imagine that more than 35 percent of the global population uses Facebook.

Facebook is the most popular social media platform and has the highest ROI. You’ll be able to find a relevant audience for any business.

Facebook’s audience targeting is one of its most effective features. Facebook’s targeting features are unparalleled by other social networks.

You can choose from three different types of audience on Facebook.

1. Core Audiences — a group of people based on age, interest, or geography.
2. Custom Audiences – Reconnect with previous customers.
3. Similar audiences — reach out to new people who share the same interests as your most loyal customers.

Facebook’s advanced targeting allows you to target ads at the right audience and reach new people that would otherwise be impossible with only organic content.

Facebook advertising includes:

• Photo ads.
• Videos are a great way to advertise.
• Story Ads
• Advertisements with Leads
• Advertisements that ask for votes
• Carousel ads.
• Instant experience ads.

Photos ads can be a great way to share collections of images. The Facebook photo advertisement by Monday.com is an excellent example.

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You can create engaging and eye-catching videos using a video maker.

The Facebook video advertisement by Kay Jewelers is my favorite — it’s quick and moving, showing a woman who smiles after getting a present.​​​​​

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You can combine short video and photo content in Story ads. There are also different types of ads, and you can learn more about them by taking the Facebook Advertising course at HubSpot Academy.

Lead ads are my personal favorite method of advertising on Facebook because you get the best from both sides: visual content sharing and lead generation at once. Facebook Lead Ads let you capture leads without having to direct people away from the Facebook platform.

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Lead ads can help you find customers that are interested in the products and services of your company, no matter how big or small your business is.

Lead ads are a way to provide viewers with a piece of useful content. This can be a link that will encourage them to subscribe for your newsletter, request a quote, or ask you more information about the business. The business gets a lead when the user fills in the form.

Facebook Messenger is another way of advertising on Facebook.

Facebook Messenger has its own set of advertising options. Facebook Messenger has become the preferred messaging app for many countries, including those in the US, Canada and Australia.

In South America, Europe and Africa as well as Asia, WhatsApp and WeChat have become the most popular messaging apps.

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Facebook Messenger is used by people and companies to exchange billions of messages each month. Facebook Messenger conversations are often started by ads.

Facebook Messenger can be used in several different ways to help you with your marketing strategy.

• Facebook Messenger Call-to Action in Ads: Begin conversations by using ads that feature a CTA to send a text message.
• Facebook Messenger Stories Ads: Create story ads in Messenger Stories.
• Facebook Messenger Advertisements: Deliver content to users directly through Facebook Messenger.

These ad formats all work together to get your target audience talking to your company. You can use them to reach out to a sales representative, get more details on a particular product or share content such as blog posts and ebooks.

Retargeting is my favorite method of advertising on Facebook Messenger. Facebook Messenger retargeting ads are an excellent way to initiate targeted conversations, send customized offers and contents and start personalized conversations.

You can advertise your company to those who already interact with you in Messenger. It’s a good way to engage your audience again in a personal 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.

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As visible in the screenshot, this ad garnered impressive engagement — with 7,446 likes, 355 reposts, eight bookmarks, and 29 quotes (as of 2023).

X breaks down its ads into five goals:

• Awareness. Promote your messages and maximize your reach.
• X engagement. Promote your messages and get more reposts, likes, and replies.
• Follows. Promote your account and grow your X following.
• Website clicks. Promote your website and get more traffic.
• App downloads. Promote your app and get more downloads.

All of these can work together to help you grow your audience on the platform and convert users into customers.

5. Pinterest

Pinterest is a unique social media platform with 445 million users who are highly engaged and predominantly female.

Some people say that Pinterest is the only platform where users actually want to see ads from brands they love because Pinterest is all about visuals.

Here’s how to advertise on Pinterest in four steps:

• Pick a pin. Promote your best pins so they appear in the most relevant places.
• Decide who sees it. Set up targeting so the right people see your ads.
• Pay for results. Choose to pay for engagement or visits to your site.
• Track what’s working. Once your campaign starts, see how it’s doing and make adjustments as necessary.

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Pinterest is great for businesses relying on photography to sell their products and who have a female target buyer persona.

6. YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine, second only to Google, with over 2.5 billion monthly active users.

Ads on YouTube appear before and during other YouTube videos or as a stand-alone promoted video that’s displayed after performing a search.

Since you can target demographic information and interests, you can serve your videos to specific, relevant audiences already watching videos from similar brands or on related topics.

Despite that, not many brands can keep their target audience engaged and stop them from hitting the “skip ad” button.

But that’s not the case with Nissan. Nissan, a Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer, changed the game by keeping their viewers engaged for over four hours without reaching for the “skip ad” button.

They launched a YouTube ad that was very different from the traditional ones. This four-hour-long ad featured a custom Lofi playlist that serves as the soundtrack to an animated character’s road trip.

One of the reasons this ad worked so well is that people love lo-fi music. It’s a genre people love listening to while studying, working, or trying to relax.

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Learn more about Nissan’s secret here.

7. Snapchat

Snapchat’s 635 million users are predominantly made up of people between the ages of 18–24.

