By: Jeremy Mayer Sep 24/2025
Traditionally, when people think of pay-per-click digital marketing, they’re thinking of Google Search Ads, the ads that appear at the top of Google when searching for a product, service, or answers to their questions. However, digital marketing has a wide variety of other marketing types and platforms that can drive meaningful results for businesses. These can be categorized under Snaptech’s umbrella term Media Planning. Each different tactic and platform has its own pros and cons, and can be leveraged to achieve a different goal. While (nearly) every tactic and platform can be applied to every business, unless the business has deep pockets for marketing, it’s usually best to focus on those that will have the highest impact or work best together. In this blog, we’re going to dive into Snaptech’s paid digital marketing options and outline the pros and cons, as well as identify the best industry and goals for each. If you decide to work with Snaptech, it’ll give you a solid foundational understanding as our team of strategists creates a custom marketing strategy for you. If you don’t, then we’re happy to have given you the knowledge to create your own marketing strategy or in your discussions with other vendors. Let’s dive in.
ECommerce Marketing
What is it?
E-commerce marketing is a blanket term for any tactics that are specific to e-commerce. This includes Google Shopping Ads (now also run through Google’s Performance Max campaigns) as well as Social Media Marketing (more about that below). Google Shopping Ads (shown in the image) use a product feed from your website to show ads to relevant searchers. They always show a product image, a product title, price, website, and (if applicable) reviews.
Pros
- Tactics that will have the highest impact for e-commerce brands.
- Avoid strategies where the ad budget may be wasted on more general digital marketing strategies that may not generate direct revenue.
- For e-commerce brands, it’s a great way to get products in front of potential customers.
- The visual format of Google Shopping Ads really emphasizes products and helps drive engagement with users.
- A fairly simple integration with Shopify and other top e-commerce websites simplifies the product feed creation.
Cons
- Many of the tactics used require features that are only available to e-commerce brands.
- Google Shopping Ads require a Google Merchant Center account and a product feed to work.
- For optimal performance, the product feed usually needs optimization, which requires additional budget and usually a fee to a company like Feedonomics.
Best for:
- E-commerce sites looking to generate awareness, traffic, and sales of their products.
Display Ads
What is it?
Display ads can best be described as those visual ads that you see on websites that aren’t Google when you’re browsing news sites, blogs, and really any website that hosts the ads. They also show up in Apps on your phone, usually when you’re using the free version of the app service.
Pros
- Low cost, a click can cost as little as $0.01, which means you can generate large numbers of clicks and high traffic for relatively low budgets.
- Display Ads can be powerful when used as retargeting/remarketing ads that remind users of your product or services when they’ve visited your site in the past. This can drive more conversions.
- With good visual assets, they can be very eye-catching and can drive awareness in your brand and products or services.
- There are powerful targeting settings that can be used to target the ads. You can build custom audiences in Google Ads to target people in the market for your products, or people who have visited your competitor’s sites.
Cons
- Low quality traffic, since these ads are not intent-based (which means someone is not actively looking for that product, like they are with search ads), they are less likely to take meaningful action on the website.
- You are more susceptible to spam traffic. Google can control spam traffic a lot better on Google Search; it does not have the same control on the third-party sites that are the Google Display Network, which can result in a large proportion of spam traffic coming through to your site.
Best for:
- Advertisers with strong visual assets that can be leveraged into high-quality visual ads.
- Advertisers looking to generate awareness for their products or services.
- (Usually) Advertisers who are looking to complement their other intent-focused advertising efforts, such as Google Search ads.
YouTube Ads
What is it?
YouTube Ads are fairly self-explanatory. These are ads that run on YouTube before and during videos that users are watching.
Pros
- Reach an engaged audience on YouTube with strong targeting settings, such as users who watch a certain segment of videos, or users who have previously visited your site (remarketing), to keep your brand top of mind.
- Drive interest in your brand through engaging videos.
- Usually cheaper than search ads for visibility, so lower overall budgets are needed.
