There are three types of Google ads available to you through your Adwords account:

1. Search Ads: these are the paid ads that list along the top of the Google search results page when a search query is entered. They are the top 2 or 3 ads that rank above organic search results, and are referred to as pay-per-click, or PPC, and are bid for with specific keywords through your Adwords account.
2. Display Network Ads: these are placement ads that are used in Google’s Display Network, which is a group of owned and 3rd party network sites (such as YouTube or Gmail) that have agreed to host these ads. These banner ads can be placed as text, image or even video. 
3. Remarketing Ads: remarketing gives you the ability to essentially “follow” your website’s visitors around the internet, and show them your ads wherever they go within Google’s extensive network — which is pretty much every main site on the web. You can use Remarketing Ads within both your Search and Display Network ad campaigns.

Check out our free Guide to Google Adwords for the full run-down on how to set up each type of ad from within your account.

Just like Adwords, Microsoft also serves ads on its Bing search engine results. Bing is not as popular as Google, so it does have a smaller audience, but this means that there is also less competition when bidding for keywords (which means ad placements cost less!), and can be really useful depending on what market you’re targeting.

Facebook Ads

Facebook offers different types of ads depending on your business’ objectives. Whether you want to build your brand and awareness, engage your audience, or drive traffic and leads to your website, Facebook has an ad type specially designed for you.

Wordstream has updated an awesome post about all of these different types to help you figure out which option might be best for your business.

Twitter Ads

Twitter Ads help you promote your account, and your brand, with promoted content and targeting. Twitter offers a ton of different targeting options, such as Follower targeting (displaying Twitter Ads campaigns to people who are similar to the followers of certain usernames you select), Device targeting (where you can target users using specific operating systems, devices, or even mobile carriers), and Tailored Audience (where you can target specific users who have recently visited your website, or who have email addresses saved in one of your customers lists).

Instagram Ads

Targeting mobile users, and with a community of more than 500 million users, Instagram is one of the world’s largest mobile ads platforms.

You can place photo ads, video ads or carousel ads, and even include“buy” buttons within the ad, to drive purchase conversions. Check out our step by step post on how to set up your first Instagram ad campaign.

YouTube Ads

Any video uploaded to YouTube can be an ad. Pre roll video ads appear before other videos on YouTube, and other video ads can appear beside playing videos and in search results. You only pay when someone engages with your video ad; if they skip it before 30 seconds (or the end) you don’t pay a cent.

YouTube also offers  a variety of targeting options that help you reach the right customer for your business. You can target by age, gender, location, interests and more.

AdMob Ads

Owned by Google, AdMob ads appear within mobile apps. These mobile apps are usually games, and the ads within them can appear as text, image, banner or rich HTML, giving app creators the ability to earn revenue off of the free content they develop.

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We hope this list of common ad types has helped you figure out which might be the best option for you business to work with in the future.

To learn more about digital advertising strategies and their forecasted trends for 2017, download a copy of our State of Inbound report: