The benefits of online ads and how they can help your online presence
Placing ads on high-traffic websites gets your message in front of a large audience quickly, in an environment people already trust, at a cost you set. Online advertising more broadly benefits a business in four ways that traditional media cannot match: you can target by intent and audience rather than by publication, measure every dollar to the enquiry it produced, start and stop within hours, and test messages against each other before committing budget.
How can digital advertising benefit my business?
Digital advertising puts your business in front of the people most likely to buy, at the moment they are looking, and tells you afterwards exactly what each enquiry cost. The specific benefits:
- Intent. Search ads show only when someone types a query. A person searching for an emergency plumber in Perth at 9pm is a lead, not an impression.
- Targeting. Social and display platforms let you choose who sees the ad by location, age, interests, job title and past behaviour, including people who have already visited your site.
- Measurement. Every click, call, form and sale can be tied back to the ad, the keyword and the audience that produced it, so the budget follows what works.
- Speed and control. Campaigns can be live within a day, paused in a minute, and scaled from a suburb to a country by changing a location setting.
Ads also produce traffic on the first day, while SEO and content are still building.
What are the advantages of placing ads on high-traffic websites?
The advantage is reach with context. A high-traffic site gives you volume, and if the site’s readership matches your customers you also get the halo of appearing next to content they came to read. News sites, industry publications, property portals and streaming services all sell this, either directly or through programmatic exchanges. The specific advantages:
- Volume on demand. Large audiences are available immediately, which matters for launches, events and sale periods.
- Trust and brand safety. Ads on a recognised publication borrow some of its credibility, and you know where the ad appeared.
- Premium formats. Homepage takeovers, in-article video and sponsored sections that smaller sites cannot offer.
The trade-off is that high traffic is not the same as the right traffic. A million visitors to a general news site includes a small fraction who need what you sell, and you pay for all of them. The modern answer is to buy the audience rather than the site: programmatic platforms reach the readers who match your customer profile across many sites at once. Our guide to the Google Display Network versus programmatic display explains the two routes.
The benefits of online advertising by channel
Each channel does a different job, and the combination matters more than any single one.
Search advertising
Search ads capture demand that already exists. They are the strongest channel for services people look for when they need them (trades, legal, medical, repairs, local retail) and for any product with a clear search term. You pay per click, and you can measure cost per enquiry from the first week.
Social advertising
Social ads create demand among people who were not searching. They reach audiences by interest, behaviour and life stage, carry video and image creative, and suit consumer brands, e-commerce, property and any business with a story to tell. They are also the cheapest way to build a retargeting audience.
Display, programmatic and video
Display ads (banners and rich media across websites and apps) are bought for reach, remarketing and brand awareness. Bought programmatically, they reach a defined audience across thousands of sites with one budget. They are rarely a direct-response channel on their own, but they lift the response rate of search and social. Video on YouTube, streaming services and connected TV adds television reach with digital targeting, and skippable formats charge only when someone chooses to watch.
What is the difference between native ads, sponsored content and display ads?
Native ads are paid placements that match the look of the content around them, sponsored content is an article or video you paid a publisher to produce or host, and display ads are the banners and boxes that sit in defined ad slots. Each is bought, labelled and measured differently.
Native ads are bought through ad platforms and shown as recommended articles, in-feed posts or promoted listings. They look like content, link to your page, are labelled as sponsored or promoted, and can run across many sites.
Sponsored content is a piece of content on one publisher’s site, produced with or by the publisher, that carries your brand. It stays on the site, is labelled as sponsored or paid partnership, and is bought as a single placement rather than through an auction.
Promotional PR and native news sit at the edge of this. Promotional PR is earned coverage a journalist chose to write. Native news is a paid article dressed as news. The label is what separates them, and a paid article should always be marked as paid.
Display ads versus banner ads. A banner is one kind of display ad: a fixed-size image or animation in a standard slot. Display is the broader category that also includes responsive ads that adapt to the space, video in a display slot, and rich media.
