What Is Paid Media? Definition, Types, and Best Practices

Paid media is a crucial part of digital marketing. 

You might be already familiar with the term, but in case you aren’t, here’s a simple definition:

Paid media is a form of digital advertising that involves sponsored content to promote a brand’s products or services.

Using paid media services is an effective way of reaching your specific audience and tracking your performance. With the right strategy, this tool can help your business grow quickly.

In this article, we’ll discuss the different types of paid media and best practices to make your paid media efforts a success.

But first, let’s understand how paid media is different from earned and owned media.

Difference between Earned, Owned, and Paid Media

Your brand’s content strategy is made up of earned, owned, and paid media. Each type has a specific purpose in the sales funnel, helping to create a well-rounded digital presence.

Earned Media

Earned media is the response your brand has ‘earned’ from people, like reviews and social media shares. It’s crucial for the top of the funnel when customers first engage with your brand, as it helps boost your reputation. You can get more earned media by encouraging reviews, running UGC contests, and so on.

Owned Media

Owned media is content created by your brand, such as blog posts and social media posts. This content is more relevant to customers in the middle of the sales funnel who already know about your brand. It’s crucial for generating organic traffic and engagement, giving your audience a deeper understanding of your products or services.

Paid Media

Paid media involves advertising space you pay for, often on social media or search engines. It can increase awareness at the top of the funnel or drive sales at the bottom. It can help boost your traffic and conversions but can be risky without a good strategy. Hence, developing a strong paid media plan is essential before spending any money.

Types of Paid Media

The main types of paid media used in digital marketing include:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Also known as Search Engine Marketing, PPC advertising displays ads on search engines like Google and Bing. These ads appear when the user search query includes keywords related to your ad. 

They provide two main benefits:

• The audience will be very interested in your results since they conducted a related search. 
• Your position in search results will be optimized to increase the probability of a click or conversion.

Popular paid media platforms for PPC advertising include Google and YouTube.

Social Media Advertising

The most common and extensively used type of paid media is advertising on social media. According to Statista, businesses spend over $225 billion annually on social media advertising. That’s right.

This type of paid media involves running ads on social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. These ads may include promoted posts, sponsored content, and display ads. 

Some popular paid media platforms for social media advertising include:

1. Meta: Supports highly targeted creative and detailed audience segmentation. Ideal for image, video, and social media campaigns.
2. LinkedIn: Offers paid promotions on its feed and messaging. Great for targeting professionals and B2B audiences.
3. Twitter: Allows promoted tweets, accounts, and trends. Useful for reaching niche audiences and influencers.
4. Pinterest: Enables Promoted Pins targeting Pinterest users. Mainly visual ads that make it suitable for specific brands.
5. Snapchat: Offers vertical video and innovative formats to engage younger audiences. Useful for brands targeting Gen Z and Millennials.
6. TikTok: Offers native advertising experience on its feed. Great platform for targeting younger audiences like Snapchat.

Display Advertising

This type of paid media involves placing visual advertisements (pictures, videos, or rich media) on unaffiliated websites, applications, and gaming sites. The goal of these advertisements increasing brand recognition. By running advertisements on these other websites, you may reach out to new audiences who could be interested in your business.

Targeting the appropriate people becomes essential since display advertising has the potential to add clutter to web pages. Concentrate on working with partners on projects involving the goods and services offered by your company.

Various ad networks and platforms are available for display advertising. The most popular one is Google Display Network (GCN), which comprises of millions of websites and apps.

Video Advertising

As the term suggests, video advertising refers to ads in specifically video format, placed on platforms like YouTube, Hulu, or within social media feeds. These include pre-roll, mid-roll, and overlay video ads. 

Video ads are growing because they are still very profitable paid advertising. The secret is to match your ad to the video’s topic and target demographic so people will naturally be interested in your offering. 

Marketers can use a variety of capabilities on YouTube to target their sponsored advertising. Your ad can appear in videos that cover specific subjects or align with particular keywords. In addition, you have the option to specify exclusions for any specific films you wish to stay away from.

The most popular platform for video advertising is Youtube, the largest video-sharing platform, which allows for a wide reach and various targeting options.

Affiliate Marketing

This type of advertising entails partnering with influencers and other professionals to promote products or services. The partner is provided with an affiliate link or promo code to help capture part of their audience as customers. In return, they receive a commission on every purchase. 

