The Top 7 Online Advertising Platforms to Use in 2024
To compete as a business online is an uphill battle. This can consist of constructing a strategic inbound marketing strategy, implementing SEO practices to rank your web pages, attracting your target audience through valuable social media content, leading a potential customer down the selling funnel, and running online advertisements.
These are just a few of the many marketing efforts that businesses consider. While organic social strategies bring your customers to you, paid advertising is equally important to promote your campaigns. But, how do you know what online advertising platforms are right for your business? What are the top competing ad platforms?
Is Online Advertising Effective?
Online advertising has been and will continue to be an important marketing tool for businesses looking to grow their brand. This strategy can be extremely effective if your campaigns are optimized to align with your ideal target and niche audience.
Online advertising platforms have evolved to interpret various signals and inputs to display ads to the right audience, allowing businesses to maximize their efforts. However, for advertisement campaigns to work, brands need to understand their target audiences through and through. This includes researching the ideal clients’ pain points, interests, behaviors, locations, search intents, needs, etc.
Keyword research is crucial for aligning with what your target audience is looking for. There are many keyword research and SEO tools available to help businesses expedite the research process. To help facilitate this investigation, follow this keyword research and SEO guide for businesses:
7 Online Advertising Platforms for Businesses in 2024
Here are 10 of the largest online advertising platforms for digital marketers, social media managers, and agencies to carry out their paid advertising strategies. Keep in mind that each of these platforms differs in terms of demographics, monthly active users, behaviors, and trends.
Piggybacking off of that point, each brand and its audience is different. What may work for one brand may not be as effective for another. There is no one-size-fits-all, however, looking at the data and seeing what each platform has to offer will give you better insight.
Google Ads
It will come as a surprise that Google Ads is one of the leading online advertising platforms that businesses bet on for increased visibility, reach, and conversions. As the largest search engine in the world, 92.26% of global searches happen on Google. Following this statistic, 63% of users have clicked on a Google ad.
Google offers a variety of advertising placements to cover all your bases: Appear in Search ads, Display ads, Shopping ads, video ads, YouTube, and application ads. Plus, Google’s platform is always innovating, with features such as Smart Bidding and Performance Max campaigns, which use AI and machine learning to automatically optimize campaigns for advertisers.
When we are talking about conversions and campaign performance, Google Ads has an average ROI of 8:1, meaning that for every $1 a business invests in ads, they see a $8 return in profit. Also, the average click-through rate (CTR) on Search ads is 3.1-6%. This means that many users are utilizing the links to learn more about your business, indicating an interest and potential loyal customer.
Overall, Google Ads is an extremely powerful online advertising platform that allows businesses to position their web pages and campaigns to millions of users around the world.
Facebook Ads
With Meta now being an umbrella, hosting multiple social networks, this allows advertisers to create campaigns across multiple networks at once. This not only optimizes your campaign creation process but also your campaign reach. However, let’s focus on Meta’s largest advertising branch, Facebook ads.
With over 3 billion monthly active users, this platform has long been established as a leading source of news, staying updated with friends and family, and exploring new products, brands, or interests.
Focusing on the Facebook platform specifically, advertisements can be displayed in the Facebook feed, Marketplace, video feeds, the right column, Business Explore, Reels feed, in-stream videos, and Facebook search results.
From our 2024 Facebook Ads study we also found that brands and social media managers favor Engagement campaigns. Why is this? From our sample, we found that Interaction and Engagement campaigns have lower average budgets, while still generating a high level of impressions. On the other hand, if conversions are your goal, Traffic campaigns generate the highest CTR rates while having the lowest average CPC, of just $0.04.
Meta Ads Manager is a unified social media management tool for all Meta content and advertisements. For brands that want to maximize their Meta ads, this platform is a great option for total management. You can also create and manage your Facebook Ads campaign with Metricool, with in-depth campaign analytics to measure your success. If you want to learn more about managing your Facebook Ads with Metricool, follow the guide below:
Instagram Ads
Once again, Instagram is underneath the Meta family, therefore having similar functions and resemblances to Facebook ads. This is also a platform compatible with building strong brand recognition and awareness. And with the introduction of Instagram shopping, businesses can sell directly from the platform.
On Instagram, brands can run campaigns of all sizes and budgets, from boosting a post at $1 to running multi-platform campaigns. What ads can you find on Instagram? Placements include feed posts, Reels, Stories, Explore, and Shop.
This platform is letting brands tell their story, leading to more valuable conversions and lasting user relationships. Plus, the reachability of Instagram ads is impressive, with a total potential reach of 1.63 billion. You can also use Meta Ads Manager to create your Instagram ads, as well as run ad placements across Facebook and Instagram via Metricool.
