10 Alternatives To Google and Facebook Ads
1: Your most engaged audience may be spending more time on other platforms. For example, many argue that business professionals are most open to business-related ads when they are on LinkedIn, a platform targeted specifically at them.
2: Showing your audience across multiple platforms complements the ads you show on Google and Facebook. The online shopping funnel is more confusing than ever.
3: You may need to remind the consumer about your product 10-20 times before they make a purchase. You increase your chances of being seen by them more often if you advertise them across all the platforms they use.
4: You minimize risk. Google and Facebook have had their share of disagreements when it comes to brand safety (especially when you pair YouTube with Google).
5: Platform extension allows you to rely more on one platform when another platform has brand security, technical or other issues.
Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft ads formerly known as Bing Ads include the search inventory of two other well-known search engines: AOL and Yahoo.
While Yahoo, AOL and Bing are much less used than their Google counterpart, they still have valuable users that can only be found on these systems and their syndicated search partners.
In March 2018 Microsoft Advertising had a 34% share of the US PC market with 6 billion monthly searches.
Even more remarkable in terms of your brand's incremental growth, Bing web audience includes 60 million PC users not available on Google, according to comScore cited by Microsoft.
Microsoft Ads usually have lower CPC compared to Google ads, but this fact usually results in less traffic compared to Google ads.
Quora
As stated by JD Prather, Quora Advertising Evangelist Quora is a unique, high-end advertising platform ideal for engaging customers as they evaluate and explore a product or service.
People come to Quora to ask questions, read and share interesting answers. This includes people who are looking for reliable information about your company, products, competitors and industry.
This allows advertisers to influence people at the stage of considering the purchase of a particular product.
Content on Quora is organized in the form of questions and answers. The question is tagged with one or more topics (for example, small businesses or startups).
With Quora ads, you can target the content on Quora (contextual targeting ) or target specific people based on behavior (People-Based Targeting or Behavioral Targeting).
In terms of reach, Quora currently has over 300 million monthly unique visitors worldwide.
AdRoll
AdRoll is a well-known and widely used retargeting platform. AdRoll reaches audiences on Google, Facebook, Instagram and over 500 leading networks and exchanges. According to the Adroll website, their clients get a 5x return on ad spending on average.
AdRoll also offers other products besides simple retargeting. These include search (programmatic display) email retargeting, and AdRoll video ads. AdRoll video ads are now available for both retargeting and search campaigns and can run both in-stream and out-of-stream.
Amazon
Amazon accounted for 53% of all US E-commerce sales in 2021 and is projected to account for 80% or more of the market by 2023.
The marketing platform alone accounts for $7 billion of the North American advertising market and the global market is expected to reach $45 billion by 2023.
If you are an e-commerce business you should consider Amazon as your brand. That being said, according to the Forbes article Amazon is a gamble for small and medium businesses so make sure you familiarize yourself with the cons of this platform before you get started.
As the stats above suggest Amazon is a breakthrough in E-commerce and should not be ignored. If you are ready to invest in Amazon you should know that their latest promotional products include:
Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Multi-Page Stores. In addition, Amazon also offers display ads, video ads, custom ads, and ads on the Amazon DSP (demand-side platform).
You will need to decide if you want to sell products directly to Amazon customers or if you want to ship them to Amazon which then sells your products to customers. In the first case you will use Seller Central.
With the help of the latteryou will advertise through Vendor Central. For more information on running Amazon ads on either of these two platforms check out the guide to running Amazon Ads by the Hanapin team.
Quantcast
Quantcast has always touted its audience dataset and analysis to generate new, untapped media audiences for marketers. Increase visits and income to your site.
Quantcast offers a free data and audience analysis tool called Quantcast Measure, which helps advertisers build their strategy and learn about the behaviors and personalities of their audiences as well as those of competitors.
Quantcast also offers its paid advertising solution, which is a real-time search and retargeting-focused software solution.
It's worth noting that Quantcast also offers control platforms called Quantcast Choice and Choice Premium. Although it is not an advertising platform it is certainly a useful tool for every brand that needs to comply with the GDPR.
BuySellAds
BuySellAds is by far one of the largest networks that you can use to effectively distribute your banner ads all over the internet.
They have a huge client list, according to the BuySellAds team, with over 4,500 advertisers running their own, display, electronic and sponsored content placements.
It is a user-friendly marketplace with transparent processes that provides a good selection of high-quality sites, especially in the IT and tech niches.
info links
Infolinks is a marketplace that uses user intent and real-time interaction to distribute ads. Infolinks is the third-largest publisher marketplace in the world and operates in 128 countries.
Since its founding in 2007 Infolinks has expanded its products and ad units to focus on bringing relevant ads in real-time based on what and where the user is looking for.
There are now 6 types of ad units to choose from compared to the original four.
- in Article: the expanded ad that the user sees
- in Search section above the results
- on Page: highlighting the main ad unit
- in Text: native ads presented in the text of the page
- in Keywords: display valuable keywords based on page content
While Instagram is owned by Facebook, Instagram audience composition and growth trajectory are markedly different. Instagram popularity is higher among teenagers.
According to a 2018 Pew Research Center study 72% of US teens say they use Instagram while only 51% say they use Facebook.
In another study Pew found that since the Pew study in 2016 Instagram popularity among US adults has increased by 7 percent from 28% to 35%. Facebook visits remained unchanged over the same time.
In addition to these differences Instagram ads are more visually oriented. As they say on their website “Instagram ads appear in a highlighted format in the center of the feed.” Visual appeal is critical to Instagram ad success, so make sure your brand's creative team has your back before launching an Instagram ad account.
If your company is B2B. LinkedIn is the first advertising platform you should test. LinkedIn offers business targeting options ranging from job-specific targeting to ABM (Account-Based Marketing) targeting specific businesses.
According to numerous studies and surveys from LinkedIn Audience 360 to Salesforce Advertising Index Report 2016 LinkedIn is the #1 B2B lead generation platform by marketers.
Over 610 million professionals use LinkedIn, and 4/5 of them make business decisions.
There are three types of ads on LinkedIn: Sponsored Content and Sponsored Email and text ads.
Within these categories, LinkedIn recently expanded its creative types to include video, giving B2B advertisers a new opportunity to tell their brand story on the most professional social advertising platform.
According to the 2016 Kleiner Perkins Internet Trends Report, a whopping 55% of users shop on Pinterest.
To put this statistic in perspective, note that the next largest platforms in this analysis are Facebook and Instagram at 12% each.
Buy intent is very high, but just like with Instagram, your creativity is key. If you want to capture the attention of your audience on Pinterest you need to make sure your creative team has the time and resources to create high-quality images or videos for Pinterest pins.
conclusions
As you can see there are many alternatives to Google and Facebook ads that will diversify your marketing mix.
By integrating more channels into your daily advertising strategy you will reach a larger audience, build a funnel, increase sales over time and gain points of contact across all types of networks on the Internet (search engines, app stores, marketplaces, advertising, social networks and more).