Snapchat offers a few ad types, including story ads, sponsored tiles in Snapchat Discover, and augmented reality (AR) lenses.

Snapchat’s ad types feel pretty similar to the advertising options on Instagram.

What makes Snapchat unique is the augmented reality lenses. AR lenses are sponsored by a business to create interactive moments that users can use and share with their friends.

It might be hard to believe, but in this example from Domino’s — even though you see the pizza, it’s not really there — that’s the AR lens at work.

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8. TikTok

One of the newer — and most popular — players in the social media advertising world is TikTok. TikTok is all about creating short, creative, and funny videos.

TikTok has exploded in the past few years and has reached 1.05 million monthly users.

Advertising options are mainly geared toward driving awareness.

Promoting TikTok videos allows brands to build awareness with a young target audience. Most posts you’ll see on TikTok aim to get laughs.

From a brand perspective, you’ll want to create funny videos that align with other content on the platform. Think of things like dance challenges and memes. This type of content is the most effective.

That said, let’s move on to paid search advertising.

Paid Search Advertising

People searching online are looking for something specific and will click on the first result they believe will be the most helpful to them.

You might be thinking: “I already appear in organic results on search engines. Why should I pay to advertise too?”

Well, there are three key reasons:

• On average, digitally prepared businesses anticipate four times better revenue than less prepared ones.
• Advertising on search engines protects you from the competition who may be advertising on your branded terms.
• Search ads appear first in the search engine results pages (SERPs) above the organic results.

Paid search advertising allows advertisers to capture the attention of their audience in a more targeted way than with organic search alone.

Search ads allow you to anticipate the wants, needs, and desires of your potential customers and serve ads to them that are highly contextual.

Over time, the analytics of your search ads can help you analyze and improve those ads to reach even more people.

But how does Google know how to deliver the right ad to the right person? That’s where keywords come into play.

Keywords

A keyword is one word or phrase that someone uses to describe what they need in search.

Advertising on search platforms takes the targeting capabilities available on social media platforms, like demographics and location, and layers it with the addition of keywords.

When a Google user types a query into the search field, Google returns a range of results that match the searcher’s intent.

Keywords align with what a searcher wants and will satisfy their query. You select keywords based on which queries you want to display your ad alongside.

Keyword research is just as important for paid ads as it is for organic search.

That’s because Google matches your ad with search queries based on the keywords you selected.

Each ad group you create within your campaign will target a small set of keywords, and Google will display your ad based on those selections.

Let’s say Mary is moving to a different house and is looking for a home mover. So she goes into Google and types “who are the best movers.”

By searching “best movers,” she’s going to see results for advertisers that targeted keywords like “moving companies” and “top-rated movers.”

Search engines also consider your intent when choosing the types of ads to display.

In the example above, search ads were the most helpful resource. But what if you’re looking for a location-based business, like a coffee shop?

In Google Maps, you might see “Promoted Pins” like these, shown in purple on the map and in the search results on the left. Promoted Pins are a great way for businesses to attract customers to their business based on

What if you’re looking to make a purchase? Well, Google might show you a different kind of post to match your intent, such as Shopping Post Ads.

In this example below, Google shows you shopping post ads for the keyword “buy snowboard.”

Since my query includes the word “buy,” Google knows that I’m interested in making a purchase, so I am shown ads for products I might be interested in.

So, how do you select your keywords?

Keywords typically fall under two categories: brand and non-brand.

A brand keyword is a word or phrase that includes a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name. For example, some of HubSpot’s brand keywords include HubSpot, HubSpot Free CRM, and HubSpot Marketing Hub.

These are all variations of the HubSpot brand and the tools that we offer.

Non-brand keywords are all other relevant keywords that don’t include a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name.

Some of HubSpot’s non-brand keywords include “inbound marketing,” “sales software,” and “customer relationship management.”

While these keywords are not part of HubSpot’s brand name, they are relevant terms that allow HubSpot to reach audiences interested in eventually making a purchase.

Brand and non-brand keywords play a role in your digital advertising strategy. Brand keywords help you protect your brand from your competitor’s ads.

If you don’t run ad campaigns for brand keywords, you’ll leave your business vulnerable to losing website traffic to the competition who is bidding on your brand keywords.

Non-brand keywords still have a role to play, too. Non-brand keywords allow you to reach new audiences unfamiliar with your brand.

Match Type

When it comes to when your ad is displayed, you don’t just want to pick a certain group of keywords and have the ad shown only when those keywords are entered into the search engine.

This is where match type comes in. Since there’s an infinite number of ways that people can actually search for one term, Google gives you three match types to choose from: exact match, phrase match, and broad match.

You can even use a broad match modifier and exclude negative keywords to optimize where your ads are delivered.

