Global Ad Platforms in a Battle Royale: Where to Allocate Your Ad Budget?

by Charles LeeFebruary 5, 202510 minutes read

In the wave of digital marketing, online advertising has become a key means for enterprises to promote their products and services. In the face of many globally recognized advertising platforms, how to reasonably select and allocate advertising budgets has become an urgent problem for many business owners and marketers.

Characterization and Analysis of Platforms

●Google Advertising

Platform features: Relying on the world's largest search engine, Google Advertising has huge user traffic and rich advertising resources, covering search, display, video and other advertising channels.

Audience groups: users who use search engines worldwide, covering almost all industries and fields, with diverse user needs.

Suitable for streaming commodity types: all kinds of commodities and services. Huge user groups and diversified needs, suitable for the promotion of all kinds of goods and services.

Ad valuation: CPC varies greatly, popular keywords can reach 5 - 10 dollars or even higher, common keywords CPC in 0.5 - 3 dollars, CPM in 8 - 15 dollars.

Advantage:

1.Accurate matching of search ads: display relevant ads according to users' search keywords, which highly match users' needs and increase the conversion rate of ads, e.g. display ads for travel-related products and services when users search for “travel tips”.

2.Wide display network: ads can be displayed on many websites and applications cooperated by Google, expanding the coverage of ads and increasing brand exposure opportunities.

Disadvantage: fierce competition, high advertisement bidding for popular keywords, relatively large advertisement cost.

●YouTube Advertising

Platform features: the world's largest video sharing platform, with a huge amount of video content, covering a variety of genres and fields.

Audience groups: Wide range of people of all ages and interests, especially popular with video content lovers and creators.

Suitable for streaming products: electronic products, movie and entertainment products. Through vivid video to show the performance of electronic products; film and entertainment products can be publicized through the video attributes of the platform.

Ad valuation: CPC is in the range of $0.2 - $1.5, CPM is about $6 - $12. The cost of advertisement is related to the quality of the video and audience targeting.

Advantage:

1.Advantages of video marketing: support a variety of video ad formats, such as front-patch ads, interstitial ads, infomercials, etc. Delivering brand information through vivid video content, such as automobile brands displaying vehicle performance through exciting video ads.

2.High user stickiness: users stay on the platform for a longer period of time, advertisements have more chances to be seen by users, and brands can cultivate user loyalty through high-quality video content.

Disadvantage: the cost of producing high-quality video ads is high, and the ad skip rate may affect the ad effectiveness.

●Facebook Advertising

Platform characteristics: one of the world's largest social networking platforms, with a huge user base and a complex social relationship chain.

Audience Groups: Almost all age groups, regions and industries in the world, with the majority of social active users.

Suitable for streaming commodity types: daily necessities, education and training courses. Wide audience is favorable for the promotion of daily necessities; socially active attributes are suitable for word-of-mouth dissemination of education and training courses.

Ad valuation: CPC is 0.8 - 2 USD on average, CPM is about 10 - 20 USD, depending on the accuracy of targeting and competition.

Advantage:

1.Precise audience targeting: Based on users' personal information, interests, social behaviors and other multi-dimensional data, we can achieve highly accurate advertising, for example, targeting fitness enthusiasts with ads for sports equipment.

2.Diversified advertising forms: including picture ads, video ads, rotating ads, etc., to meet the publicity needs of different enterprises, such as fashion brands often display new products through beautiful picture ads.

Disadvantage: Strict advertising policy, complicated audit process, some ads may not be able to be placed due to non-compliance with the regulations.

●X Advertising (Twitter Advertising)

Platform characteristics: known for its real-time and topicality, fast information dissemination, and the ability of users to share and access information instantly.

Audience groups: a wide range of people from various industries, media workers, trend-setters, etc., especially those who are concerned about current affairs and hot topics.

Suitable for streaming products: news and information products, fashionable and trendy items. News and information products fit the real-time characteristics of the platform, and can quickly reach the people who pay attention to current affairs; fashion trend products can trigger discussion and dissemination with the help of the topic.

Ad valuation: The cost is based on the bidding model, the average cost per interaction (CPE) is around 0.5 - 2 dollars, and the cost will fluctuate with the degree of competition and the accuracy of the target audience.

Advantage:

1.Topic marketing: With the help of popular topic tags, it can rapidly increase brand exposure. For example, when an electronic product brand releases a new product, it combines with relevant topic tags, triggering a large number of users to discuss and retweet it, and harvesting massive exposure in a short period of time.

2.Strong interaction: companies can interact directly with users, reply to comments and private messages to enhance user stickiness, for example, many beauty brands collect product feedback through interaction with users.

Disadvantage: information is updated quickly, advertisements are easy to be flooded quickly, and you need to continuously invest energy to keep the heat.

