What is Digital Advertising?
Digital advertising, also known as online advertising or Internet advertising, is generally using the online opportunity to communicate marketing promotions to consumers or visitors. There are many new and upcoming formats for digital advertising, although it is commonly known that it would include social media marketing, e-mail marketing, search engine web marketing, more usual types of display advertising, and mobile advertising.
There are three main types of digital advertising: acquired advertising such as communications generated through public relations online, paid for advertising such as Google AdWords, and finally, company generated advertising whereby the business uses its own blogs, apps and other platforms to communicate. Online advertising is growing immensely all over the world.
Why should one use Digital Advertising?
When any kind of paid online marketing campaign is well planned out, thought, and executed, it can mean the difference between wasting money and being able to draw a direct line of profit from ones digital marketing efforts to a return on that investment.
Today, digital advertising expands beyond banner ads with basic targeting. It’s now possible to zero in on prospects based on specific demographics, intent, their stage in the sales funnel, and engagement patterns. These insights can then be used across display, search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), social media, native ads, pay-per-click, retargeting, affiliate, mobile marketing, and more.
Digital advertising has created a world in which users can develop a holistic plan to find and engage with their customers. In 2019, eMarketer projects that U.S. advertisers will spend 54.2% of their ad budgets on digital ads, and by 2023 that figure will reach 66.8%. That’s a lot of competition, so marketers must be aware of how they can make their media spend count.
The good news is that once marketers take the plunge into a more sophisticated approach to digital advertising, the benefits will outweigh the cost of change. Increased relevance shall turn into increased engagement, both in terms of attracting and nurturing leads until they are ready to become customers.
What is AdEspresso?
AdEspresso is a web-based advertising and affiliate software solution developed by Hootsuite for small and medium-sized businesses that require a reliable, robust, and feature-rich advertising and marketing platform. The platform allows users to easily and effectively manage their Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns.
AdEspresso allows advertising agencies and marketing professionals to conduct a range of duties effortlessly; they can create, perform, and manage A/B testing; optimize campaigns to get the best possible returns and create easy-to-understand visual analytics of campaign data.
The cloud-based software solution provides users with the tools to perform Facebook Ads A/B testing, obtain valuable recommendations for campaign optimization, and get a more accurate analysis of their Facebook Ads campaign through reliable and result- driven analytics.
AdEspresso Features
AdEspresso by Hootsuite helps users manage social media ads faster and more efficiently, especially when it comes to Facebook Ads. Dealing with marketing and advertising through Facebook can be time-consuming and difficult. AdEspresso works to eliminate that and make the entire process simpler and more effective.
To get the most realistic and effective results, users have to have the ability to create multiple variants for every single aspect of your creative approach, including different demographic targets. This is how one can achieve results-driven Facebook Ad campaigns. Granted, most advertising and affiliate software solutions in the market allow users to do that, but the key is having the ability to deal with all the processes in a quick and simple manner.
AdEspresso provides a campaign editor that enables users to create and test multiple ads within minutes, instead of hours. Furthermore, having the ability to come up with new experiments to test can help increase your returns on advertising by up to a hundred percent.
The cloud-based advertising solution also allows for the easy tracking and management of all Facebook Ad campaigns. Users have more control over all the ads with regards to timing, ad placement, and custom audiences, which typically translates to higher conversion rates for the user’s brand.
AdEspresso also offers top-quality analytics tools that enable marketing professionals to analyze and optimize the marketing campaigns after publishing. The analytics solution allows users to view only the metrics which actually need for tracking and campaign optimization purposes, instead of wasting time on a multitude of data columns that only add to the confusion.
Speaking of optimizing Facebook advertising campaigns, AdEspresso by Hootsuite actually does all the analysis for users on all their campaigns. It provides users with daily actionable recommendations, which in turn allow users to obtain better and more effective results.
AdEspresso’s PDF report builder allows users to quickly create comprehensive and detailed PDF reports of all their Facebook advertising efforts for customers, colleagues, and stakeholders. The AdEspresso Report Builder can help you create clean and professional-looking PDF reports for your Facebook Ads within minutes.
The advertising platform utilizes a drag-and-drop function that allows users to simply drag and drop the various elements they want displayed for each individual campaign. They can fully customize the display to only show the metrics they care about and how the data is being presented. In a few simple steps, your PDF report is ready to download and presented to your customers and/or bosses.
AdEspresso’s data synchronization software solution enables users to connect their Facebook Ad account to their existing customer relationship management (CRM) platform and/or email marketing tool. This allows you to keep all your leads, target audiences, and contacts always in sync and up-to-date automatically, instead of consuming the majority of your time focusing on tedious data.
Creating Campaigns
Let us walk through creating a sample campaign. Assuming you’ve registered and are using the free trial for this. You’ll need to set up your account and link it to your Facebook account, so it can manage your ads. Once it’s all set up and you’re logged in, just click the big “new campaign” button at the top. You will have to plug in a name and a billing account here, and you can add tags if you want for later organization and comparison.
It will ask you what you want to promote. In this case, you can click the website tab and click news feed, which will create a promoted post. Once you click proceed, you’re taken to the ad design menu, where you can click which page you want to promote.
This is where things get interesting. You have one field for headlines, but you can add multiple headline variations for split testing. The same goes for ad text, you can vary it just by clicking the + to add another field. You can also upload as many images as you want to test. Keep in mind that this is creating a matrix of possibilities. If you have title A and title B, copy 1 and copy 2, and image X and image Z, you end up with the ads A1X, A1Z, A2X, A2Z, B1X, B1Z, B2X, and B2Z.
This wouldn’t normally be a problem, but remember that you do have to pay for all of those. The more variations you test, the more your budget has to be divided amongst all of the options. If you’re not keeping tight control on your ad spend, you can easily add a few too many variations and drastically over-spend. AdEspresso makes it so easy to make variations that you may not even realized consciously how many you’re making.
Continue filling out the data as normal; landing page, link description, display link, CTA, placement, and all the rest. This is all very standard. You can also choose to track your goals in Google Analytics and with the Facebook Pixel if you have the pixel implemented on your site.
After this, you get to fill out audience targeting data. There’s actually not a lot of difference here between AdEspresso and Power Editor. Seems as though Facebook did something right with that plugin, eh? Still, it might be worth taking a look into the documentation to see if any features stand out to you.
Normally, this would be the end. However, AdEspresso adds in one more question, which is “what do you want to test?” This has a bunch of different options you can test, like difference between gender performance, or relationship statuses, or placements, or whatever else you have chosen in your targeting. Some options will be disabled, though. Remember, your ad creative variance plus your targeting variance can add an incredible number of variations. AdEspresso caps you at 250 to make sure you don’t go overboard and end up with meaningless data from tiny sub-audiences.
The budget and bidding menu is next, and it’s all very self-explanatory. Frankly, if you’re not aware enough of Facebook ad bidding structures to comprehend this section without my assistance, you’re probably not in the right mindset to be using as robust a tool as AdEspresso. You’re more or less just using a jackhammer to dig up a flower with overkill.
Once you have that set, you can publish your ad variations. That’s it! No going back and copying campaigns and making variations manually; AdEspresso does it all automatically. As soon as you click publish, everything is up and ready to go, according to whatever timing or budget constraints you may have added.
AdEspresso Benefits
AdEspresso by Hootsuite allows users to optimize Facebook Ads as effortlessly as possible, regardless of their skill level or experience working with software systems, online applications, and tools. The cloud-based advertising and affiliate software solution allows for easy and painless A/B testing.
The platform enables users to create a multitude of variants of Facebook ads with just a few simple clicks. If one has a different target audience, the ability to create a host of variants allows users to test all versions across multiple target audiences.
AdEspresso has a save function that allows users to save preferences for audience demographics so it can reuse them on an advertising campaign in the future. Users can also store all your media through the cloud so to can avoid uploading the same image, video, or audio file every time one is trying to create Facebook ads for A/B testing.
AdEspresso also offers clean and robust analytics capabilities, which means users can finally stop relying on complex and messy data tables. The customizable dashboards enable marketing professionals to put more emphasis on key metrics in order to identify their most effective and top-performing ads. The analytics tool also allows you to assess Facebook Ads performance fairly accurately, so one doesn’t have to waste time and money on underperforming ads.
Finally, one of the main benefits AdEspresso provides its users is the ability to efficiently and effectively optimize campaigns and take them to the next level.
AdEspresso Pricing
AdEspresso by Hootsuite offers four pricing plans for small and medium-sized businesses, marketing firms, and agencies. The pricing plans are billed on a monthly basis. A 14-day free trial period is also available with no credit card required.