One of the most popular platforms for affiliate marketing is Amazon.

Out-of-home (OOH) and digital out-of-home (DOOH) 

Marketing materials used in out-of-home (OOH) advertising include posters, pamphlets, and billboards. This also covers digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising, such as the massive LED billboards in Times Square. Like any other kind of paid advertising, OOH and DOOH campaigns have the potential to be successful when carried out strategically.

Just as important as the material itself is where you choose to target your OOH messaging. Subway ads in New York City usually feature ads for local fashion brands, food delivery services, jobs, and other things essential to many commuters.

Paid advertisements can increase leads, sales, and website traffic. So the real question is, how can you maximize the effectiveness of your advertisements?

Let us answer that question for you.

Paid Media Best Practices

Here are some tips to enhance your paid media efforts and achieve success in the long term:

Define Your Goals and KPIs

Start by identifying your core campaign goals: do you want to drive more traffic to your site, increase brand awareness, or maximize your sales? Answering this question can give you direction about your paid media efforts.

It’s important to ensure your goals are specific and quantifiable, i.e., what percentage increase are you expecting in your site traffic or revenue? 

Choose 2-3 key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your performance at the end. KPIs should be quantifiable metrics directly tied to your objectives. Examples include click-through rate, cost per lead, reach, and conversion rate. 

Align Your Objectives with Goals

The secret to the best results of paid ads? Your campaign goals shouldn’t be isolated! They must align with broader business aims. If your overall goal is revenue growth, ensure your campaign KPIs and objectives reflect that.

Mismatched goals lead to wasted ad spend and missed opportunities.

Get input from stakeholders in other departments. Think about how well you do on marketing indicators, like leads or website traffic. Connect these to important outcomes like sales, return on investment (ROI), or other key measures. You should develop objectives supporting organizational success.

Clear goals and measurable indicators of business success give you a strong foundation. This base helps improve performance, show the campaign’s value, and guide critical decisions.

Budgeting and Bid Management

Bidding and budgeting determine what you pay for ads and how effectively they reach your target audience.

Consider your bid as the ticket price for every click on your ad: let’s say you’re throwing down $2 for each click, and to keep it going, you set a daily budget of $20. Your ad runs until the daily budget is fully spent.

Here’s the deal: you must find the perfect balance between your bid and budget. You want enough clicks to make a splash without breaking the bank.

How do we create that balance for Google ads? Let’s see:

1. Set your target CPA (cost per acquisition): You choose how much you want to spend for a conversion, and Google adjusts bids to meet that average. It’s best for accounts with at least 30 conversions in the past 30 days.
2. Set your target ROAS (return on ad spend): This can help you maximize your revenue. It works well for accounts with at least 50 conversions in the past 30 days.
3. Utilize enhanced CPC (ECPC): This tool helps with cost-per-click (CPC) optimization, as bids are based on the likelihood of conversion. Google removed the 30% bid cap in May 2017. It works best for accounts with at least 30 conversions in the past 30 days and can be used with manual bidding.
4. Regularly monitor your campaign performance: A few key performance indicators (KPIs) might offer insightful information when assessing the effectiveness of advertising efforts.These include click-through rates (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), ROAS and CPA. 
5. Adapt to trends and algorithm changes: How your ads are shown might be affected by the frequent algorithm changes online advertising networks make. Hence, make sure to keep up with the most recent algorithm changes and make changes where necessary.

Utilize Retargeting and Remarketing Strategies

Remarketing is a potent strategy for reconnecting with potential customers who visited but didn’t convert. By targeting these warm leads, you can significantly increase the chances of conversion.

Key techniques for retargeting include:

• Segment your audience and use dynamic ad content 
• Display personalized ads based on users’ search queries or browsed products
• Limit ad views over time to avoid overwhelming your audience and maintain relevance
• Attract return visits with special discounts highlighted in your remarketing ads
• Expand efforts across multiple platforms for broader audience engagement
• Monitor metrics, identify underperforming elements, and make data-driven improvements for an effective campaign

Conclusion

Paid media is crucial for digital marketing. It includes PPC advertising, social media advertising, display advertising, video advertising, affiliate marketing, and out-of-home (OOH) advertising. Each type serves a unique purpose in reaching target audiences and promoting products or services.

Using the paid media best practices we’ve highlighted above, businesses can enhance their online presence, drive more website traffic and make their paid media efforts successful. 

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