●Yahoo Advertising

Platform characteristics: long history, with rich content resources, including news, finance, sports and other areas.

Audience groups: wide distribution of age levels, covering from the younger generation to middle-aged and old-aged users, of which users interested in comprehensive information account for a relatively large proportion.

Suitable for streaming products: financial products, health and wellness products. Relying on rich financial content, we can promote financial products; multi-disciplinary content covers different health demand groups, which is conducive to the promotion of health products.

Ad valuation: CPM (cost per thousand displays) usually ranges from 5 - 15 dollars, depending on the ad format, location and target audience.

Advantage:

1.Content integration: ads can be integrated into various kinds of high-quality content to realize native ad display and enhance user acceptance, such as placing financial product ads on financial news pages.

2.Precise targeting: Through the analysis of users' browsing behavior and interests and preferences, precise advertisement placement can be carried out to improve the advertisement effect.

Disadvantage: relatively weak influence in social media and mobile internet, low activity of young users.

●TikTok Advertising

Platform characteristics: mainly short video content, characterized by creativity, entertainment and interactivity, with rapid user growth.

Audience groups: mainly young users, especially Generation Z, who pursue trends, like new things, and have strong consumption potential.

Suitable for streaming products: trendy clothes and digital games. Young audience pursues trend and is highly receptive to clothing and trendy games.

Ad valuation: CPM is between 5 - 10 USD, using bidding model, cost is affected by ad creative and target audience.

Advantage:

1.Creativity-driven: Users are encouraged to participate in creative content creation, and brands can inspire users to participate and enhance brand awareness by launching challenges, collabs and other interactive forms, such as the creative collab challenge launched by a beverage brand, which attracted the participation of a large number of users.

2.Algorithm recommendation: Based on powerful algorithms, advertisements can be quickly pushed to target users, improving the reach of advertisements and accurately positioning young consumer groups.

Disadvantage: the platform content is updated quickly, the ads need to be constantly innovated to attract users' attention, otherwise they are easily ignored.

●Microsoft Advertising

Platform Features: Integrates the advertising resources of several products and services under Microsoft, such as Bing search engine, Outlook mailbox, MSN, etc.

Audience groups: users of Microsoft products, including office users, gamers (Xbox users), etc., with a certain degree of spending power and specific needs.

Suitable for streaming products: game peripherals, office equipment. Match with office users and gamers audience.

Ad valuation: CPC is 0.6 - 1.8 USD on average, CPM is 7 - 14 USD, and the cost is relatively stable due to platform characteristics and user groups.

Advantage:

1.Cross-platform coverage: Display ads in different products and services of Microsoft to realize multi-scenario coverage, such as displaying ads in the mailing list page of Outlook mailbox.

2.Data Integration: By integrating user data from various products under Microsoft, more accurate advertisement placement can be carried out to enhance the advertisement effect.

Disadvantage: The overall market share is relatively small, and the popularity and influence of the advertising platform is not as good as some industry leaders.

Suggestions for Budget Allocation

When allocating advertising budget, enterprises need to consider the characteristics of their products or services, target audience, marketing objectives and budget size.

If the target audience is mainly the young generation, pursuing trends and creativity, TikTok Advertising may be the focus of budget allocation; if the enterprise focuses on search engine advertising and wants to accurately reach users with clear needs, Google Advertising and Bing Advertising are worth investing more budgets; for enterprises relying on social relations for brand promotion, Facebook Advertising and Twitter Advertising are good choices; and for enterprises relying on social relations for brand promotion, Facebook Advertising and Twitter Advertising are good choices. For enterprises relying on social connections to promote their brands, Facebook Advertising and Twitter Advertising are good choices; and if the enterprise's advertisements focus on video content, YouTube Advertising is undoubtedly an important platform.

In general, it is advisable to diversify your advertising strategy. They can allocate 40% of the budget to core platforms with the highest matching degree in terms of target audience and marketing objectives, 30% to platforms with certain potential and complementarity, and the remaining 30% to test new platforms or conduct small-scale advertising experiments, so as to continuously optimize the effect of advertisement, find the most suitable budget allocation plan for themselves in the global advertisement platform war, and realize the maximization of advertisement return on investment. The remaining 30% is used to test new platforms or conduct small-scale advertising experiments, so as to continuously optimize the effect of advertising.

Conclusion

In today's digital marketing arena, businesses face a diverse array of ad platforms. Each platform caters to specific user groups and offers unique traffic and ad formats. Successful ad campaigns hinge on aligning the platform with the target audience and product.

Budget is another critical factor. With varying costs and pricing models like CPC and CPM, businesses must allocate funds strategically, considering both cost and conversion potential.

To excel in the global ad platform competition, businesses need to conduct a comprehensive analysis of platform features and align them with their specific needs and budget constraints. This approach ensures maximum ad effectiveness and ROI.