Best Google Ads & Facebook Ads alternatives
Google and Facebook (incl. Instagram) currently account for approx. half of all digital ad spend. This means there is high competition for eye balls and clicks amongst advertisers, in turn forcing up the average CPCs and ROAS.
If you’re running on a limited ad budget or work in a niche industry, there are other networks you can advertise on that have much lower CPCs, without compromising on audience quality.
Here are our recommended Google Ads alternatives and Facebook Ads alternatives.
Reddit Ads
Reddit is made up of over 100,000 active communities where people dive into the topics most relevant to them. The site has 50m+ daily active users and 50B+ monthly views.
Target visitors based on their interests, the communities they are visiting or as part of a remarketing campaign.
Read our Reddit Ads review or click here to find out more.
Quora Ads
Very similar to Reddit Ads, but with slightly lower quality traffic. Quora Ads is worth testing if you have a service that can help solve common questions/issues raised on Quora.
It is all self-managed and very easy to set up if you are used to a Google Ads style UI.
AdRoll
AdRoll provides a platform for ecommerce brands to easily launch brand awareness and remarketing display ads. AdRoll relies a lot on Google’s display network, although it does buy inventory from multiple ad exchanges.
Amazon Ads
This isn’t really a niche platform, but it is often overlooked by business who don’t sell on Amazon. Amazon’s ad platform generates more revenue for the business than Prime subscriptions. Their most recent reporting showed ads brought in $31 billion for the business.
As well as sponsored products for items you sell on Amazon there are also brand display ads for shoppers on and off Amazon.
BuySellAds
BuySellAds is primarily aimed at advertisers who want to reach technical audiences. The platform has over 100 publishers across design/developer sites and technology focused sites.
The promise is you can reach developers, designers, early adopters, crypto enthusiasts, and other tech-savvy audiences in a single platform.
Ethical Ads
A niche ad platform focused on a web developer audience, this is as targeted as it gets for brand awareness campaigns. The platform boasts a hand picked network of developer focused sites and over 35 million ad impressions per month.
Bing Ads
Google Ads’ less successful cousin, but still a worthy investment. I tend to find traffic is much lower through Bing but the CPC is cheaper and the conversions actually higher.
Unfortunately, the small market share Bing enjoys limits the traffic and sales potential, but I would always recommend running a campaign on Bing.
Pinterest Ads
Reach 400 million people who use Pinterest every month to discover and buy your products. This is a visual medium an relies on you having well designed images to stand out amongst all the pins.
Pinterest Ads also sits high up the conversion funnel, at the awareness and interest stages. Don’t expect a lot of directly attributable/last-click conversions.
Share your Google Ads alternatives
Are there any alternatives to Google Ads or Facebook Ads you’ have used and would recommend? if so, leave a comment below.
Note, I have intentionally not mentioned Twitter Ads in the list above. From my experience, it is a low performing ad network with very little value in terms of ROI.