Digital advertising is a brilliant way to drive targeted, direct traffic to your website. However, there are so many different platforms and techniques, often businesses are put off because of lack of knowledge of the opportunities available.

We’ve outlined just four of the ways you can drive more business and traffic to your website through digital advertising.

1. Ad extensions

Ad extensions are a fantastic way to offer extra information to potential leads. These are utilised on the Google AdWords platform, as well as Bing Ads, and the premise is that the more detail and options you can offer consumers, the more likely they are to click through to your website or call.

For example, the different types of ad extensions available on Google AdWords include:

• Call extensions give users the option to click a call button to phone directly through to you.
• Location extensions allow people to find your location easily by clicking the link.
• Review extensions enable Google to pull through reviews from third party sources. This allows you to offer an insight into your company and increase your click through rate (CTR).
• Sitelinks extensions offer you a number of links to help you find what you’re looking for on a site. These are more likely to result in a conversion as people are landing specifically on what they want.
• Callout extensions add further text to your ad, which gives people much more detail on what you can offer via the website.

There are also a number of automated extensions on Google AdWords. Google will implement these extensions when it feels they will improve the performance of your ad. These include:

• Previous visits where automated extensions are shown to people who have visited your site previously from a Google search.
• Dynamic structured snippets which automatically show further landing page details to a user.
• Consumer ratings where Google will pull through your best consumer ratings onto the ad.
• Seller ratings where google gathers ratings from a number of business sources and pulls through your seller rating.

The ads below illustrate seller ratings extensions (mid ad) and consumer ratings (bottom ad):

2. Display advertising

Having different types of ads allows you to effectively reach different audiences and more users. Placing your ads on the right websites and email newsletters, based on other interests, means you can target specific audiences; those of which are more likely to convert as their interest levels are higher.

With a range of ad formats to choose from, such as text, image, video, and interactive, capturing the attention of your desired audience is easier than ever.

3. Remarketing

Remarketing is a clever and successful way of driving more business through to your website, as well as increasing brand awareness. The overall premise behind remarketing is to show your ads to users who have visited your site previously across other websites as they search.

By targeting people in this way, you are more likely to grab their attention when they’re engaged and involved in your products/services. If they didn’t convert the first time around, remarketing allows you to remind the potential customer that you’re still there. You can also target people for tailored goals that you may have, such as people who didn’t fulfil their shopping basket.

Options for remarketing include:

• Dynamic – Remarketing specific products or services that consumers have been looking at on your website
• Standard – Show your ads on both websites and apps to people who have been on your website before
• Search ads – Tailor your ads to show to people who have previously visited your website and are now conducting follow-up searches on Google
• Video – Remarketing ads shown to people across YouTube or Display Network websites, apps, and video

4. Social media advertising

This is a whole topic within itself, but briefly, social media advertising is another method of digital advertising that allows you to target by location, interests, demographics, and more.

Facebook advertising lets you choose your marketing goal, whether that’s to push people through to your website or to increase conversions. Facebook targeting means that you can choose exactly the right audience for you through:

• Location targeting
• Age and gender
• Interests, such as flowers, floristry, roses, tulips etc.
• Connections – people who have liked your page, people who may have joined a group you created, or a Facebook event

Similarly, with Twitter, you can choose how to create your campaign based on your marketing objectives. This is helpful if you are purely looking to push more traffic through to your website.

Both platforms offer great insights and analytics to measure the performance of your ad campaigns, allowing you to see what’s working well and what could be further optimised.