Online advertising has become an essential part of modern-day marketing strategies. With the rise of digital media consumption, businesses of all sizes are turning to online advertising to reach their target audience. Online advertising on self-serve platforms allows advertisers to create and manage their ad campaigns through user-friendly interfaces.
These platforms offer a range of benefits that traditional advertising cannot match, making them a popular choice for businesses seeking to maximize their online presence. So in today’s post, we’ll discuss 7 of the most important benefits you should know about advertising in self-serve platforms.
By the end of this read, you’ll be convinced about leveraging it for your marketing campaigns and be on your way to generating more leads and sales for your business.
Let’s get right to it.
Why Should You Try Self-Serve Online Advertising Platforms?
Self-serve online advertising platforms have become increasingly popular in recent years, and for good reason. These platforms allow your business to create and manage your digital advertising campaigns without an advertising agency or specialized knowledge in the field. Here are a few reasons why you should consider trying self-serve online advertising platforms:
First, these platforms are incredibly user-friendly and offer a range of features that make it easy to create and launch your advertising campaigns. Second, self-serve online advertising platforms can be more cost-effective than traditional advertising methods. Thirdly, these platforms provide a high level of transparency and control over your advertising campaigns.
But that’s just a quick overview of why you should leverage self-serve advertising platforms. Let’s delve deeper into each one.
7 Proven Benefits Of Self-Serve Advertising Platforms
Benefit 1: User-friendly Interface
Self-serve advertising platforms are designed to be easy to use, even for users with no specialized knowledge or experience in advertising like those in the dog training industry or cleaning services firms whose expertise is far off from tech. This is achieved through intuitive navigation, step-by-step guides, and drag-and-drop interfaces.
Self-serve advertising platforms provide templates for ad creation. These templates allow you to quickly and easily create ads without the need for specialized design skills. You can choose from a variety of ad formats and customize them with your own branding, text, and images.
Another way that self-serve advertising platforms offer user-friendly interfaces is through audience targeting options. Most platforms allow users to target their ads to specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. Simple drop-down menus and checkboxes make it easy for users to select the audience they want to reach.
In addition to these features, self-serve advertising platforms typically offer real-time previews of ads, so you can see what their ads will look like before they go live. They also provide analytics and reporting tools that are easy to understand, allowing you to track ad performance and make informed decisions about future campaigns.
Having a user-friendly interface doesn’t just eliminate the need for specialized knowledge or skills to save time and money, it also helps your business be more agile and responsive to changing market conditions, as they can quickly create and modify ads as needed. It makes digital advertising more accessible and approachable while also providing the tools and features necessary to create effective campaigns.
Benefit 2: Cost-effective
Self-serve advertising platforms can be more cost-effective than traditional advertising methods. With it, you can set your own budget and bid on ad placements, giving you more control over advertising spend. Additionally, since you manage your own campaigns, you can avoid agency fees and markups.
With these platforms, you get more flexibility in setting the budget. This means you can choose how much you want to spend on advertising and adjust it as necessary. This level of control allows you to allocate your advertising budget more effectively, ensuring you get the most value for your money.
As for bid on ad placements, you can optimize your advertising spend by targeting your ads to the most relevant audience, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI).
Another advantage of self-serve advertising platforms is that you can avoid agency fees and markups. When working with an advertising agency, you typically pay fees for the agency’s services, as well as any markups on the cost of advertising. By managing their own campaigns, you can avoid these additional costs and put the advertising budget towards actual ad placements.
Additionally, these platforms often provide performance metrics and analytics that can help you optimize your campaigns for maximum ROI. This means you can make informed decisions about how to adjust their campaigns to achieve better results without having to rely on expensive agency consultants.
Benefit 3: Higher Control And Transparency
Self-serve advertising platforms allow you to manage your own campaigns, giving you complete control over advertising spend, targeting, and ad placement. With these platforms, you can manage your campaigns in real time. You can adjust your targeting, messaging, and ad placement as necessary, giving you greater control. This means that you can make decisions about advertising campaigns based on real-time data you’ve gathered yourself.
In addition to providing increased control, self-serve advertising platforms also provide greater transparency. You’ll see exactly where your ads are placed, how much you are paying for each placement, and how your ads are performing. These platforms provide a level of transparency that is often lacking in traditional advertising methods.
This increased transparency allows you to optimize your campaigns for better results. By analyzing the performance data provided by self-serve advertising platforms, you can make better decisions about how to adjust your campaigns to achieve better ROI. For example, if an ad is performing poorly in a certain geographic region, businesses can adjust their targeting to exclude that region and focus on areas where the ad is performing well.
These platforms often provide tools for A/B testing and optimization, allowing you to experiment with different ad formats, messaging, and targeting to find the combination that works best for your target audience, something not possible with traditional advertising methods.
Benefit 4: Access To Advanced Targeting Capabilities
These platforms use advanced algorithms to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behavior, allowing your business to reach your target audience more effectively.
