When you create a Digital Marketing strategy to promote your business online, you should know that making a great ad is only half the job done. It doesn’t matter if you hire the best PPC specialists in the industry to see that your ads have great graphic design and written content if you end up placing them on the wrong websites.
Now, you may be thinking: why does it matter where I place my ads if they’re good? Well, think of it this way, the platform you choose to showcase your ads on reflects on your business. Honestly, it could take you years, maybe even decades to build up a reputation only to have crushed it in the dirt by placing your ads on a shady website. No one takes those ads for card games and whatnot that make you rich overnight seriously. So if they see your ads on a site that features phony ads such as the ones I’ve mentioned, why would the average viewer trust your brand at all?
This is especially true for businesses that require a lot of trust from their customers, such as healthcare and security services. Think about it, are you likely to trust the services of a clinic if it places its display ads alongside ads like ‘This man lost 30 kgs in a month using THIS diet pill’? Exactly. The reputation of your business rides on something as basic as the sites you feature your ads on, so it’s best to be careful here and do your research before you take the plunge.
When you create a Display Ad or Ads for your business, the first thing to do is to look for sites that feature the kind of content that circles back to what you’re offering customers. For instance, if you run a men’s apparel business, you’d want to place your ads on lifestyle and fashion sites that receive good traffic and are highly reputed. And where shouldn’t you place your ads? On sites that deal with completely unrelated products or services. In this case, it could be sites that deal with educational materials for kids, just as an example.
The easiest way to figure out where you shouldn’t place your ads is to establish your target audience and determine where it won’t be. In the example I’ve given you above, ask yourself why anyone browsing a website that features articles on the best study resources for kids would be interested in purchasing men’s apparel. Sure, there could be men browsing such sites who would want to or need to purchase clothing, but how likely are they to navigate away from such sites and go to yours?
In other words, you can’t depend on sites that offer you a low click-through rate (CTR) if you’re hoping to boost revenue. If these sites are reputed and receive good traffic, chances are, it’ll cost you a bomb to take up space on them to feature your ads. Besides, more often than not websites that are unrelated to your business feature ads that are relevant to the site’s main content. You will essentially be competing with these ads for clicks and you’re not very likely to achieve good results. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to opt for a website that’s popular if it doesn’t receive the right kind of traffic i.e. traffic from your target audience.
Other sites to avoid would be sites from your competitors. You don’t want competing sites to receive more traffic because of your attractive Display Ads as it’ll only boost their revenue. Besides, who’s to say you’ll achieve a satisfactory CTR if your business is competing for attention against a brand that owns the site you’re attempting to promote your business on? It’s better to avoid such an unwise investment altogether and opt for sites that are related to your business but don’t belong to competing brands.
Alternatively, you could consider advertising on competing brand sites that are not in the same niche as your business is. For instance, if you’re selling life insurance policies, you ideally shouldn’t be floating your ads on sites from competitors that deal with life insurance as well. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t feature them on sites that deal with travel insurance. As you can see, in both cases we’re talking about the insurance sector, but they’re not the same kind of insurance and there’s no reason someone interested in purchasing travel insurance won’t be interested in purchasing life insurance as well.
At the end of the day, you want your business to receive exposure. However, you need to remember here that not all kinds of exposure are good. For instance, consider that you probably know the names of a few notorious serial killers but you only have this knowledge for all the wrong reasons. Besides, if a notable serial killer were to promote a certain brand of aerated drinks, would you purchase said drinks? Yeah, I know, it’s a far-fetched example but you see where I’m going with this.
There are as many factors to bear in mind regarding which websites you shouldn’t place your ads on as there are regarding which sites you should. Think of it this way: eliminating a list of sites you should avoid like the plague (or do we say like the COVID now?) can make it easier to determine the sites that are worth your time and money.
