How to Choose the Right Paid Ad Platform: A Guide for Startups

Paid ads are essential to startups because they get your products or services in front of your ideal target audience. However, choosing the right platform can be challenging as you need to balance your business goals, budget, and audience targeting. 

Keep reading to learn about each paid ad platform and how to choose the most suitable one for your startup.

Understanding your advertising goals

Before starting a paid ad campaign, you need to outline your goals. Your goal is a desired future state, and having one enables you to create the right motivations and pathway. You can start with a simple question. What do we want to achieve? This could be any of the following;

• Brand awareness 
• Lead generation
• Direct sales

Your goal determines your paid ad strategy, messaging, and the type of creative you will deploy. It is also essential for resource allocation, performance tracking, and choosing the right channel.

Paid ad platform categories

Paid ads can be split into categories—paid search and paid social. Paid search uses search engines to display ads, while paid social uses social media platforms for display ads.

Analysis of major paid ad platforms

Each paid ad channel has different strengths and is suitable for different goals, outlined in table below.

Google

The Google Ad platform is effective for targeting intent-based searchers who are actively seeking solutions. It can be the right platform to sell quickly. There are many available formats, such as text, image, video, responsive, app promotion ads, shopping ads, and call-only ads. Google Ads attract an average click-through rate (CTR) of 4-6% and up to 800% ROI.

Facebook

Facebook Ads are suitable for when you need to zoom in on specific audiences. You can target in-depth and segment by specific demographic and psychographic features. Available formats include carousel, slideshow, collection, instant experience, poll, and messenger ads. The clickthrough rate (CTR) for Facebook Ads stands at around 2.5%, while the conversion rate gets up to 8.25% across industries.

Instagram

Instagram Ads are suitable for advertising with visually compelling content. They are also ideal for a young and engaged crowd, especially within the creative industries. Travel, food, fashion, and skincare brands are among the top Instagram advertisers. 

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn platform is ideal for targeting professionals across industries. It is a suitable ad platform for B2B marketing, lead generation, and brand awareness.

TikTok

TikTok is ideal for startups that want to reach a young, trendy, and active crowd, like Gen Z. It is also suitable for bite-sized and short-form video content and memes. It has massive viral potential.

Essential factors in choosing paid ad platforms

The campaign objectives provide a guideline that serves as a pointer for the most suitable ad platforms for startups. Having a clear objective is always the first place to start.

Campaign objectives

Start by identifying what problem you want to solve. You may want to create awareness for your brand, generate leads or sales, attract web traffic, or promote your new app. The campaign objectives will guide your decision on ad copy, format, targeting, and choice of platform. 

Target audience

To create a target customer profile, consider where your target audience hangs out the most. Study their conversations to understand their pains, what matters to them, how they like to be spoken to, and their motivations. Here are a few extra points to consider.

• Google: You can find targets based on topics and active searches for products or services. Search intent takes precedence over demographics. So, ensure you target keywords that are relevant to your audience search.
• Facebook: You can target by demography, interest, behavior, custom audiences, and lookalike audience. The lookalike audience feature targets people who share similar features with your existing customers. The demographic is more evenly spread compared to Instagram.
• Instagram: Shares similarities with Facebook as they are both under the Meta ad network. However, Instagram resonates more with a younger audience. 62% of Instagram users are between 18 to 34 years old. 
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn would suffice if you’re in the SaaS or professional services niche with a B2B focus. It offers a professional context, allowing you to target organizations or individuals by their education, job experience, and demographic details.
• TikTok: TikTok mostly caters to a younger crowd, too. 70% of TikTok users are between 18 to 34 years old. It is suitable for startups targeting young, tech-savvy individuals who like to consume short-form videos.

Budget considerations

Factor in your budget when selecting an ad platform, as each platform has unique cost structures and minimum spend requirements. Here are some rule of thumbs when it comes to budgeting:

(1) If you’re just starting out, consider allocating an amount that's manageable enough to risk, yet substantial enough to collect meaningful data

(2) If your budget is too low, it takes longer for the ads platform to optimize your campaigns, thus lower performance and slower learning for you

(3) If your budget is too high, your ROI will be low as paid ads is subjected to the law of diminishing return

• For Paid Search: High budget for product with low search volume means that ads will show for random low intent keywords
• For Paid Social: High budget for product with small audience means that ads will either be (1) shown to random people or (2) very frequently to the same group of people, making them desensitised or even have negative sentiment to the brand

The cost structure, budget control, and flexibility of each ad platform are broken down below:

