What is Paid Media: Definition, Types, Benefits, and Goals

In short, Paid Media is the paid advertisement of a brand or its products on a publisher and media channel. 

It helps a business to share its message with the target audience and promote their services.

In other words, when a business pays for the ad space on a media platform or a site to promote itself to the target audience, it is known as Paid Media.

It helps a brand to enhance its traffic, conversions, leads, and overall revenue. Further, it helps a brand to rocket its awareness at scale among the target audience and potential buyers.

Media is an element in the online marketing strategy for enhancing sales and brand awareness. Media works as a source for businesses to spread their message and awareness to the audience.

Media generally falls into three categories earned, paid, and owned media. Let’s understand each in kind if media in detail.

Types of Media

What is Earned Media?

People also call it free media, and it is the media source that is earned due to trustworthiness, or service quality, and word of mouth. It is an organic way of marketing yourself among potential clients. It also includes the online organic advertisement space such as social media, search engine optimization, and other free methods.

What is Paid Media?

Everything you do to promote your brand and services in front of the target audience with paid methods is called Paid Media.

What is Owned Media?

These are the media channels that you own and use for advertising yourself, be it email marketing, websites, blogs, and social media business pages. These owned channels are pretty powerful in building relationships with your customers and potential buyers.

Types of Paid Media Pricing Models

There are several types of paid media ads that have different pricing models or methods. Let’s learn what these are:

CPC- Cost Per Click

In this paid media, advertisers have to pay for every single click they get from the users on their ads, whether it is Display or Search Ad. No matter how many people see your ad, if they don’t click on it, you are not going to be charged from the publisher or by the media channel. You can choose between automated bidding and manual bidding. With manual bidding, you can bid for the amount you are willing to pay for specific ad space. You can actually set the maximum budget for your ad campaign as well as the maximum bid limit. This is one of the best methods to increase the web traffic that consists of your well-targeted audience.

CPM- Cost Per Thousand Impression

You have to pay an amount for every thousand ad impressions or views. It is the best option when you want to increase your brand awareness and nurture your potential clients by showing them your ads multiple times on different publishers and channels. This kind of Media type can be used in display ads, sponsored posts on social media, and others.

What are the Types of Paid Media?

The paid media includes many different platforms and methods that you can utilize to advertise your brand. Let’s learn regarding this all in a bit depth:

Paid Social Media Ads

It is the most popular paid media advertisement method. When you access Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media, you see a lot of sponsored content and banner ads that are what we call Paid Social Media Ads.

Advertising through this method is also known as Social Media Marketing, and you can use the various bidding methods here as well.

Bear in mind that social media ads are not successful in generating direct sales effectively. This is because social media is a platform where people come to entertain, get new updates or news, or connect with their friends. Most people have no intention of buying things when they surf social media.

You cannot expect direct conversions via social media, but it is a powerful source to create a powerful online presence in front of your audience. You can easily promote your products, services, and your brand with the targeted audience.

You can target very specifically on social media platforms based on demographics, interests, user behavior, and location, and so on.

Search Ads

Search ads appear on search engines when a user searches for something. If you want to advertise using search ads, then you can use various bidding models, be it Pay Per Impression, Pay Per Click, Pay Per Acquisition, and so on.

Search ads are basically targeted on the basis of keywords and are highly efficient in driving sales or for lead generations. If you want to increase your web traffic, sell a particular product or service or want to get relevant leads, then use the Search Ads.

Display Ads

You are reading an article on a blog, and you see a few banner ads on the webpage. These ads are called banner or display ads that you need to design and publish to promote your business or a product. You can use Google Ads to select and run a Display ad campaign. You can use many targeting methods in Display ads, be it based on user behavior, user interests, demographics, location, and keywords.

For example, if you want to run an ad about a post-workout drink to encourage interested people to buy it, you can run your banner ad on the websites or webpages that contain the keyword “best post-workout drink.” You can also place this ad on the sites that most fitness enthusiasts visit.

Native Ads

Native ads are pretty similar to the Display Ads, and it appears on the publisher’s website or social media platforms or even local business listings. The main thing that makes it different from banner ads is it is designed in such a way that it doesn’t look like an ad or advertisement banner. Instead, it matches the web content it is posted on, and users cannot easily perceive it as an ad.

That is the only reason it gets almost 53% more attention than banner ads, which are clearly recognizable as sponsored content.

For example, while reading a blog, you may have seen sponsored posts from other blogs that appear just like the other posts of the blog you are visiting. It is a great way to increase traffic on your site or blog. It might also boost your conversations if the landing page is relevant, luring, and effectively use Call to Actions.