Top 5 Advertising Platforms in 2024
Today, it is difficult to imagine the full-scale promotion of brands and their products on the internet without specialized advertising platforms. From this article, you will learn what they are and which systems are most in demand in 2024.
What are Advertising Platforms?
Advertising platforms are services for creating, optimizing, and managing online advertising campaigns. They are centralized hubs where advertisers can plan and launch advertising for different channels, devices, and audience segments, as well as track their results. The functionality of these platforms allows for flexible campaign customization: setting goals, adapting to a specific consumer group, tracking metrics, and receiving insights based on this data.
There are several types of such services:
- Demand-Side Platforms (DSP). Through them, advertisers buy advertising space on various internet resources.
- Supply-Side Platforms. These are where publishers manage, optimize, and sell ad spaces.
- Ad Exchange. Platforms of this type perform the function of an exchange, uniting advertisers and publishers.
Advertising platforms use a number of promotion channels. The most popular among them are search engines, social networks, websites, mobile applications, email service providers, and others. Their main users are companies and brands that conduct advertising campaigns to promote their products, increase awareness, and sales. In addition, they are popular among marketers and digital agencies.
Key features of online advertising platforms:
- Advertising auctions. Advertisers bid on available advertising spaces based on their value, which is determined by a number of criteria. The position is awarded to the participant who offers the highest amount for it.
- Targeting. The targeting functionality allows you to customize your ads to the most relevant audience, filtering them by demographics, geolocation, behavior, interests, and other parameters.
- Campaign formats. The platforms support campaigns of different formats: text/media/interactive ads, video ads, native ads, sponsored content, etc. Their effectiveness depends on the goals, object, and audience of the campaign.
- Budget management. Users can set a daily, weekly, monthly or total campaign budget to control their advertising costs.
- Monitoring results. The platforms come with built-in analytics and reporting tools. They provide real-time information on campaign performance. Moreover, they allow advertisers to measure key advertising metrics: click-through rate (CTR), conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI).
Google Ads
Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is one of the best advertising platforms. It allows advertisers to promote products and services through Google Search, YouTube, and the Google Display Network (GDN) partner network.
Key features:
- Users have access to several campaign formats. Search ads – ads in Google Search results. Display ads – ads on CDN network sites. Shopping ads – display of products in search results. Video ads – advertising on YouTube. App ads – advertising of mobile applications on Google Play and other services.
- Ads appear in prominent locations throughout the Google ecosystem. Their exact placement depends on the quality of the ad, the amount you bid, and other factors.
- Google Ads is one of the most progressive digital advertising platforms with AI. Built-in artificial intelligence algorithms automatically select the most relevant advertising formats for Google Search, YouTube, Discover, and other resources, ensuring the highest conversion.
- Targeting settings allow you to flexibly adapt campaigns to your target audience by specifying restrictions on demographics, geolocation, or interests.
- Conversion tracking provides actionable insights into your audience, while automated budget optimization and recommendations maximize your ROI.
- Google Ads offers different pricing models: pay-per-click (PPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), or cost per action (CPA). This allows you to choose the right model for different goals and budgets.
- Detailed campaign performance reports allow you to track a wide range of metrics, from views and clicks to conversions.
The cost of advertising in Google Ads depends on a number of factors: the industry of the business, current trends, the customer life cycle, and so on. The average cost per click (CPC) in 2024 ranges from $1 to $2 for the Google Search Network. For the Google Display Network, it is less than $1.
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Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is one of the social media advertising platforms. The ads placed through it are shown to the audience of one of the most popular social networks on the internet (about 2.1 billion daily active users).
Key features:
- The platform supports various formats of advertising publications: Image Ads, Video Ads, Carousel Ads, Collection Ads, Instant Experience Ads, Poll Ads, Slideshow Ads, Messenger Ads, Stories Ads, and Lead Ads.
- Advanced targeting functionality allows you to customize ad delivery based on a variety of audience parameters: age, gender, geolocation, life events, interests and hobbies, purchase history, devices used, contacts, and so on.
- Facebook Ads is called one of the best online ad platforms for its convenience. It allows you to get results from your Facebook and Instagram campaigns through a single dashboard, as well as manage and track them.
- The platform integrates with third-party systems in a couple of clicks without the need for coding skills. Once you set up the necessary connections, you can automatically collect audience data from Google Tag Manager, WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce.