Self-serve advertising platforms offer a wide range of targeting options, so you can tailor your advertising campaigns to specific audiences. For example, you can target users based on their age, gender, location, interests, and even their past online behavior. This level of targeting granularity allows your business to create highly personalized advertising campaigns that are more likely to resonate with your target audience.
This is especially helpful for businesses offering their services to super-targeted audiences like this industrial autonomous vehicle solutions firm that’s only interested in showing ads to companies that need inventory and mobility solutions for their products. It should exclude small-scale businesses that won’t need warehouse solutions.
In addition to demographic and interest-based targeting, self-serve advertising platforms also offer advanced targeting capabilities like retargeting and lookalike targeting. Retargeting allows you to target users who have previously interacted with their brand, like by visiting the website or adding items to their cart. This allows your brand to stay top-of-mind with potential customers and increases the chances of converting them into paying customers.
Lookalike targeting, on the other hand, allows you to target users who have similar characteristics to their existing customer base. By analyzing user data, you can identify users who are most likely to be interested in your products or services and target them with relevant ads.
Furthermore, self-serve advertising platforms often provide real-time metrics and analytics so you can monitor their campaigns and make adjustments as necessary. By analyzing the performance of their ads, businesses can identify which targeting options are most effective and adjust their campaigns accordingly.
Benefit 5: Real-time Analytics
Another key benefit of self-serve advertising platforms is the availability of real-time analytics. These platforms provide you with immediate access to advertising campaign performance data, allowing you to make informed decisions about how to optimize campaigns for better results.
With it, you’ll see exactly how your ads are performing, including metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions. Since the data is available in real time, you can monitor campaigns and make adjustments on the go.
It also provides historical data and analytics so you can track the campaign performance over time, identifying trends and patterns that can affect future advertising strategies.
Here are a few of the key metrics they can provide:
I. Cost per click (CPC)
This is a metric that determines the actual cost of your ad’s CPC. You can calculate it using this formula:
CPC = Total cost of your clicks / total number of clicks
CPC is not calculated solely to understand how much you’re earning per click on your ads. It’s also helpful in comparing the performance of your ad campaigns against competitors.
II. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
This metric can help you make a smart decision on where to invest your ad budget. You can calculate your ad campaign ROAS by dividing the revenue by your company’s advertising costs.
For example, you spend $1,000 on your online advertising campaign and run it for one month. The campaign earned a revenue of $10,000 for the month’s duration.
Therefore, your ROAS has a ratio of 10:1 (you generate $10 for every dollar you spend on the ad campaign).
The ROAS ratio depends on your business goal. Some require a higher ratio like 10:1 to stay profitable, but others can consistently grow even at a 3:1 ratio.
Other than the listing fees, don’t forget to consider:
- Total number of clicks and impressions
- Commission fees from your affiliates, partners, and vendors
III. Conversion Rates
The conversion rate metric shows how well your campaigns are performing. It will calculate the total percentage of visitor interactions through your ads.
Here’s the standard formula you can follow:
Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions / Total number of unique visitors x 100
You can also measure the total number of sessions and leads by replacing the “total number of unique visitors” value. If you apply it to an eCommerce ad campaign, then the number of clicks and purchases must be the same (high).
If the click is higher, but the purchases are low, re-evaluate your landing page’s design, content, and helpdesk solutions.
Benefit 6: Increased Flexibility
Self-serve advertising platforms offer you increased flexibility with ad placement and campaign management. With self-serve platforms, you can adjust ad campaigns in real time, allowing you to respond quickly to changing market conditions.
You can choose where their ads are displayed, including specific websites, social media platforms, popup AI chats, and mobile apps. You can also adjust your ad placement as necessary, based on performance data.
Another way self-serve advertising platforms offer increased flexibility is through campaign management. You can set your budgets and adjust advertising spend as needed. You can also adjust their targeting, messaging, and ad creative in real-time, allowing you to optimize campaigns for better results.
With it, you can adapt to changing market conditions fast like when a competitor launches a new product or enters a new market, you can adjust their ad campaigns to stay competitive.
Benefit 7: Scalability
The scalability of self-serve advertising platforms is another significant benefit for you. These platforms can scale with the needs of your business, providing increased capacity and functionality as it grows.
As it scales, its advertising needs are likely to change. With a self-serve advertising platform, you can start small and gradually increase your advertising spend and complexity over time. These platforms offer a range of advertising options, including display ads, social media advertising, search engine marketing, and more, so you can scale advertising efforts as needed.
If your business is growing fast like this solar lead company catering to a country-wide audience, then you would need self-serve advertising platforms. Because it is quick and easy to implement you can keep up with your marketing growth easily. You can quickly add new advertising channels, increase advertising spend, and adjust targeting and messaging to reach new audiences.