Rich media versus standard banners. A standard banner is a static or lightly animated image. A rich media ad expands, plays video or responds to the cursor inside the same slot. It costs more to build and serve, gets more attention, and suits brand campaigns more than direct response. Our earlier post on native ads, sponsored content, display and remarketing covers the remarketing side.
Is Google Ads programmatic advertising?
Google Ads is an auction-based platform for Google’s own inventory: Search, YouTube, Shopping and the Google Display Network. Programmatic advertising in the trade sense means buying impressions across many ad exchanges and publishers through a demand-side platform. Google Ads display campaigns are automated and auction-based, so they share the mechanics, but when a Perth media buyer says programmatic they usually mean buying across the open web through a demand-side platform.
For most Perth businesses Google Ads is the right place to start, because search intent is where the enquiries are. Programmatic display comes in when you need the open web, specific publishers, connected TV or audio, and it is one of the channels in PWD’s media buying service.
How effective is online advertising, and how do you judge it?
Online advertising is as effective as its measurement. Because every channel reports in detail, the question is never whether ads work but whether these ads are producing enquiries at a cost the business can afford. Judge that by objective: reach, frequency, viewable impressions and video completion for awareness campaigns, cost per qualified lead for lead generation, and return on ad spend and cost per purchase for e-commerce.
For a real estate business in Australia, the metrics that matter are cost per enquiry, cost per inspection booked, cost per appraisal request and the share of those that became listings or sales. Impressions and clicks do not tell you whether an agent got a listing. Property advertising also needs the tracking to separate buyer enquiries from vendor enquiries, because the two have very different values to the agency.
Two things undermine effectiveness on every channel: a landing page that does not match the ad, and invalid traffic. Bots and fake impressions inflate reach and clicks, and every platform filters some of it but none filter all. Our guide on how to combat click fraud in PPC explains the exclusions and monitoring that keep the numbers honest.
What is online publicity, and how can it benefit my business?
Online publicity is coverage you did not pay for: news articles, reviews, podcast mentions, social shares and directory listings that reference your business. It builds credibility that advertising cannot buy, produces links that help organic rankings, and gives your ads something to point at. A prospect who sees your ad, searches your name and finds a recent article and good reviews converts better than one who finds nothing. Ads control the message and the timing, publicity supplies the proof.
Are there services that help improve online advertising effectiveness?
Yes, and the useful ones sit around the ad rather than inside it. Campaign management is the obvious one: keyword research, negative keywords, bid strategy, creative testing and weekly optimisation. The others matter as much: conversion rate optimisation and landing pages so the traffic you pay for converts, call tracking so phone enquiries are counted and fed back into bidding, creative production, and analytics so every channel reports into one place. If you are asking who offers programmatic display advertising in Perth, PWD’s media buying team does, alongside Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and video streaming, delivered in-house from West Leederville.
When to hand online advertising to an agency
Hand it over when the spend is large enough that a few points of wasted budget cost more than the management fee, when you are running more than one channel, or when nobody in the business has time to look at the accounts every week.
Keep it in-house when you run one platform and have the hours. Either way, keep the ad accounts, pixels and analytics in your own name.
Frequently asked questions
Which is a benefit of advertising online?
Measurement. Online advertising tells you what each enquiry cost and which ad, keyword and audience produced it, so budget can be moved to what works. Targeting, speed and control of spend follow from that. Traditional media offers reach, but it cannot report back at the level of the individual enquiry.
Why is online advertising important?
Because your customers research online before they buy. If your competitors appear in the search results, the social feed and the news site and you do not, the customer never reaches the point of comparing you. Online advertising is how a business is present at that point without waiting for organic visibility to build.
Get a free Google Ads audit
If your ads are producing clicks but not enquiries, the problem is usually measurement, landing pages or placements. PWD is a Google Premier Partner, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified, and manages every campaign in-house in Perth with monthly written reports on spend, leads and cost per lead.
Request a free website and ad account audit or call 08 6146 0195.
