Where Else Can I Advertise?

When people think of doing paid advertising, their first thought is often Google but we want to explore other avenues for our advertising efforts. It is no secret that the Market Share of Google has been dropping, on the whole, since May 2015. The image below, provided by www.statista.com indicates this nicely

So if people aren’t spending their advertising budgets on Google, where else are they doing so?

Amazon:
Amazon can fairly be justified as the future of advertising with US Ad Revenues projected to climb 63.5% in 2018, surpassing $2 billion for the first time. This figure would take them to being the third biggest advertising platform behind Facebook in second, and of course Google will remain in first position.

Amazon can work in the same way as Google in that you will be targeting your shoppers by keywords and products and you pay only for a click and Amazon state you can start a campaign for as little as £100. They may not be making a dent in the duopoly in the immediate future but it is definitely a platform worth investigating.

eBay Shops:
By creating an eBay shop, you can display all of your listing in one convenient location. You then customise and personalise your shop window with a unique website address. This is effectively a website within a website. Using an eBay shop is a really good way to keep in control of your costs as you’ll only be paying a fee when somebody makes a purchase, usually around the 10% mark. There are some small costs to setting this up but once we have paid our subscription, we will always know our ROI for every time we make a sale. We can think of this as an affiliate model where we are paying a 10% commission to eBay for selling our products.

Affiliates:
Instead of just thinking of the above as an affiliate, we can actually use specialists in this field. We can reach out to individuals or brands and have them display our products on their website or social media, and in return we will pay them a cut each time they make a sale for us. If you’ve ever been reading an article reviewing products, you can be sure that if you click through and buy it, the article host will receive a cut. That is the affiliate model and it’s a great way to make incremental revenue.

As with eBay, it is a great way to keep track of our costs and ROI and generally these do not cost a lot to set up. If we have a great product, people will come to us asking to sell it on our behalf because they know they can shift a boatload and in turn make a small fortune in commissions.

As we move into the midst of Q4 we need to start thinking about how we are going to spend our budgets in 2019 and the above methods are all great ways as creating new income streams aside from Google, but it does seem that Google is going to be the major player for the foreseeable future and we need to focus a lot of our time and effort with that platform.