- The Creative Hub template library allows advertisers to test different ad campaign formats, ad elements, and ad placements. Single image, video, and carousel ads are supported.
- Facebook Analytics collects data on individual campaign dimensions, providing valuable insights into user metrics, demographics, engagement metrics, page metrics, and more.
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LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads is considered one of the best advertising platforms for small businesses. With its help, companies and marketers effectively promote personal and corporate brands, advertise products and services, communicate, expand their presence, and strengthen the trust of the audience.
Key features:
- Platform users can place different types of advertising here. Sponsored content – posts marked as promoted. Message ads – mailings in personal messages. Text ads – advertising blocks on LinkedIn pages. Dynamic ads – profile promotion. Lead gen forms – forms for collecting data. And this is not a complete list.
- In addition to promoting your brand and products, LinkedIn Ads offers other opportunities for businesses. These include creating company pages and industry communities, posting job openings, sharing useful content, and more.
- Thought leader ads are one of the newest advertising formats available to platform users. They help promote content from top managers of companies or authoritative professionals among subscribers of a page or community. The presence of this format distinguishes LinkedIn Ads from other ad platforms.
- When preparing a campaign, users can choose one of the goals they want to achieve. “Awareness” involves familiarizing the audience with the brand or product. “Attention” includes website visits, video views, likes, comments, reposts, and so on. “Conversions” focuses on lead generation, registrations, purchases, subscriptions, and job posting responses.
The minimum budget for any campaign format on LinkedIn Ads is $10 per day. To start a new campaign or renew an inactive campaign, you must have at least $100 in your account.
Instagram Ads
Instagram Ads is confidently and consistently included in the list of best online advertising platforms. This service is designed to manage advertising campaigns in the second most popular social network after Facebook (in the SMM industry). Businesses advertise brands and products here among a predominantly young audience, whose age ranges from 25 to 34 years.
Key features:
- Instagram Ads offers a range of advertising formats. Photo ads – paid placement of photos and pictures in the target audience feed. Video ads – advertising videos up to 60 seconds long. Stories ads – paid placement in Instagram Stories. Carousel ads – an advertising post with a series of images or videos.
- The platform allows you to promote products and services not only in the main content feed but also through the Shopping ads tool. With its help, users view products with photos, descriptions, and characteristics directly in the application, after which they can go to the seller's website to place an order.
- Instagram Boost allows you to promote your published posts. Before launching a campaign, you need to create a Business or Creator account and select a goal: more profile visits, more website visits, or more messages (including via WhatsApp).
- The Meta Ads Manager tool provides maximum possibilities. One example is an extended list of goals: attention, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, sales.
The average Instagram Ads spend in 2024 is $0.00–$0.25 per click, $0.00–$4.00 per 1,000 impressions, and $0.03–$0.08 per engagement.
Pinterest Ads
The popular social network with visual content offers advertisers its own advertising platform, Pinterest Ads. Using its tools, they can publish photos and videos of promoted products or services to a wide audience – more than 500 million active users per month.
Key features:
- The platform offers a number of interesting advertising formats. Standard pins are image posts marked as promoted. Video pins are short videos with product reviews or storytelling. Carousel ads are posts with a series of images. Shopping pins are ads with direct links to products. Collections are ads with product collections. Quiz pins are quiz posts.
- To launch advertising, you need to register a business account, go to the business hub menu, and select “Create a campaign”.
- The platform offers two formats for creating campaigns: manual and automatic. The second option is ideal for beginners using Pinterest Ads, while the first allows you to more accurately select goals, targeting, and bids.
- There are only two goals to choose from for automatic campaigns: conversion and attention. With manual settings, their number increases significantly. They are supplemented by brand awareness, video views, conversions, catalog sales, and more.
Pinterest Ads is one of the paid advertising platforms. Access to them is provided for free, but a budget is required to run campaigns. According to advertiser surveys, their average advertising costs in Pinterest Ads in 2024 are $0.10 per click, $2 per conversion, and $1.50 per 1,000 impressions.
Bottom Line
The top advertising platforms presented in our article offer a wide range of advertising formats and powerful analytics tools that allow flexible tracking of campaign targets. One of their most useful features is retargeting. It allows you to track your audience across platforms using personalized ads or messages. To achieve maximum advertising efficiency, experts recommend not limiting yourself to one service. Advertisers should combine campaigns on several platforms, choosing sites with the most relevant audience for their brand or product.