It also allows you to test new advertising strategies without committing a significant amount of resources. You can test new ad creative, messaging, and targeting strategies on a small scale before increasing your efforts. This allows you to optimize your campaigns for better results without incurring a significant cost.
Now that you know the benefits of self-serve advertising platforms, you’ll want to know more about the platforms you can leverage. That’s what we’ll cover next.
3 Examples Of Self-Serve Advertising Platforms
There are several types of self-serve online advertising platforms you can use. I’ve listed the most recommended options:
A. Build-your-own Self-serve Ad Platform
Most people often use commercial software or an online platform to get started. But thanks to the current technology, you can now build and host your own self-serve advertising platform.
Setting up a self-service platform isn’t an easy feat.
You would need a deep understanding of the following:
- Market behavior
- Different types of ad formats
- A/B testing (know how to use)
- Data integration and targeting: Own, third-party, and publisher-provided data
- Ad campaign performance: Learn all metrics that can prove the ads’ value
- Scalability and relevancy: How many third-party suppliers to integrate and ad campaigns the platform can handle
Don’t forget to research all reliable service providers so that you can choose the best host for your self-serve ad platform.
Keep it simple and advertiser-focused to ensure ease of use. You can get an idea from the most successful self-serve ad platforms, like Amazon, Google Adwords, and Facebook.
If app-building isn’t your cup of tea, you can hire a software developer, web designer, or other field experts to help you develop the self-serve ad platform.
B. Social Media Self-serve Ad Platforms
Social media platforms reshape the way businesses operate and promote their products. It allows you to build a community where you can share relevant content and personalized messages with your target audience.
A Statista survey proves that its popularity will continue to grow as the number of social media users increases.
In choosing a social media self-serve ad platform, consider where your target audience stays the most.
B.1 Facebook
Facebook may be old, but it remains the strongest choice because it offers self-serve advertising solutions suitable for all levels of expertise.
It also has the largest audience globally (2.91 billion, according to DataReportal).
One of its many advantages is the scope of the network. When you order ads, it will display the ads on all the places they serve:
- Messenger
- Publisher network
Its system cannot control the ads’ performance. However, they can determine the ads’ placement, position, and size. When you create an ad, you can choose any of the available ad formats:
- Image – Still, panoramas, and 360 photos
- Video – MP4, MOV, GIF, and 360 video
- Carousel – 10 images or videos per single ad (maximum)
- Collection – Consists of a cover (video or image) and three product images
B.2 Spotify Ad Studio
Spotify’s self-serve advertising platform is the best you can get for running audio and video ad campaigns. It only takes four simple steps to get started.
You can target your audience based on their activities, demographics, locations, and interests. Spotify Ad Studio can help you reach targeted listeners.
C. eCommerce platforms
Online shopping isn’t a new concept. However, its popularity skyrocketed only after the pandemic hit.
This opens an excellent opportunity for businesses to boost their income, particularly those who closed their physical shops amidst the pandemic. Since consumers want complete control over their shopping experience – from researching to receiving the products, self-serve advertising is helpful.
But before you can get started, you first need to establish trust.
Gaining trust from prospects and existing customers is not child’s play. But you can start by providing the utmost convenience and transparency.
C.1 Amazon DSP (Demand-Side Platform)
Amazon’s popularity is undeniable. Buyers patronize it because they offer a broader selection of products, free shipping for Prime members, and many other benefits.
Sellers can do great on this platform. To further make their life easier to promote the products, the company offered its demand-side platform called Amazon DSP. Its software provides centralized and fully automated media buying from various sources.
The ads you can purchase are:
- Video ads
- Audio ads
- Display ads
One of its two options is self-service.
Aside from complete control over your campaigns, another advantage is it doesn’t charge management fees. If you want to create your ads, you can use the video creative builder and eCommerce creatives.
Once everything is set, the ads will be displayed on all of Amazon’s platforms (owned and affiliated).
C.2. Yelp for Business
Product reviews heavily impact consumers’ purchasing decisions. That happens where Yelp shines because it works by publishing crowd-sourced reviews about products, hotel recommendations, and businesses.
That’s why most sellers chose Yelp for business to promote their products.
Compared to Amazon, Yelp’s self-serve option is simpler to setup:
- Set a budget
- Customize the ad’s design
- Set the ad’s target location (Custom Location Targeting) to ensure the ads will only appear around your business areas.
If you’re always on the go, you can use its mobile ads dashboard to review all the campaigns’ performances.
Conclusion
If you still aren’t leveraging self-serve advertising platforms yet, now is the best time to do it. Because it is user-friendly, you can avoid agency consultancy costs and budget wasted from the non-targeted audience. Additionally, since it comes with real-time analytics, you can make better decisions not just on how much to spend but also where to spend them.
While we only mentioned the 7 best benefits, the advantages are actually endless, something you’d only realize if you test these platforms out yourself. Sometimes though, the links they provide are just too long. Do you find that annoying?
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