Complete Social Media Ads Guide 2024
Organic social media marketing is still viable, but to reach new audiences, convert leads, and target ideal users, social media advertising can help your brand reach new heights and stand out online.
However, with the plethora of social media platforms and advertising types available, businesses must do the research before investing in paid advertising.
Benefits of Advertising on Social Media
- Convert leads into customers: Social media ads target users who are more likely to be interested in your brand, thus increasing the likelihood of converting leads into paying customers.
- Customize campaigns to target your ideal audience: Ad platforms have highly customizable campaign features that allow you to segment and target users most aligned with your brand, maximizing your investments.
- Attract users with engaging content: Using attractive images, videos, and storytelling entices viewers and portrays your brand story. This allows content to stand out and make a splash online.
- Access insights to monitor performance: Track impressions, reach, and ROI in real-time to optimize campaigns and shift strategies, such as moving budgets to best-performing ads.
Best Social Media Platforms to Advertise On
Before advertising on social media, brands must understand which platforms match their target audience, goals, budget, and campaign assets. Each platform differs in demographics, cost, and format.
Here are the top social media platforms to advertise regarding usage, preference, and influence.
According to Statista, Facebook is the leading social media platform for marketing, with 90% of surveyed marketing experts saying they prefer Facebook due to its extensive global user base.
From our 2024 Facebook Ads Study, we found that 42.4% of the analyzed campaigns were used to increase audience engagement and interactions.
Brand awareness campaigns achieve the highest impressions, while traffic campaigns generate the most clicks, with an average CTR of 1.51%. The average CPC (Cost-Per-Click) per Facebook ad campaign is $0.075. App promotion campaigns have the highest average CPC (US $0.32) while traffic generation campaigns have the lowest CPC ($0.04). App Promotion campaigns have the highest average investment cost, $1,856.64 spent per campaign.
Facebook’s advertising formats include photos, videos, stories, messenger, carousels, slideshows, collections, and payables. Depending on your offer, brands can include clickable links to shop in-app, offering a seamless buying experience.
While videos, stories, and carousels can tell a brand story in an immersive way, slideshows, collections, and images can showcase products. Playable ads offer an interactive preview before downloading an app.
For a beginning tutorial on how to run ads on Facebook, read this guide below:
Instagram’s sisterhood with Facebook under Meta makes this platform useful for social media advertising. Over 97% of marketers use Instagram and more than half of US marketers use Instagram Reels for influencer marketing.
Instagram ads can reach 31.4% of total internet users while reaching 20.3% of the world’s population. The average CPC on Instagram is $1.23, while the average CTR (Click-through rate) rate sits at around 0.9%. The average CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions) is $6.70.
Ad formats on Instagram include images, videos, carousels, Stories, Reels, Collections, Explore, and Shopping. The ability to showcase products and shop in-app allows brands to sell directly on the platform.
Plus, brands can create shops to feature products on their profile. As mentioned above, influencer marketing thrives on Instagram. Many brands have started using influencers and celebrities to promote products to their followers.
Marketers can run Instagram and Facebook ads through Meta Ads Manager, Meta’s marketing and advertising hub. Additionally, Metricool’s ads platform offers advertising across Facebook and Instagram simultaneously, with the option to boost posts directly from the Analytics dashboard. To learn more about Instagram ads, read this guide:
LinkedIn, a professional social media network, is not normally viewed as an advertising platform. However, ad exposure on LinkedIn can result in a 33% increase in purchase intent, while conversion ads can drive 4x the engagement compared to traditional email and 2x as much as message ads.
The average CPC for LinkedIn ads is $5.39, significantly higher than Instagram and Facebook. This could be due to heightened demand during 2023. Advertising on LinkedIn can also boost a brand’s credibility and authority, with a Nielsen study finding that brands were perceived to be “more professional” (92%), “more intelligent” (74%), “higher quality” (59%), and “more respectable” (59%) when their ad was seen on the LinkedIn platform.
LinkedIn ad formats include single images, carousels, videos, text, dynamic, message, conversation, event, document, thought leader, display, and InMail ads. Find a guide to LinkedIn’s ad formats, including objectives, specs, and requirements here.
Advertisements on LinkedIn can range from downloadable resources, to event sign ups, and videos sharing thought leadership information. Learn how to run LinkedIn ad campaigns below:
X (Twitter)
Despite app usage declines, X (Twitter) is still a powerful platform for advertising. X has worked to improve their AI capabilities to improve ad relevance and reduce time in building campaigns. In beta testing, the AI-powered Optimized Targeting feature saw an average increase of 10% in click-through rates and 16% in conversion rates.
