It provides access to a large, diverse audience, and can also be tailored to specific audiences, budgets, and goals. However, it may not always be the right choice for every business. It can be expensive and time-consuming. For businesses looking for an effective, cost-efficient alternative to Facebook Ads Manager, a range of options is available. In this blog post, we will look at 10 alternatives to Facebook Ads Manager that could help you make the most of your online advertising budget.
Top 10 Alternatives to Facebook Ads Manager
Whether your business model is B2B or B2C, youโll find an alternative that will fit your needs. For example, did you know that 44% of U.S. marketers have no interest in Pinterest? Thatโs way too much.
Let’s walk ahead and read about 10 alternatives to Facebook Ads you should consider.
1. Email
Email marketing is still one of the most popular marketing channels, although some may say email channel is dead. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. By 2023 there will be 4.3 billion email users.
Additionally, one of the greatest email marketing benefits is an ROI of $42 for every dollar spent. It is the largest among all channels.
However, email marketing is something that takes time since you need to build the list. There are dozens of tools for email marketing.
For most of these tools, you need to pay monthly payments. That’s why it’s always a good deal if you can find a lifetime deal offer because you can quit recurring costs for email marketing.
Mailchimp is usually the first choice when you have a small list of contacts. As you grow, you are likely to consider Mailchimp alternatives.
It depends on your needs and the type of business you’re running.
Some marketing tools specialized in eCommerce, while others are for bloggers, life coaches, or any other niche you can think of.
2. Reddit
With more than 17 million unique visitors on monthly basis, Reddit has been the most popular community forever. The chance for small businesses is in its subject-based communities – subreddits. At the moment, there are more than a million subreddits.
New reddits by months, compared to Facebook the costs are lower.
When you advertise on Reddit, CPM is $0.75, which is 40% lower than Facebookโs common $1.25. Depending on your promotion goals, you can promote posts as link ads. Or you can do it as text ads.
Link ads are generally better to drive traffic to your website, while text ads are more suited to invite for conversations.
Before you start advertising, we strongly suggest reading the tips on how to write effective Reddit ad copy.
According to the photo below, the majority of the users come from the United States, and after that, from UK and Germany.
This means that most of the visitors are actually English speakers, so youโre probably interested in this social network if your potential customers are English speakers.
The same source says that even 69% of users are males, and females are only 31%. However, this data isnโt segmented – itโs the data for all registered users.
When it comes to the U.S. users, then we can say the results are almost equal, although there are slightly more females .
3. Product Hunt
Counting nearly 300k registered members, ProductHunt is a big community where people rank new products on daily basis. Whatโs more, many of the members are big influencers in their field.
Most contributors are founders and co-founders which means that Product Hunt is the place where you can reach decision-makers.
An average Product Hunt contributor is located in San Francisco and has about 7,426 followers on Twitter.
Youโll stand the best chances if your products belong to one of the three main categories:
- SaaS platforms
- Games
- Books
If you manage to reach high ranks, youโll get thousands of visitors to your site that day, and slightly fewer on the following day.
However, there is one little catch – itโs a closed community and you need to be invited. You can deal with this in two ways.
First, interact with ProductHunt members through other social media like Twitter and wait for an invitation.
Second, get posted by an influential member. One of our previous posts was about reaching out to influencers.
Once you become a member, you should try to get your product featured. SEJ says that getting featured is a 5-step process:
- Do your homework
- Build interests before you launch
- Contribute to the community
- Time your launch for maximum impact
- Learn from your submission
Keep in mind that you can be penalized, and you will be if you start asking for a vote or try to force visits in some other way. Announcing that youโre a member is enough.
4. Google Ads
If we were to pick only one alternative to Facebook ads, it would be advertising on Google. Here are some of the reasons:
- Precise match to the customer’s intent
- Fast results
- Budget control
- Easy to measure
Huge amounts of money are spent every single day. How much your competitors are spending depends on the industry your business belongs to.
On Google Ads, you can advertise on their Search Network and/or Display Network.
Advertising on Search Network means bidding for a place on Googleโs search engine result pages – SERP.
On the other hand, advertising on Display Network is nothing else than bidding for a place on partner websites (those who use Google AdSense).
Itโs the most effective auction system. You place a bid and enter into competition with other bidders. However, this doesnโt mean that the highest bidder will have the best rank.
There is a value called Ad Rank, to determine your ad position.
Ad Rank is calculated using your bid amount, the components of Quality Score (expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience), and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats.
