Types of Paid Advertising: Choose What Works for You

Paid advertising is usually explained as a list of channels — search, social, display, video, native, remarketing — which makes the choice feel like a matter of preference. It is not. There is one distinction underneath the list that determines whether a budget works, and the channel names sit on top of it.

Some advertising intercepts demand that already exists. The rest creates demand in people who were not looking. These are different jobs with different costs, different timescales and different minimum budgets, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake available to a local business.

Interception: search

Search advertising reaches somebody who has already decided they want the thing and is choosing where to get it. The intent is doing most of the work, which is why it converts fastest, costs the most per click, and produces a measurable return soonest.

For nearly every local business this is where to start. Capturing existing demand is the shortest path to knowing whether advertising works at all, and it teaches you what people actually want — in their own words — before you spend money trying to create demand.

Creation: social, display and video

These reach people who were not looking. That is genuinely valuable for visual services, for new offerings nobody is searching for yet, and for building familiarity ahead of a decision — but it is a harder job, it needs more volume before the numbers mean anything, and it takes longer to show a return.

Starting here with a small budget is the most common route to concluding that advertising does not work. The channel was not wrong; it was asked to do the difficult job first, with too little to work with.

Interception is easier than persuasion. Start with the people already looking for you, then decide whether you can afford to go and find more.

Retargeting is usually the best value

Retargeting reaches people who already visited, which makes it neither pure interception nor pure creation — and frequently the cheapest paid activity available to a small business. The audience is small, warm and already aware of you.

• Cap the frequency. Retargeting that follows somebody for weeks generates irritation rather than sales.
• Exclude people who already converted, or you are paying to advertise to your own customers.
• Set a sensible window — days for urgent services, weeks for considered purchases.
• Say something new rather than repeating the original advertisement at higher volume.

Choose by where decisions happen, not where attention is

The usual way of picking a platform is to ask where the customers spend their time, which reliably points at social media for everybody. The better question is where they make the decision, and for most local services that is a search at the moment of need rather than a scroll on a sofa.

There are real exceptions — visual and discretionary services genuinely do get chosen from a feed. The point is that this should be a judgement about buying behaviour rather than about screen time.

One platform properly beats three badly

A budget divided across three platforms rarely reaches the volume any of them need to produce reliable data, which leaves you with three ambiguous results and no way to tell which was worth continuing.

Test one properly before adding another. Concentration is what makes a modest budget legible, and legibility is what lets you make the next decision with any confidence.

The ongoing management is paid advertising, and the arithmetic for setting the number is in working backwards from the jobs you want. To have your current mix assessed, ask for a proposal.