Cons
- YouTube is similar to Display ads in that the targeting is not as intent-focused as search ads. Users are on the platform to watch videos, while some are for product reviews where your product could resonate; mostly, users are viewing videos for entertainment. As such, conversion rates are low, and traffic quality tends to have low engagement on the website.
- Advertisers usually need good-quality videos to be successful. This requires a large time investment and, if using a video production company, additional video production budget.
Best for:
- Advertisers with high-quality video assets and the budget to spend on awareness ads on YouTube.
Amazon Ads
What is it?
Amazon Ads is the suite of ad types offered by Amazon to its sellers that help to promote product listings in the Amazon search results or as display banners on similar products and the search results page. You will have seen these as the “Sponsored” listings while shopping on Amazon.
Pros
- The Amazon search results page can be extremely competitive. Amazon Ads help push your product to the top of the search results to improve your product’s visibility for relevant searches.
- Similar targeting options to Google Search Ads, if you have these running, your prior keyword research or search term data can help expedite the setup of your Amazon Ads.
- Multiple Ad types are available through the platform to feature the products in different ways.
- Highly relevant, when users are on Amazon, they’re usually looking to buy in that moment.
Cons
- They can be expensive and reduce what can already be slim profit margins on Amazon.
- Requires strong product pages and product titles, and descriptions to be successful. Good reviews are also fairly essential.
- Leveraging Prime shipping for your products boosts the success rate but can reduce profit margins.
- Success is impacted heavily by other features on Amazon. You can end up competing against Amazon products in the ads or products that offer features like Prime shipping that you may not offer, which reduces the chance of purchases.
Best for:
- E-commerce brands that sell through Amazon (really, that’s only who it’s for).
Social Media Marketing
What is it?
Social Media Marketing is an umbrella term for the variety of paid ad options on Social Media platforms. The most common platforms used are Meta Ads (for Facebook and Instagram) and LinkedIn ads. However, platforms like TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, and X (formerly Twitter) all have ad options available. Each platform has its use and most relevant audience, for example, LinkedIn is great for businesses looking to target users by job title, company, or educational experience, since all those targeting options are provided by the users in LinkedIn. Meta ads offer similar targeting since we provide so much information in the platforms as we interact with our social media communities on a daily basis.
Pros
- Much better audience targeting than Google Ads due to the huge amount of additional information that users provide to Social Platforms.
- Huge awareness potential across many platforms.
- Lower starting budgets are required for platforms like Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok.
- LinkedIn is unmatched for the ability to target specific employment and education demographic characteristics. There is no other platform like LinkedIn with that data for ads.
- Cost-per-click can be lower than Google Search.
- A variety of ad formats, all of which leverage visuals to capture attention.
Cons
- As with many of the other tactics discussed in this article, users aren’t on social platforms to shop or find services they need; as such, the traffic can be of lower intent than a tactic like Google Search.
- Much easier to “waste” marketing budgets if not properly set up. The platforms will look to spend your entire budget and show your ads to the maximum number of people. Whereas, for Google Search, where your budget is spent based on demand, if there are no searches occurring, then your ads don’t show, so you don’t spend anything.
- All social platforms are very visual, so success usually depends on the visual assets available. Good visual assets (video and images) require extra effort to produce and usually extra budget.
- Google platforms play well together. If you have Google Analytics set up, you can use that data to inform your Google Ad campaigns easily through an import. Social Media platforms require their own performance tracking setup, another extra step or cost.
Best for:
- Businesses looking to generate awareness or target based on interests and demographic details.
- Businesses that need very niche targeting (such as by Job Title on LinkedIn).
- Advertisers looking to complement their other platforms with awareness and remarketing for a full funnel approach.
Explore Your Options Outside of Google Search
As we’ve covered, there is a wide variety of options for marketing outside of Google Search. Each has its merits and downsides. However, all can play a strong part in a comprehensive digital strategy. Picking the right mixture or strategy for your goals is essential to maximizing the return on your marketing budget and achieving the results you need for that campaign. Usually, our clients will mix a few tactics that complement each other for a more full funnel approach.
If you need help choosing and developing a strong digital marketing strategy for your business, reach out to us!
About the Author
Jeremy Mayer