LinkedIn Ads
As the leading professional social media network, LinkedIn Ads are very unique. When executing your advertising strategy on this platform, you need to keep the demographics, nature, and behaviors in mind. If your business is looking for B2B lead generation, this is your spot. 58% of marketers also say LinkedIn ads provide the best ROAs.
Our 2024 LinkedIn study revealed that the carousel format receives an average of 1,387 impressions per post, compared to an average of 703 impressions per image post, 672 per video post, and 589 per text post. Carousels also receive higher engagement ratios, clicks, and shares. LinkedIn users navigate toward educational, motivational, and inspiring content, the carousel format facilitates this professional storytelling.
What placements are available on LinkedIn ads? Placements include the following formats:
- Text ads
- Single image ad
- Carousel ad
- Video ad
- Single job ad
- Event ad
- Document ad
- Click-to-message ad
- Message ads
- Conversation ads
- Spotlight ad
- Jobs ad
- Follower ad
As you can see, LinkedIn ad placements include unique placements not available on other platforms, especially when promoting an open role for your company. This is also a great platform to generate event leads and increase registrations. You can also create targeted ads based on factors including company size, job title, education, etc.
While LinkedIn ads may be more expensive on average, generated leads are often of higher quality and more likely to convert for your business.
TikTok Ads
While TikTok’s ad platform hasn’t been around as long as other networks, such as Facebook, its creative capabilities and engaging nature make it a strong contender for running successful ad campaigns.
Even though TikTok’s reputation continues to be scrutinized in the United States, the truth is that 64% of Gen Z and 49% of Millenials are flocking to this app for information, product recommendations, and inspiration. TikTok’s dynamic algorithm allows brands to optimize their advertising campaigns using keywords, campaign objectives, and even an AI creative assistant.
Placements for TikTok Ads include in-feed ads, Following feed, Profile feed, ads in the Shopping Center, and search ads. TikTok Ads Manager is the network’s campaign management tool, allowing brands to centralize their TikTok ad efforts.
From our 2024 TikTok Ads study, we found that brands and social media managers favor video views and engagement campaigns. This is because these campaign types see the highest percentage of impressions, representing 46.7% of our total campaign sample. Driving traffic is also a popular ad campaign objective used on TikTok, which leads to higher clicks on average.
Overall, TikTok Ads allow brands to creatively promote their product or service while being able to tell their story, show their brand personality, and connect authentically with their audience.
Pinterest Ads
Pinterest is another platform that very much taps into a creative, visually appealing, and inspirational space. Similar to TikTok, it’s a powerful search engine for users to discover something new.
Whether you are showcasing your products, linking your latest blog post, or running creative video campaigns, you can display your Pinterest ads in front of the right audience with automated targeting, keywords, interests, demographics, and actalike audiences.
The possibilities for ad placements are also varied and include:
- Standard
- Video
- Idea
- Carousel
- Collections
- Shopping
- Showcase
- Quiz
Pinterest Ads Manager is the network’s advertising hub, providing creators and marketers with the necessary tools to optimize, manage, and measure ads in one place. Pinterest also has a multitude of resources and insights for those wanting to improve their marketing efforts on the platform.
X (Twitter) Ads
X (Twitter) can be beneficial for businesses due to its average low ad cost while having powerful discoverability. As Elon Musk pushes to make X an all-in-one platform, the advertising placements and formats are very diverse. These placements include promoted ads, vertical video ads, X amplify, dynamic product ads, and collection ads.
With X ads, brands can increase awareness, nurture audience relationships, and drive conversions. The native campaign dashboard includes insights on your ad performance and conversion tracking allows you to monitor sales from your ad.
X is a powerful advertising platform considering the platform’s strong establishment. According to X, there are 528.3 million mMAU, monetizable monthly active users. This proves to show that the range of businesses, opportunities, and visibility can help businesses run effective campaigns on this platform.
To learn more about X (Twitter) ads:
Online Advertising with Metricool
Metricool is an all-in-one social media and advertising management platform. This allows you to centralize your digital management in a single tool. Our social media planner allows you to schedule and auto-publish content across nine social media platforms. While your content rolls out, you can connect your Facebook and Google ads accounts to run and manage campaigns directly from the Metricool platform.
Then, measure the performance of your campaigns with Metricool’s social media analytics tool. Even automate and download reports with your advertising analytics including campaign impressions, reach, clicks, CPM, CPC, CTR, and a list of your top-performing ads. Create your FREE Metricool account and test out all that the platform has to offer:
