Reach Your Audience with Alternative PPC Platforms to Google Ads
Take a look as we detail the 11 alternative or additional PPC platforms to Google Ads that businesses can use to capture their audience’s attention.
When it comes to running a PPC campaign (paid search) the first platform that comes to mind is Google Ads. We all know that Google dominates the paid advertising industry – with Google accounting for 31.1% of worldwide ad spend.
However, this does not mean that other platforms should be forgotten about or underestimated. Social media alternative platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, allow you to target users by interests and online habits. But people who opt against using Google Ads are limiting their access to a massive amount of their target audience.
1. Facebook Ads
For businesses, Facebook is a gold mine of data and is full of highly targeted marketing opportunities.
Despite 3 million businesses actively advertising on Facebook, there are still many brands who try Facebook ads and fail to generate positive results and conversions. Now, 92% of marketers report that they are utilising Facebook advertising. With such a high level of competition (and potential), its vital businesses leverage the platform and beat their competitors to the punch.
Facebook advertising certainly has its strong points – but unlike Google Ads – intent isn’t always one of them. Not many people will visit Facebook specifically looking for a company’s latest product. Usually, they’ll visit their website directly for that.
2. Microsoft Ads (Bing)
Microsoft Ads often don’t get much attention because it’s just seen as ‘that other search engine’. While Google is undoubtably the most popular search engine, Bing is a bit of a dark horse with 2.45 % of the search engine market share worldwide.
Bing Ads operate essentially the same as Google Ads, meaning their pay-per-click advertisements appear alongside search results. Bing Ads operate a similar auction dynamic as the Google Ads auction – and with less competition on Bing comes better ad positions and cheaper costs per click.
Learn more: Why Bing Ads Are Worth Your Time
3. Pinterest
With Pinterest attracting more than 300 million users every month, the visual discovery engine could be an effective alternative to Google Ads.
Pinterest isn’t only used for new hair style inspiration or ideas for decorating a Birthday cake, there’s much more to it than that. It’s an incredibly influential platform for buying decisions and discovering new ideas.
Pinners (Pinterest users) are keen to learn more about brands and their products. To align with your marketing goal, Pinterest offers a range of ad forms.
- Promoted Pins: basic format with a single featured image
- Promoted Video Pins: visually engaging video format
- Promoted Carousels: a series of images that Pinners can swipe through
- Promoted App Pins: to encourage app downloads
4. YouTube Ads
YouTube is Google’s most popular service – with almost 1.8 billion monthly active users.
- YouTube has over a billion users, with more than 500 million hours of videos watched every day.
- They’re the second biggest search engine, after Google, of course.
Video marketing on
YouTube is definitely worth exploring – especially since 1/3 of online activity is spent watching video.
5. Amazon
Each month more than 197 million people across the world visit Amazon (which is more than the entire population of Russia). With so many people using Amazon’s platform, it begs the question why your business is not implementing Amazon Ads to attract website visits, drive brand awareness and generate sales.
Advertisers looking to boost their visibility on Amazon can pay for the best positions on Amazon SERPs to increase their product views and sales. Advertisers are then charged when a shopper clicks on their ad. Ads can also be displayed on individual product pages.
Display Ads are available to all businesses whether or not they sell products on Amazon. Customers can be directed do a custom landing page or even an external web page. Display Ads can appear on Amazon, Amazon owned / operated websites, third party websites and on Amazon devices.
Read More: Getting to Know Amazon Ads
6. Instagram
Did you know 80% of people remember what they see, compared to 20% remembering what they read and 10% what they hear?
With an unbelievable 800 million monthly active users and 500 million daily active users, the social media platform is the perfect place to deliver quality images and videos.
While Instagram is part of Facebook platforms, the ads mostly blend in like organic posts, which is one of the reasons why they’re so popular – it’s a great platform to engage customers who enjoy visual content.
7. Twitter
With 500 million tweets sent per day, it can be easy for a brand’s marketing on twitter to go unnoticed by their target audience. Twitter ads are designed to help you connect with your audience, generate results that drive conversions, and add value to your business.
Much like Facebook ads, Twitter ad campaigns are based on specific business objectives, so the first thing businesses need to do is decide their campaign objective to determine which engagement types and actions they will pay for.
Twitter offers a range of targeting options to help businesses reach the right audience for their ad and maximise their budget. Targeting options include:
- – Demographic: gender, age and language etc
- – Geographic: from postal code or country
- – Technology: target by device or carrier
- – Audience Features: target based on certain user characters like events, interests, behaviours, specific keywords and tv shows that users tweet about.
8. LinkedIn Ads
What really sets LinkedIn ad campaigns apart from other social media advertising platforms (Facebook / Instagram / Twitter) is their B2B targeting options. LinkedIn is an excellent platform for businesses to advertise to other businesses.
LinkedIn users are professionals who use the platform for several reasons. They could be interested in industry news, business events or just browsing professional topics. For your ads to be successful, they should feel like this style of content.
You can use real, member-generated demographic data to reach the right audience, target professionals using any of the following criteria and more:
- – Job title
- – Company
- – Industry
- – Education
- – Seniority
- – Interests
- – Company connections
Find out more: Should Your Business Run LinkedIn Ad Campaigns?
9. Infolinks
Infolinks is an advertising platform providing ad solutions for online advertisers. With their Self-Serve Marketplace, businesses can customise their campaign and deliver their brand message to targeted users. Infolink’s real-time targeting capabilities enables advertisers to engage their audience with intent-based advertisements:
- – InArticle: user-engagement expanding ads
- – InFold: ad placements above the fold
- – InFrame: display ads
- – InText: ads within the text of a webpage
- – InTag: display keywords related to the content with customisable ad units
10. AdRoll
You might not have heard of AdRoll – but they help brands generate $246 billion in sales every year.
AdRoll specialises in retargeting and multi-device display advertising and allows businesses to advertise on multiple channels from one platform.
Advertisers can reach their audience across a range of websites, devices, 1,000+ of AdRoll’s private marketplace deals and 500+ of their ad exchanges – including Google and Facebook.
11. Quora
The question-and-answer platforms allows users to freely ask and answers questions related to pretty much any topic or industry. Advertisers have the opportunity to influence people during the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey, whilst raising brand awareness and getting their business out there to Quora’s 300 million monthly active users.
Advertisers have the option to their target the content on Quora, known as contextual targeting, or target users based on behaviours and their activity on the platform.
What Alternative PPC Platform Is Right for You?
Google is an excellent platform – but there are plenty of other options businesses should make themselves aware about. Combining these ad platforms will give your business the best chance of successful paid advertisements.
Want to know which platform will help you reach your target audience? Contact Different Gravy Digital for a free, no obligation consultation and we will review what platform will help see the most success.
Book a meeting: michaelgoldman.co.uk/
Telephone: 0161 706 0004