Let’s start with a very simple question, ‘what is advertising?’.

This might seem like a very basic point but let’s make sure we all understand the same thing when we use the word.

First of all, for something to count as ‘advertising’ you have to pay for someone to see it! It is therefore different from those social media posts that you can create and post for free on Facebook and Instagram. Those are called ‘Organic’ posts.

Within paid advertising there are some further distinctions to draw. There are ads you pay to appear on the Google search results page (sometimes called PPC). There are ads that appear on websites (often called Display), and there are ads that appear in the feeds of social media (mostly called Paid Social).

Offline, there are of course poster ads, newspaper ads and radio ads too.

Most of our attention here will be about Paid Social ads as we believe this is an area where small businesses would like a lot of help and advice.