According to a study by “Die Mediaagenturen e.V.”, the digital market will account for almost 69% of advertising revenue in Germany in 2025. This in turn will be dominated by three major players: Google, Meta and Amazon – which combine for 72% of digital investments. In addition to their own high-reach platforms and services, all three have an advertising network. This means that advertising is not only displayed on their own services (e.g. Google Search, YouTube, Gmail or Google Maps), but also on countless other websites and apps that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with these companies. For example, Kleinanzeigen, Spiegel or Kicker only partially manage their advertising space themselves, so that Google Ads are also displayed there. Two users who go to the same website at the same time usually receive different advertisements as a result. For advertisers, cookies and other tracking technologies have the advantage that they can be used to “track” potential customers and reach them on a variety of websites and apps.
Online advertising with a small budget only via large advertising platforms
Small companies rarely sign advertising contracts with individual website or app operators to place banner ads, for example. On the dating platform Tinder, for example, which belongs to the Match Group, you can only place ads directly via the Match Media Group if you have an advertising budget of 25,000 US dollars or more. However, Tinder has also released advertising space for Google’s advertising network. This can even be set via the placements in Google Ads.
Other internet companies such as Microsoft and TikTok also maintain advertising networks (albeit much smaller ones). In addition, there are a few others that are little known to the general public, such as Outbrain, Taboola or Tradedoubler – but these are of little relevance to small companies. Nevertheless, advertisers should always ask themselves where and via which providers they can best reach their target group and definitely include TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, X and other channels in their considerations – and not directly target Google Ads and Meta.
Cost and payment models
Unlike print advertising, where you pay a certain amount for an ad, there are usually no fixed costs for online advertising. Costs are usually only incurred when a user clicks on an ad. This process is called pay-per-click (PPC). It is difficult to say how much a click costs (cost-per-click, CPC), especially as this depends on several factors, in particular the advertising platform, the competition from advertisers and the quality factor. As a small company, a simple Google Ads search campaign should be expected to cost between 50 cents and three euros per click. It makes more sense to use the Google Keyword Planner to determine the CPC for the desired search terms (keywords) than to use any average values.
Each advertiser can set the amount of the daily budget themselves on advertising networks that work with the PPC method. With Google Ads and Meta Ads, for example, it is possible to advertise for as little as one euro per day. However, this is not recommended. Once the daily budget has been used up, the ad is only displayed again the following day and is no longer shown to potential customers. It is generally difficult to say what the minimum advertising budget should be. However, experts often advise small companies to start with a campaign budget of 300 to 500 euros per month.
In addition to the CPC method, other billing models such as cost-per-impression (CPI), cost-per-action (CPA), cost-per-lead (CPL) and cost-per-view (CPV) are also common. In the case of CPI, the advertiser pays an amount for each ad impression, although this is usually so low that it is referred to as a cost per thousand (CPM). With CPA, costs are incurred for an action carried out on a website (e.g. a download) and with CPL for a contact (e.g. a newsletter registration). As a “lead” requires an “action”, there is sometimes an overlap between CPL and CPA. The cost-per-view model (CPV) is often used for video advertising. Here, advertisers pay for each view of their video.
5 tips for online advertising
The success of a campaign depends only to a limited extent on the channel used. You should therefore not try to play different platforms off against each other. Sweeping judgments such as “Instagram ads work great”, “Pinterest advertising is useless” or “Google Ads are worthwhile” are not very useful. The following tips are designed to help small businesses advertise successfully online.
1. campaign creation: develop it yourself or commission an agency?
Online advertising is quick to set up, especially as Google Ads has been offering “smart campaigns” and “automated ads” in the Meta Ads Manager for several years now, which even non-experts can use to create campaigns in a matter of minutes. Experts usually advise against such campaigns, but in practice they can perform quite well – if you’re lucky! As you shouldn’t rely on them, it is advisable to watch a tutorial on how to run ads on YouTube beforehand. This is especially true for small companies that only have a monthly advertising budget in the lower three-digit range and only want to run one Google Ads search campaign. For them, hiring an agency is not worthwhile for cost reasons. Accordingly, they are well advised to take care of their ads themselves and watch a tutorial on YouTube on the question “How do I create a search campaign on Google Ads?“.
In all other cases, it is worth hiring an online marketing agency. They not only create advertising campaigns and benefit from their experience in this area, but also conceptualize and design the ads – from the idea to the image to the finished creative.
2. advertising objective: What should be achieved with the campaign?
The ultimate goal of advertising – apart from recruitment – is to generate more sales. However, the target group is not always ready to buy immediately, for example because the product is an innovation, the purchase price is high or the switching costs are considerable. In such cases, it can make sense to first increase awareness of the product or company. Outdoor advertising, for example, primarily aims to increase awareness. Accordingly, advertisers should not expect that someone will immediately buy a car just because they have walked past a poster for a car advertisement, for example. The situation is similar with online advertising. Display advertising, for example, is well suited to generating reach and making a product known, but compared to a search campaign, it is further away from closing a sale. For this reason, a Google Ads search campaign is usually a good idea for small companies to gain initial experience with online advertising.
3. advertising platform: Google, Meta or something else?
For many companies, Google Ads search campaigns are the be-all and end-all of online advertising. The two big advantages: a) advertisers only need a little time and a bit of text to create them and b) users already have a concrete interest in a product or service (otherwise they wouldn’t be searching for it). They are therefore not at the top of the marketing funnel, which is all about attention, awareness and reach, but already one step lower, i.e. they are already considering buying a product or service.
In the case of search engine advertising, the chance that an interested party will become a customer is relatively high. However, if many advertisers pursue the same strategy, the cost per click (CPC) increases, so that the advertising placement is no longer worthwhile. This is particularly true in sectors with high competition and low margins.
Sometimes you also have to start further up the funnel (see previous point). The advertising target and advertising platform should therefore be coordinated. Advertising on Meta, TikTok, Spotify, Reddit or a completely different platform can make perfect sense. Meta Ads and LinkedIn Ads perform well when recruiting specialists, for example, and TikTok is becoming increasingly important as an advertising platform for trainee recruitment.
4 Targeting: Who should be reached?
Google, Meta and Amazon are regarded as data octopuses. This is extremely useful for advertisers, as the target group settings (targeting) can be very finely adjusted. While it is only possible to control who sees an ad to a limited extent for outdoor advertising, for example, it is no problem to play out an Instagram campaign only to people between the ages of 32 and 54, from Cologne and the surrounding area of 3 km, who are interested in renovation and refurbishment. Thanks to these setting options, the scatter loss in online advertising is significantly lower than with conventional marketing. Although targeting is not quite as precise in practice as the advertising networks specify, it is generally possible to narrow down the target group. If you only have a small advertising budget, you should definitely make use of these setting options and keep your targeting narrow. Note: With Meta Ads, the target groups for advertising campaigns on job offers, housing or financial products cannot be defined so narrowly due to anti-discrimination guidelines.
5. optimization: How to create a perfect campaign?
There is no such thing as 100 percent perfect online advertising. It is therefore important to monitor, analyze and optimize your own advertising campaign. As a rule of thumb, the first adjustment for small budgets should be made after around two to four weeks, as you don’t have enough meaningful data before then. There can be many reasons for poorly performing campaigns. Campaign type, budget, target group, interests, target region, ad text, creatives, keywords (for Google Ads) or the landing page are just some of the factors that determine the success or failure of a campaign. It is therefore important to critically analyze your own campaign and act accordingly if necessary.
