19 Best Ad Networks for Advertisers - Alternatives to Google and Facebook (Meta)
People often wonder how big tech giants like Google and Facebook make money since it's free for any user.
It's all because of the specific word "advertising". In this fast-growing world, there are many growing start-ups and established businesses. Most of them set aside a significant amount for their marketing purposes.
Back in the 20th century, these industrialists and company owners had options like newspapers, magazines, and flyers. Apart from these, there was a small scale in television advertising, but it was not such a massive market for advertisers, since the number of users was small.
Interestingly, at the beginning of the 21st century, the business model of Google and Facebook (meta) has changed the situation, and now advertisers have the opportunity to display their products as digital media.
What is an ad network?
Ad networks are marketplaces for advertisers and publishers. They act as aggregators so that advertisers can place their ads in accessible spaces on various websites and mobile platforms. They help online platforms monetize the ad spaces they have by matching them to advertiser requirements.
The term "ad network" is impartial to the media. However, it is often used as an "ad network" as the commercial center of publishers and advertisers is gradually found on the Internet. The main difference between print media and online promotion networks is that websites deliver ads to the general population through an ad server.
Hearing this, only two names can come to mind in everyone's head: Google Ads and Facebook Ads. You are not mistaken in this case, since Google and Facebook are known as major shareholders in the media and advertising circles. Their combined ad revenue was $ 219 million in 2020, accounting for 34% of the entire market.
But the market is not limited to these platforms. There are currently many ad networks that advertisers can try out. But there are certain things you need to keep in mind before finalizing any platform.
Internet advertising has grown enormously in this developing world. Thus, the number of ad networks has increased like never before in these two decades. It is too difficult for an advertiser to choose which ad network is best suited for their business achievements and is able to find the ideal target audience related to the company's business.
Below are some points to consider when choosing an ad network company for your product.
Marketing strategy
The marketing strategy varies from company to company as it depends on the company's product and budget. Some of the company's products are designed to serve only a specific niche of the population, while some products are made for all people without any discrimination.
For example, companies like Lamborghini and Dior must have marketing strategies without forgetting millionaires and billionaires. On the contrary, products from companies like Colgate and Pepsi are meant for everyone, and so they need to reach a wide variety of people. As such, each ad network has a dedicated community of publishers, so you need to choose an ad agency that can be helpful to your marketing strategy.
Target Location
Each company has a target audience in several regions according to their product range. For example, Hyundai is a company from South Korea that now sells its cars all over the world. So, they have a marketing budget for all the countries where they sell their product.
One option is to hire one global ad network and give it a contract so that all companies can negotiate. They are more likely to get a contract at a much lower rate than expected, but this may affect their target audience as well.
There is another option when you give contracts by seeing local advertising networks and their connection with the audience of this country. In this option, you need to select different ad networks for different countries. However, each ad network has better reach and crowds in certain places. For example, Crazy house is best for targeting China, JumpTap is best for targeting the US, and so on.
List of publishers
Believe it or not, publishers play a significant role in any advertisement. If the right ad is in the wrong place, it won't do the magic. For example, if any Salmon Sister product — one of the banner ads for one of the best canned fish brands — is posted on a blog with the headline "The 5 Best Vegan Foods for Your Daily Life", what will happen? No one will click on this banner because the publisher's audience is different from the company's target audience.
Each ad network is made up of many publishers. But always remember to look at quality, not quantity. Typically, ad networks mention their long list of resources or their assigned publishers, but always look for publishers that match your business.
If the ad is related to the automotive sector, you naturally need to look to see if there are publishers on the network that are related to cars or other vehicles. Request a list of sites where your ads will appear! This will help you get a better idea of it.
Metric methodologies
Before you find an ad network for your ads, you must decide what measurement is best for your promotion. Some ad networks are suitable for CPM and some are suitable for CPA or CPC.
- CPM: This is the cost per thousand impressions. CPM is also called CPT, i.e. cost per thousand impressions, which means we want to pay a cost per 1000 impressions. For example, if the cost per thousand impressions is $10, that means the cost per 1,000 impressions is $10.
- CPA: This is the cost per action. These are the costs spent on clicks/conversions. For example, your promotion generated 1,000 clicks at a cost of $100 and you generated 100 conversions. So, at this point, your CPA is $10. The lower the CPA value, the higher the conversion rate.
- CPC: This is the cost per click. Like CPM, CPC is also used in online advertising. The only difference between the two is that this cost is based on clicks, not impressions. If any user is shown an ad but doesn't then click on it, you won't be charged because the cost is based on clicks only. For example, if the CPC is $3, that means each click costs $3, so 20 clicks will cost you $60.