• Google Ads: The cost per click (CPC) for most businesses is between $0.11 and $0.50 per click on Google Ads, according to Web FX. You can set daily budgets to as low as $1, as there is no minimum entry budget. You can use features like budget allocation to manage your ad spending.
• Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads cost between $0.26 and $0.30 per click and $1.01 to $3.00 per 1000 impressions. There are also features to help you manage budgets, such as automatic bidding, manual budding, and campaign budget optimization (CBO).
• Instagram Ads: Instagram Ads cost around $0.20 to $2.0 per click, while CPM averages around $6.70. Like other ad networks, your industry, bid, and other factors also come into play in ad pricing.
• LinkedIn Ads: The average cost per click on LinkedIn is around $5.26 for sponsored posts and $6.59 per 1000 impressions. LinkedIn also offers the bid type option, ad scheduling, and budget adjustments.
• TikTok Ads: TikTok Ads require a minimum campaign budget of $50 and a $20 ad group budget. For web conversion campaigns, TikTok recommends a $30 minimum daily ad group budget for North America and EMEA brands, and $20 for APAC brands.

The above averages are only indicative and will vary based on your industry, targeting, ad type, bid, and other factors.

💡Tip: Try out this template we use to get an estimate of budget, conversions and customer acquisition cost for paid ads

Platform strengths and limitations

By assessing the pros and cons of each ad platform, you can strengthen your decision-making. Here are some points to note;

• Google: Suitable for matching audience search intent. Delivers high-quality leads. However, it is highly competitive, and keywords with high volumes can be costly.
• Facebook: Offers extensive targeting and high engagement. Suitable for broad and precise targeting and supports various ad creative formats. However, it is prone to frequent algorithm changes and ad fatigue.
• Instagram: Instagram offers great visual appeal and leverages the Meta network. It also offers high engagement and shopping features. However, it is also prone to frequent algorithm changes, and link options are limited to large profiles—limiting direct traffic to websites.
• LinkedIn: Most ideal for a professional audience. Offers accurate targeting and quality leads, but it is more expensive and delivers less engagement than Google and Facebook.
• TikTok: Suitable for an audience that is more active and engaged. It’s easier to go viral compared to other channels. However, it may be more expensive and has limited analytic capabilities. Non-video ad formats tend to underperform due to the platform’s nature.

Competitors

Where your competitors advertise can be a good indicator of where your customers are. Hence, you can take inspiration from that rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, especially when you’re new to paid ads. You can draw insights from competitor ad analysis to inform your paid ad strategy.

Implementing and optimizing your ad strategy

Start with a test budget

Start small. Calculate the CPL for each channel and focus on channels with lower costs but sizable reach. Allocate a budget for at least 3 months to achieve cost efficiency, as ad platforms need time to understand your data. 

Make data-driven decisions

Focus on a data-driven approach to improve decision-making accuracy and speed. Review historical ad performance data and also consider an A/B test. Learn more about running A/B tests for paid ads here.

Optimize campaigns consistently

Regularly audit your ad campaigns and also use the results of an A/B test to improve your ad strategy. Analyze competitor ads and be willing to reallocate ad budget to better-performing campaigns.

Consider multi-platform strategies

Depending on your niche, goal and target audience, you want to start with a cost-effective ad platform. So, you may start with Google Ads to see how its intent-based audience responds to your key messaging (e.g. keywords, ad copies). Focus on identifying and crafting the right messaging for your target audience. 

When using Google Ads, it's important to use keywords that are relevant to your product or service. Don’t just focus solely on high competition keywords, as they tend to be more expensive to bid on.

On Facebook, you can use the lookalike audience feature to target people who interact with your Google Ad and landing page. You can also use the Meta pixel feature to build an ideal profile. That will enable you to optimize your ad for the future or to re-engage or remarket your audience.

Benefits of cross-platform strategies include:

• Increased reach and more ad exposure.
• More flexibility in your ad strategy.
• Reduced dependency on one platform.
• Better learning and iteration.

Tips for optimizing ad performance across different platforms

When advertising across multiple platforms, understand that each platform is unique and deploying one strategy may not be the best thing to do. Instead;

• Set clear KPIs for each platform.
• Maintain consistent brand messaging across platforms.
• Follow algorithm changes of each platform.
• Use platform-specific tools to improve your ad copy and creatives.

Case study

Kaya offers end-to-end paid ads management for startups, including B2B tech startups and B2C YC-backed startup clients. Our Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool plays a key role in the process. We consolidate your ads from Google Transparency Center and Meta ads Library and use that for further analysis.

For Google Ads: We use our AI-driven Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool to analyze competitors’ keyword strategies and ad spending. Using the insights derived, we have helped our clients to expand their reach and increase signups.

For Meta ads: We analyze competitors' ad types, messaging, and offers. Then, we identify successful themes, targeting, and longest-running ads. This allows us to create fresh and engaging ad content and creatives for our clients, helping them overcome creative blocks.

As shared above, where your competitors advertise can be a good indicator of where your customers are, hence which platform to prioritize. Get a free report here to learn about your competitive landscape.