Let’s take a look at each match type:

• Exact match: A keyword set to exact match will only display your ad if the search term includes that exact keyword or a very close variation. Exact match keywords are surrounded in [brackets].
• Phrase match: A keyword set to phrase match will display your ad if the search term contains the same order of the words, but it can also contain additional words. Phrase match keywords are surrounded by “quotes.”
• Broad match: A keyword set to broad match displays your ad when the search term contains any or some combination or variations of the words in your keyword, in any order. Broad match keywords don’t include any symbols.
• Broad match modifier: The broad match modifier allows you to select keywords that must be included in the search query for your ad to be displayed. Keywords with a broad match modifier use a +plus sign.
• Negative keywords: Excludes your ads from being shown on searches with that term. Negative keywords include a -minus sign.

Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo

There are a few advertising platforms out there for search, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But Google is by far the most used search engine out there.

Google processes more than 90,000 search queries each second. With Google leading the search engine market and accounting for 85.53% of the search engine market share, it makes sense for businesses to run Google Ads campaigns.

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But this doesn’t mean you should entirely rule out advertising on these other platforms.

In some cases, you can achieve impressive results with a smaller ad spend on Bing and Yahoo than you could on Google since there is less competition from advertisers.

My recommendation is to dig into your organic traffic to identify if Bing or Yahoo make up a significant amount of traffic for any given keywords or topics.

This might indicate that advertising for those keywords on Bing or Yahoo could be profitable.

Regardless of where you advertise, the good news is that advertising on all of these platforms more or less work and look the same. So knowing how to advertise on one will make advertising on the others easier.

Native Advertising

Publishers like BuzzFeed and The Dodo produce content that snowballs in popularity on social media almost daily.

And they make money by helping other brands do it, too. Brands will pay these publishers to craft posts and videos that follow the publishers’ formula for virality.

They also pay publishers to distribute this sponsored content to their massive audience through social media and their website.

This is native advertising.

Check out this example from Walmart. The retail giant partnered with BuzzFeed to create this advertisement about Walmart Essentials.

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When you pay for a publisher’s native advertising services, you’ll be able to leverage their editorial expertise and audience reach to help your brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership.

And each publisher is going to support different ad formats and creative types.

During the creative process, you’ll collaborate with publishers to craft sponsored content that covers one of their main topics and looks like a regular piece of content on the publisher’s website.

This way, even though your post is technically promotional, it won’t disrupt their audience’s browsing experience. They’ll enjoy reading your post and won’t feel like you or the publisher are advertising to them.

This exposes your work to a huge, engaged viewership and attracts new followers to your brand.

Native advertising creates a symbiotic relationship between publishers and brands. Publishers who do sponsored content right reap the benefits of another revenue stream and gain more audience trust if they promote a native ad from a trustworthy brand.

For brands, collaborating with prominent publishers can unleash unprecedented amounts of creativity to help them win over the publishers’ audience and boost engagement — as the click-through rate on native ads far exceeds traditional.

For example, T Brand Studio, the New York Times native ad business, crafted sponsored posts that captured as much engagement as some of nytimes.com’s highest-performing articles.

To find the optimal native advertising opportunities for your brand, try using StackAdapt or Nativo.

Display Advertising

Display ads are a controversial topic in the digital marketing community.

For almost 25 years, advertisers have abused them by tricking internet users into clicking misleading ads — some malicious display ads have even infected people’s computers with viruses.

It’s easy to see why people have developed banner blindness and can’t stop downloading ad blockers: display ads have the reputation of being intrusive, distracting, and irrelevant.

On the other side of the spectrum, though, display advertising technology has advanced to the point where ad networks can leverage data and machine learning to offer advertisers more effective targeting strategies and consumers more relevant ads.

Ad networks like Google Display Network and Facebook’s Audience Network are the leaders in the banner ad renaissance.

They can display your ads to the right target audience at the right place and time.

And if you want more control of your advertising, they’ll let you decide where to place your ads. Below, we’ll cover each ad network’s features and targeting capabilities.

1. Google Display Network

When you use Google’s Display Network, you can design visually appealing ads and place them on over two million websites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail.

You can also build new audiences by targeting people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and remarket website visitors just by importing a list of their contact information.

If you don’t want to build out your ideal audience or deal with bidding, you can let Google Ads do it for you. Its automated targeting and bidding features can identify your highest-converting audience for the best return on investment.

Display ads can be most effective when retargeting an audience that’s already familiar with your brand.

Here’s an example of a display ad on Yahoo News:

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2. Facebook’s Audience Network

With Facebook’s Audience Network, brands can expand their Facebook ad campaigns and use the same targeting data they use on the platform to advertise on a huge collection of websites and apps.

Brands can place native ads, banner ads, full-screen ads, in-stream video ads, and rewarded video ads (for example, “Watch this video ad to get more tokens!”) on the network’s websites and apps that their Facebook audience frequently visits.

This type of advertising can be particularly effective for mobile games, like in the example below from 5agame, who was able to attribute 80% of their revenue through their rewarded video.

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If you want to continue leveling up your ads training, check out HubSpot Academy’s free course on the Digital Advertising Training Course.

Getting Started

In today’s digital work, having the right online advertising strategy is essential for every business.

Now that you know about all of the digital ad types that are available, the next step is to learn how to leverage the right ads for your business to achieve your goals.

Start building a strategy today, so you can increase your revenue tomorrow.

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