Now you know all the ways to choose the perfect ad network for your ads. Currently, Google and Facebook (now Meta) own most of the digital advertising market. But you need to be aware of all other ad networks besides Google and Facebook. They also provide excellent services and, in most cases, at a low price compared to these two big giants.
YouTube and Instagram are also great alternatives to Google and Facebook. However, the twist here is that YouTube is an integral part of Google Inc. since November 2016, while Instagram is owned by Meta Inc. since Facebook bought Instagram in 2012. That's why we don't consider YouTube and Instagram on this list.
Check out this list of 19 ad networks that are the best alternatives to Google and Facebook ads.
Apple Search Ads
Apple Search Ads (ASA) is an ad network channel that connects advertisers with an influential interest group. Currently, 20 million registered iOS app developers care for 500 million visitors every week , causing fierce competition for all verticals. They have managed to raise $100 billion in revenue.
Apple Search Ads comes with two options: basic and advanced. The extended version comes with additional features at a comparatively higher price. Please note that with Apple Search Ads, similar ads will not be shown to every user. There are several types of ads and the options include the number of images and videos.
Yahoo Ad Tec Hour offers many tools for buying and selling. It includes multi-channel DSP (demand-side platforms) and Exchange. DSP is a platform provided by Yahoo where ad buyers can bid and buy inventory, manage their purchases, and track their ads.
Yahoo Ad Tech Core USP (User Sell Offer) is an exclusive partnership that provides non-competitive access to brand-safe premium assets with maximum viewability across native, video and media formats.
Amazon classifieds
Amazon Ads has access to over 300 million active accounts. They gained a deep understanding of what customers think about the products and brands they find, browse and buy online.
They offer services such as sponsoring products, brands, and displays. In addition, they also provide audio and video ads and personalized ads for their clients. Amazon DSP (demand-side platform) allows advertisers to programmatically purchase display, video, and audio ads. They offer seven different services and eight different products to their customers. Amazon Ads currently operates in 18 different countries such as Australia, Brazil, India and many more.
Tabula
Tabula is a local advertising network based in New York City. It distributes "offered" content in various popular news outlets and spaces that are visited. Taboola Ads are most commonly used by medium-sized companies (from 51 to 1,000 employees) and marketing and advertising companies.
They have exclusive partnerships with the world's leading publishers such as USA Today, NBC, MSN, Business Insider, Bloomberg and many more. Taboola helps you easily achieve your marketing goals and generate leads.
Advertising on TikTok
Tik Tak has over 1 billion users since September. TikTok ads can now reach an estimated adult (18+) audience of 825 million people worldwide. The platform offers various types of ads such as feed ads, image ads, video ads, spark ads, pangle ads, carousel ads, top-down ads, branded hashtag challenges, and branded effects (branded stickers and filters).
TikTok offers advertisers a simple four-step solution to publish ads on its platform. The main steps include choosing a target and choosing an audience. After that, you must enter your budget. In the last step, you need to develop an advertisement and then you are ready to advertise.
Ads on Snapchat
Snapchat Ads are primarily used by advertisers who want to target the Millennial generation. Snapchat has the highest traffic in this young age community. You can target your ads based on interests, behaviors, location, and more. Along with that, connect with people who are innovating new behaviors and values that are changing the world.
With Snapchat Ads, you have a total available market of around 319 million users . These users are active daily. In addition, Snapchat reaches almost 75% of Millennials and Gen Zers, so it will help promote your brand among them. If you're building a brand for young people, there's no better platform than Snapchat. Your promotion can skyrocket among the youth.
Twitter Business
Twitter Business provides over 20 product options on its platform to display your personalized ads. Below are some of the important adoptions you can find on Twitter.
- Advertisements
- Subscriber Announcements
- Twitter Boost
- Twitter Live
- Polls
- Takeover of Twitter
- Branded hashtags
- Company Notice
And much more…
Twitter is a platform with a strong community. If you want to present your brand on social media, Twitter is the best place to showcase your products or services.
Spotify Ads
A couple of years ago, if any advertisers wanted to target a music-loving audience, they only had to choose FM radio. But now everything has changed. Spotify Ads basically gives you three options to filter your target audience: demographics, behavior, and context. In addition, you can also narrow down your audience using custom targeting.
Spotify offers adaptable ad options. Thus, there is something for you, no matter the size of your financial plan. Advertisers can get everything they need for as little as $250 through their Ad Studio self-service advertising platform.
Microsoft announcements
Microsoft Ads has a track record of reaching 41 million consumers with 400 million monthly searches on Microsoft and partner sites. It comes with 15 different promotional tools that can be very helpful to improve the performance of your advertising campaign.
Assuming you're currently doing some extraordinary work with Google Ads and Facebook Ads, you can offload that work to Microsoft Advertising by letting the import tools do all the hard work. This way you can put less energy into your day to day social media marketing strategies and focus on business results.
