PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is one of the best digital marketing strategies for businesses to drive targeted traffic and generate leads. It allows you to bid on specific keywords, relevant to the product or services your business offers.
When your targeted customers search for any of those keywords on search engines, a PPC ad has the chance to appear at the top or bottom of the SERP (Search Engine Page Result). If a user clicks on that ad, you’ll need to pay a fee against it.
This marketing strategy allows you to connect your target audience with your product/services to increase your sales. But what’s the cheapest pay-per-click advertising platform out there? Read on to find the best option.
Cheapest Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Factors to Consider While Choosing a Pay-Per-Click Advertising Platform
The following are some of the most important factors that you should consider while opting for a PPC advertising platform.
- Relevance to Target Audience: Ensure that the platform you’re considering aligns with the demographics and interests of your target audience.
- Suitability of Ad Formats: Different platforms offer different ad formats, such as text ads or display ads. You need to choose the one that best suits your campaign goals.
- Ad Placement Options: Evaluate the available ad placements on each platform and determine which ones are most likely to generate high-quality traffic.
- Conversion Tracking Capabilities: Look for a platform that provides high-quality conversion tracking tools so that you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Cheapest Pay-Per-Click Advertising Options to Choose From
Here’s our list of the cheapest PPC advertising platforms available in the market.
Google Ads
Google Ads is the most commonly used Ad platform because of two major reasons. First, it’s offered by Google, the company that runs the most popular search engine. Additionally, it’s a part of the GDN (Google Display Network) that has a very large number of websites.
According to recent statistics, Google Display Ads appear on more than 650,000 apps and over 3 million websites. It means that this platform has the potential to display your ads, wherever your target audience is.
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Some of the main features of this platform include adjusting bids on a micro level, testing different bidding strategies, improving the quality score of your bids, monitoring your search impression share, and conducting remarketing.
- Supported Ad Formats: Videos, images, text, and responsive
- Placement: Google SERPs, YouTube, mobile apps, Google Shopping, web placements on the GDN
- Cost: Google Ads uses the CPC (Cost Per Click) model and the price is calculated based on ad quality and competition. It’s also possible to pay on the basis of cost per 1,000 impressions.
Important Note: Although Google ads might be a bit more expensive than some third-party ad platforms, the benefits and features it brings to the table make it the best value for money.
Microsoft Advertising
The second most popular search engine after Google is Bing, which is handled by Microsoft. It’s also a powerful tool that allows you to advertise your products/services on the Bing search engine, as well as Microsoft’s partner networks, including AOL and Yahoo.
Additionally, it’s the only platform out there, other than LinkedIn (discussed below) that you can use for LinkedIn profile targeting. This feature makes it an excellent option for B2B companies.
Another excellent feature of Microsoft Advertising is that it allows you to import your ad campaigns directly from Google ads. It can save you a whole lot of time, as you won’t need to manually replicate your campaigns.
Other notable features of this platform include advertising locally and globally, measuring campaign performance in real-time with reports, evaluating keyword and ad performance, and tracking your budget and spending.
- Supported Ad Formats: Text, app install, dynamic search, multimedia, and responsive
- Placement: Bing, Microsoft Audience Network, Edge browser, Outlook.com, and LinkedIn
- Cost: Microsoft Advertising also uses the CPC pricing model and the cost is calculated based on ad quality and competition. But considering its features and results, it makes for an affordable platform.
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn is the best ad platform for B2B marketers because of the nature of this network. It’s known as a professional networking platform that allows you to connect with business leaders and C-level executives.
According to recent statistics, about 930 million professionals from more than 200 countries use this platform. You can target these individuals based on your own professional criteria, such as company type, seniority, job title, industry, location, and more, through LinkedIn Ads.
- Supported Ad Formats: Text, images, and video ads
- Placement: LinkedIn platform, mobile apps, LinkedIn Audience Network, and ad exchanges
- Cost: LinkedIn uses the CPC model to calculate the price of each ad in real time based on the ad relevance and competition. It also offers cost-per-impressions and cost-per-send models.
Meta for Business (Facebook Ads)
Meta for Business is yet another affordable advertising platform for businesses and digital marketers. What makes this tool an excellent choice is that it primarily targets Facebook, a social media platform with 2.95 billion active monthly users.
The ad platform allows you to target the right audience using different options such as location, age, gender, behaviors, interests, etc. It also supports retargeting using the information collected from user activities on Facebook.
Supported Ad Formats: Images, videos, slideshows, carousel, and canvas
Placement: Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook Audience Network
Cost: Facebook ads pricing works like an auction, where ads compete based on their bids and performance to get shown to people.
Twitter Ads
If your brand’s target audience resides on Twitter, you can utilize the power of Twitter ads. While it doesn’t allow you to display your ads on any place other than Twitter, it can still be very useful as there are over 450 million active monthly users on this platform.
- Supported Ad Formats: Promoted trends, promoted accounts, and promoted tweets containing, text, videos, images, and GIFs,
- Placement: Twitter web and mobile app
- Cost: The cost of promoted accounts and promoted tweets is calculated based on the CPC model. Whereas, the price of promoted trends is calculated in real-time by Twitter sales representatives.
Final Words
These are the best ad platforms out there that also make for the most affordable ones because of their advanced features and large user bases.
Make sure that you first define your business’s needs and then start looking for the advertising tool.
It’ll allow you to choose the best option that suits all your unique needs the best.
