Paid Media Activities

Digital marketers typically advertise online through advertising networks, such as Google AdSense, and advertising exchanges, such as Google AdX (the differences between these are summarized succinctly here but are outside of the scope of this course). Although these two approaches to providing advertising space to advertisers differ, from an advertiser’s perspective, both provide an entry point where advertising space can be purchased. Networks, for example, aggregate ad space across websites and sells this inventory to advertisers.

Nowadays, much of advertising space is sold through programmatic buying, the automated purchasing of digital advertising space. When marketers purchase space through the Facebook Ads or Google Ads platforms, for example, they are making use of programmatic buying. These platforms have been transformed in recent years by the use of algorithms and predictive analyses to help identify the optimal placement of ads to reach specific objectives. Facebook Ads, for example, gives advertisers options such as reach, awareness, or lead generation campaigns. Choosing a specific objective will influence where ads will be placed (i.e., who will see the ads) to maximize the effectiveness of the ad campaign.

We now turn our attention to different ways of reaching customers. More precisely, we will briefly cover banner advertising, search advertising, social media advertising, affiliate marketing, and influencer marketing.