Epom
Epom gives you a 14 day free trial to test the platform. They provide many ad server solutions such as White label ad servers, Powerful RTB Bidder, Whitelabel DSP and many more to grow any business multiple times. You can set up hyper-targeted ad campaigns to reach your audience through Epom. In addition, various ad formats are available, such as display, mobile, apps, and video.
For Ad Server, Epom pricing starts at $212 per month (Basic plan) to $2125 (Advanced plan). Plus, you can even set up your plan in Enterprise Mode.
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads offers ad types for all needs, from conversational to dynamic to video. It promotes your company's ads to target audiences across platforms such as desktop, mobile, and tablets and builds awareness. Your product is featured in the world's most viewed professional news feed.
LinkedIn's Campaign Manager simplifies all your promotional workflows. It creates, measures and optimizes your missions across multiple platforms. Moreover, there are over 65 million decision makers on their platform. This can definitely lead to a paradigm shift in your business.
Media.net is the world's leading promotional organization with one of the most thorough mechanisms for publishing innovation across all platforms.
The platform works with web advertising, creating top-level elements in numerous sections of any advertising technology. Thanks to this, the requirements of each client are satisfied without interacting with different sellers. This helps to consolidate solutions from other vendors on one platform to simplify the ad management process.
Telegram ads
Advertisers can use Telegram Ads to target their ads on any public Telegram channel with over 1000 members. They have over 500 million monthly active users worldwide, and every month, Telegram users generate 500 billion views across multiple channels.
Advertising messages are currently in test mode. When they're fully prepared to go ahead and let Telegram take care of their basic expenses, they'll start offering promotion revenue to the owner of whatever public channel the posts are showing on.
InMobi Audience Targeting
InMoby is an India-based company that has an influential audience such as fashionistas, fast food lovers, college students, health and fitness enthusiasts, car shoppers and wealthy citizens. It contains various features for advertisers such as Pulse for market and customer insights, Audiences for customer targeting platform, DSP and Exchange.
Publishers offer valuable services such as mobile app monetization, header staking platform service, unifID identification solution, game monetization, various ad formats, and more.
AdRoll
Adroll is an advertising platform with data on hundreds of thousands of brands and billions of buyers for over 10 years. This will ultimately help target the right audience for your product. They also provide marketing strategies that are perfect for your business. Once you apply these strategies, you will see fruitful results.
AdRoll not only works with ads, but also sends automatic emails to the target audience, and the combination of both increases traffic to your site. In addition, they have their own USP in targeting the audience over time based on the change in the taste buds of the products.
SXM Media is the largest podcast advertising network in the United States of America. Suppose your target audience listens to podcasts of different genres. In this case, this is the perfect ad network for your product as you can target almost 55 million podcast listeners from this platform.
They offer multiple options on their platforms such as streaming audio, video, dynamic audio, and serial audio. Now comes their best part, which is podcast advertising, where they offer audience-based purchasing, contextual alignment, branded content, and exclusive display opportunities that are all part of SXM Media.
perpetua
Perpetua provides everything you need to grow profitable market share for eCommerce brands. Instead of creating campaigns, they ask for your goals and budgets, and based on this data, they customize the branding for each brand. With customized solutions, you can expect better results for your brand.
Perpetua optimizes bids programmatically, which is faster and more accurate than our manual process. Thanks to this, now you have time to focus on strategies, testing and analysis. Perpetua prices start at just $250 per month.
Premise
Primis is a video promotion module that offers online video advertising capabilities. They offer customers compelling videos with perfect timing and the best ad space to improve CPM and customer experience. Their own ad block does everything and is fully responsive to your website.
By using video promotions through Primis, you can offer customers the choice of ad designs they like and earn high ad revenues. Primis holds itself accountable for the industry's most customer-focused media marketing recommendations. The ad network is secured to use and protect customers from fraud.
A click
Clikadoo is a publisher's ad network that manages over 4 billion ad impressions daily. Among them, 3.6 million users are converted to purchase a product or service. Numerous advertising structures offered by the organization include PopUnder, promotional videos and advertising pennants, including for laptops and smartphones.
If you have little user traffic on your site or app, then Clickadu might be the best option for you. They accept multiple payment options such as PayPal, Web Money, Paxum and bank transfer. Regular CPMs for all the different ad designs are listed on his website. So, you can check them out and see how useful Clickadu can be for you.
Conclusion
The above list includes the top performing ad networks from our huge list of publishers. Some of them are extremely specific to some advertisers and only work well for them. So, whichever ad network you choose to place your ads on, keep one thing in mind: personalization is the key to growing your business through digital marketing.
You can also learn how to protect yourself from malicious search ads.