X ad formats include images, videos, carousels, text, dynamic products, collections, amplify, takeovers, and live ads. X states that using 3 or more ad formats increases campaign awareness by 20% and purchase intent by 7%. View the full list of X ad formats and descriptions here.
X users are 7x more likely to engage with a vertical ad compared to the same ad on their Home Timeline. While it’s clear video ads are favored on the network, ads like X Amplify, Takeovers, and Live campaigns allow brands to leverage their presence across Timeline and Explore tabs, placing their brand at the top of conversations.
WebFX found that 53% of businesses spend $101 – $500 per month on X advertising, and 51% of businesses allocate 6% – 30% of their overall advertising budget to X ads.
Known for its aesthetic and inspirational setting, Pinterest ads are 2.3x more cost-effective per conversion than other social media advertising platforms. Considering this is also a search engine platform, Pinterest drives 10x higher off-platform branded searches, compared to other social media sites. When Pinterest users find a new brand or product, they are ready to take action.
Brands can utilize trending content, topics, and focuses to leverage their advertisements. For example, sustainable messaging on Pinteret ads were 2.4x more likely to drive action compared to non-sustainable messaging campaigns.
Pinterest ad formats include carousels, collections, idea pins, images, premiere spotlights, quizzes, showcases, and video ads.
Pinterest brands that use both Catalogs and Pinterest Shopping Ads saw a 15% increase in their ROAS compared to those who did not use both.
YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google, making this platform a massive advertising hub. Brands can advertise across Google and YouTube simultaneously, with the potential to reach 2.56 billion users around the world.
YouTube ad formats include skippable video, non-skippable in-stream, in-feed videos, bumper, masthead, YouTube Shorts, and Outstream ads. YouTube campaigns can be set up through Google Ads. With the addition of Performance Max campaigns (PMAX), brands can utilize AI and smart bidding to create targeted ads on YouTube, in less time.
YouTube is another platform where influencer marketing thrives, with 59% of Gen Alpha wanting to buy the products their favorite YouTube or Instagram influencers use.
Before launching any ad campaigns, a strategy should always be in place. Read this YouTube Ads strategy guide to build your strategy from scratch:
TikTok
TikTok is the last major social media platform extremely compatible with social media ads. Partnering with a TikTok influencer or creator can boost a brand’s advertising view-through rate by 193%. Considering nearly 50% of Gen Z prefer TikTok and Instagram as a search engine over Google, brands can be discovered t
Our 2024 TikTok Ads Study found that TikTok traffic campaigns receive the highest percentage of clicks, with over 67%, while ad campaigns to increase video views get the highest number of impressions out of all objectives.
The average cost-per-click across all ad campaign types is $0.22, with video view campaigns having the highest average CPC at $6.08, and the highest average investment at $2,537.94 per campaign.
TikTok ad formats include in-feed videos, TopView videos, brand takeovers, branded hashtags, branded effects, and Spark ads. The variety of advertising formats allows brands to get creative with promotions beyond selling a simple product or service.
TikTok users have the highest rate of impulse buying, and the ease of in-app purchases and the Shopping tab feeds the fire. This platform also has the highest engagement rate of social media platforms at $2.65%.
Manage Social Media Ads with Metricool
After reviewing these ad platforms and their formats, which platforms are you choosing to advertise on? While there are no right or wrong answers, each platform is designed to present brands differently.
As you develop your advertising strategy, it’s important to manage your campaigns and monitor your results. Each platform offers native campaign insights, however, if you run campaigns across multiple platforms this can become overwhelming.
That’s why we recommend using Metricool to manage your campaigns. Metricools ad platform allows you to run campaigns across Meta and Google placements and analyze your campaign performance, with an easy-to-use, intuitive platform. View a list of your active campaigns to monitor results in real time.
Metricool users can also connect their TikTok Ads account to monitor results and track impressions, clicks, conversions, CPM, CPC, CTR, and a list of top-performing campaigns.
Within Metricool’s platform, users can also boost Instagram and Facebook posts for eligible posts, in just two steps. Creating a Metricool account and building advertising campaigns on the platform is completely free!
Create your free account, and for more information about advertising on the platform, make sure to watch this tutorial:
