When considering viable alternatives to Google Ads, it can be taken two different ways. The first way is from the perspective of a company or individual wishing to place advertising on a website, but outside of the Google Ads, Google Ad Exchange, Google AdSense arena. The second way is from the publisher’s perspective. Here, they own a website (or more than one) that derives considerable advertising revenue through display advertising. Below we’ve covered both approaches to cater to the different interests of our readers. First, we begin with paid adverting, and then we discuss options for publishers.
Paying for Advertising
While Google holds considerable sway in the online display advertising market, they’re not the only player in town. Originally, they acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion back in 2007, almost a year after acquiring YouTube for half as much. Increasingly, other popular platforms have been vying for the ad revenues from companies and the occasional individual looking to pay to advertise to their audience.
Here are some of the options:
Bing
The second search engine and one that sometimes gets overlooked is Microsoft’s Bing. While it got off to a sticky start, it has gained pace and now has a small, yet significant segment of the search market. It’s also profitable now, thanks in large part to its selling of advertising on its platform.
While its reach is not as wide as Google Ads, when you wish to specifically reach organic searchers, then it’s the next best thing to Google. It may also be less expensive on a per-click basis depending on the search term that’s being targeted.
Facebook advertising has been popular for many years. The social media giant allows advertisers to target specific demographic groups and people with similar interests, and has further ways to segment the market to make ads more profitable.
The ability to add your collected email addresses for customers to your Facebook account to let the social media company locate similar people is a useful one. It can help to make finding new customers less expensive than it might otherwise be.
Twitter is not often considered an advertising option, but for companies that wish to get in front of likely followers and future shoppers, it’s an interesting way to do so.
Targeting ads based on the Followers, or chasing a new trend, are both possible through the creative use of the modest hashtag. Also, tapping into influencer markets to reach out to their audience is possible too.
LinkedIn now includes advertising in its capabilities to reach over 750 million professional people. The resume and jobs market along with business commentary published on the platform attracts a business-oriented audience that’s receptive to certain types of related advertising.
The demographical mix won’t work for everyone, but for the B2B crowd, it’s often very reasonable to connect with them.
Private Ad Placements
Online adverts can also be placed on individual websites rather than using a platform or ad network. This has the advantage of targeting the audience of one website, gaining preferential ad placement and visibility, and negotiating a long-term deal too.
Beyond that, website owners can use the BuySellAds platform to individually price different ad spots for specific durations and sell ad space piecemeal. Buyers can then lock up ad spots and place their ads there for a fixed duration, number of impressions, etc.
Publishing Content and Displaying Advertising
Owners of websites (publishers) now often use advertising revenue as a key revenue source. While they may sell products directly from their site or have one or more affiliate relationships with Amazon, Walmart, and other retailers for commission-based referral sales, ad revenue is a growing force.
Google Ads, Google Ad Exchange, and Google AdSense all play a part in this success. By having access to an account with Google, publishers can receive a percentage of the revenue generated from the paid advertising shown on their site. However, there are other options for people either banned or blocked by Google, or who wish to avoid dealing with the conglomerate entirely.
Here are a few of them:
Amazon Native Shopping Ads
Amazon Native Shopping Ads require an Amazon Associates account that affiliates apply for. These adverts allow for the creation of fixed or custom ad units to display a range of products in an ad format. The adverts can be selected from a product category or individually chosen.
The ad blocks are manually added as code to a page or post on a website. Therefore, the publisher has control over most, if not all, of the content and how often the ads are displayed.
Media.net
Media.net is operated by Bing and Yahoo. It is extremely well-known as a viable alternative to Google advertising options.
Their adverts are often contextual where the ad relates more closely to the content on the page. They also use header bidding to obtain better rates for publishers by having advertisers bid against each other to win the ad spots.
PropellerAds
PropellerAds is a mixed bag with a wide offering of banner advertising, push notification options, and a host of other ad types. Their large network has a global reach of over a billion users.
Ads can be shown on a publisher’s site. Advertisers can also create their adverts directly inside the PropellerAds Ad creator facility, so adverts won’t look the same as with other networks where there’s often considerable overlap. Additionally, they’re now using AI to help advertisers and publishers achieve the best outcome.
BuySellAds
As mentioned in the previous section, BuySellAds allows publishers to sell blocks of ad space privately completely outside of an existing ad network. While this requires sites to have a good amount of consistent traffic, it does permit granular control over what ad space is sold, to whom, and for how long.
For publishers that are reluctant to let ad networks cover their pages with uncontrolled advertising, BuySellAds is an interesting alternative that has been around for years.
Whether you’re wanting to advertise online outside of the Google Ad eco-system or you’re a publisher with a site who wants to include non-Google advertising to earn more, there are plenty of ways to do so now. Thanks to the size of the internet today, no one is stuck with a single player in the market.
