Week 5: Paid Advertising Platforms

Welcome to another week of my blog. If you were not here last week, I covered the importance of testing creatives for a long-term successful advertising campaign. Today I am going to take a look at the platform side. What are the different types of platforms where digital advertisers choose to spend their budget? 

Two of the largest types of advertising platforms are search engines and social media sites. The search engine market size in 2023 in the US was $242.8 billion (ibisworld.com). Advertising on search engines can be an extremely effective strategy. There is a reason Google is one of the largest companies in the world. The beauty of running paid advertisements on Google is that an advertiser can choose certain keywords or phrases to advertise. For example, if someone searches for the best computers, the first things that show up are products for sale from a variety of computer companies. There are other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo, but these are not nearly as popular advertising platforms. What makes advertisers choose to advertise on search engines is that they can advertise to high-quality potential customers who have already expressed interest in what they actually searched for. 

The other main type of advertising platform is social media. The social media market was $219 billion (thebusinessresearchcompany.com). Advertising on social media sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, and TikTok can be an effective way for advertisers to grow their businesses. The reason Meta (Facebook) is one of the largest companies in the world is because of how powerful their platform is for advertisers. Advertisers can target people with certain interests based on their social media usage. Additionally, because there are over 3 billion users on Facebook, the machine learning capabilities are endless. For example, even if an advertiser does not include many targeting options when they launch their Facebook campaign, the meta algorithm will still figure out which types of users are more likely to engage with the advertisement. Meta is the 7th largest company in the world, and Google is the 5th largest company in the world. And the reason for this is because of the power of their advertising platforms. Although there are other search engine platforms (such as Bing and Yahoo) and other social media platforms (Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter), Google and Meta are able to dominate the paid advertising market. Advertisers will choose to advertise on Google and Meta for different reasons, and a lot of the time they will choose to advertise on both platforms. In the next blog, I hope to dive deeper into these two platforms. Thanks, as always, for tuning in!