The Base pricing plan goes for $49/month for up to $3,000-per-month Facebook Ads spending and unlimited Facebook Ads accounts. It also include essential features, automatic optimization, a PDF report builder, CRM/Leads sync (up to 3,000 leads), data update frequency (60 minutes), online support in 48 hours, and a one-hour dedicated AdEspresso training session.
The Premium Plan is worth $149/month for up to $10,000-per-month Facebook Ads spending. It comes with everything from the Base Plan in addition to the following: Up to two sub-accounts, CRM/Leads sync (up to 6,000 leads), data update frequency (40 minutes), online support in 24 hours, and a two-hour dedicated AdEspresso training session.
Then there’s the Elite Plan, which is priced at $299/month. It is good for up to $50,000-per-month Facebook Ads spending and includes everything from the Premium Plan. Important features include a white-labeled PDF report builder, up to 10 sub-accounts, CRM/Leads sync (up to 10,000 leads), data update frequency (20 minutes), online support in 12 hours, and a three-hour dedicated AdEspresso training session.
Finally, there’s the Diamond Plan for $499/month and up to $150,000-per-month Facebook Ads spending. Aside from all the features offered in the Elite Plan, this package comes with up to 30 sub-accounts, CRM/Leads sync (up to 15,000 leads), data update frequency (10 minutes), online support in six hours, and a four-hour dedicated AdEspresso training session.
Enterprise plans are also available for agencies spending more than $150,000-per-month on Facebook Ads. Interested parties may visit the AdEspresso official website for details about the enterprise plans and all the essential features that come with each pricing plan.
Alternatives to Ad Espresso
1. Qwaya
Qwaya is a somewhat smaller name in ads management, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less powerful. Let’s take a look.
Features:
- Ad scheduling, which allows you to set your campaigns to turn on and off on a schedule.
- Campaign rules, which allow you to tell campaigns to pause if certain conditions are met, so you don’t need to be actively monitoring every day to cut off underperforming ads.
- Rotation, which allows you to automatically cycle through ads on your own rotation rather than on the rotation Facebook decides.
- Google Analytics integration.
- Multi-user collaboration and asset sharing.
- Templates for both ads themselves and for audiences.
- Split testing, though it’s a little less robust than what AdEspresso offers.
- Ongoing updates that take advantage of new Facebook ad expansions and new ad types.
- Excel-based data export in either xlsx or csv format.
2. Social Ads Tool
SAT is a global program that has content in English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Brazilian Portuguese. They cater to a large, multilingual audience largely focused around Europe and South America, and as such are less valuable to users in the United States. Still, let’s see how they compare.
Features:
- Ads for all sorts of objectives, including fan generation, brand awareness, and even offline sales, which can be tracked back to their online campaigns.
- Campaign management that includes involved bulk imports and exports, audience templates and creative templates, goals and management rules, bulk multivariate testing akin to what AdEspresso offers, and third party tracking tag support.
- Automation features that work with Google Shopping, ad promotion based on performance, budget controls, hourly scheduling, and automatic modification based on competitor spending.
- Real time analytics including detailed reports, goal conversion tracking, audience analysis, and a customizable dashboard.
- Ad management for non-Facebook ads for high spenders.
- Mobile apps for management and for analytics on the fly.
3. AdStage
Third and final of the options I’m considering today, this one is notable for managing more than just Facebook ads. They work for Facebook, Bing, Google, Twitter, and even LinkedIn ads, all in one central dashboard. While that sounds nice, what do they offer in terms of features for the cost? Let’s find out.
Features:
- Bulk ad creation and split testing, to vary up everything form headlines to images to URLs.
- Management for multiple networks in one place, including easy budget editing and status changing in bulk.
- Unrestricted data about performance across all managed platforms.
- Automation for performance based on KPI monitoring, including spend, performance, and custom variables.
- Bulk cleanup, so you can remove all but the best performing ads to unclutter your history.
AdEspresso discount coupons
Use the following codes to get the mentioned discounts for AdExpresso:
- Use code 10off at checkout to get 10% off on AdExpresso Purchase.
- Use code AFFL10 and save $10 on checkout
- Enjoy 10% off on first order when you sign up at AdEspresso using code signup
Roundup
AdEspresso by Hootsuite enables users to easily manage advertising campaigns and Facebook Ads performance and spending. The cloud solution allows them to effortlessly conduct various A/B testing to identify the best and most effective approach to converting their target audience.
AdEspresso lets marketing firms and professionals split test every aspect of their campaigns. It comes with a variety of tools and applications to help them identify which creatives and demographic targets deliver the most actionable results.