Itโs obvious that besides earning from ads, Google wants to provide the most relevant results with the best user experience.
So make your ads relevant and your landing pages enjoyable.
5. Twitter
When it comes to advertising on Twitter, you have three options:
- Promote your brand
- Promote your video
- Drive conversions
- Twitter Ads Objectives
Promoting your brand will increase website traffic, followers, brand awareness, and tweet engagements. If you decide to increase the website traffic, then you have to know that youโll pay only per click.
Next, promoting your video is whenever you want to reach a targeted, engaged audience. You pay only when the targeted user views an absolutely great video.
As for drive conversions, itโs perfect when you have an app that you want to increase people to download or open your app.
When setting up a campaign, you can target your audience by country, gender, location, followers, behavior, and so on.
Besides that, what matters on Twitter is the time when you share (advertise). According to a source, these are the best days and hours to tweet.
Although it can be useful for any type of business, Twitter is more suitable for B2B than B2C. So, if youโre B2C and looking for one or two alternatives to Facebook ads, Twitter is probably not the best option.
On the other hand, if youโre B2B using Twitter is a must.
6. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the largest social network focused on business connections. Almost half of the U.S. population is registered on LinkedIn.
In other words, the perfect opportunity for business advertising. The two ways you can advertise on LinkedIn are:
- Self-Service Advertising (supported Ad formats: Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, and Text Ads)
- Managed Campaigns (supported Ad formats: Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, Dynamic Ads, Display Ads, account-based marketing – ABM)
Sponsored Content allows you to get your companyโs updates, share content and promotions, and more. The ads appear in a homepage feed. Sponsored InMail is a chance to send sponsored content to active members’ inboxes.
This is a great way to make personalized messages.
Text Ads are only available on desktops and may appear on the top of the homepage as a text link ad. You can use filters to make precise targeting. Display Ads are best suited for raising brand awareness because they help you to show your ads in front of relevant profiles. Dynamic Ads allow you to make customizations by writing your ad, choosing a call to action, and using dynamically generated images.
Advertising on LinkedIn may look costly because a minimum daily budget is $10. Still, your audience here should be very specific and very influential so itโs worth trying.
7. Pinterest
Pinterest is a platform where users can share content to virtual collections – pinboards. Itโs founded in 2010 and, as New York Times reported, in the first five years it crossed the number of more than 100 million monthly active users.
According to this year’s update from DMR stats, there are 175 million active users. Here are some more mind-blowing stats:
- 60% percent of Pinterest users are women
- 42% of women and 13% of men are adults
- 2 billion is the average number of monthly searches on Pinterest
- 55% of US online shoppers pick Pinterest as their favorite social media platform
Looking at these numbers you can see just how great a business opportunity Pinterest is. However, even 44% of U.S. marketers have no interest in Pinterest. As for us, we think thatโs too much.
If youโre considering advertising on Pinterest, there are a couple of things you need to know.
First of all, when you create an account itโs very important to sign up for a business account. Otherwise, you wonโt be able to use all the features like the analytics tool.
Think of pins as content as the content you share while pinboards (usually called just boards) are how you organize pins.
Get familiar with Rich Pins because they include extra information beyond just the image, click-through link, and the pinner’s description.
Paid advertising option at Pinterest has Promoted Pins. At this time Promoted Pins are only available to partners in the US, CA, UK, IE, AU, & NZ and you have to sign up for the waitlist.
8. StumbleUpon
Some may not know about it, but trust me on this, using StumbleUpon is a very powerful traffic generator.
StumbleUpon Ads are called Paid Discovery. It works in a way that you submit a page to StumbleUpon and then drive traffic to it with no clicks required.
They have some great targeting options which is the reason why many marketers love them. You can target by content category, age, gender, and location.
Basically, very similar to targeting with Facebook Ads but with lower costs. Of course, you can use Google Analytics to track all the traffic and measure the performance.
The best way to do it is by using Campaign URL Builder.
This way, you can measure which campaigns, ads, and things like that bring the most revenue. Furthermore, you can import cost data, so you can measure ROI in a very easy way.
Thereโs public Quality Score metric that helps you understand if you targeted users correctly.
Youโll get the most out of it if you have great content because Quality Score is based on the number of people voting up your content. The better content you have, the more visitors youโll generate, plus the costs per visitor will decrease.
One useful tip: Match your content with different categories to find out what works best for you.
9. Snapchat
Snapchat counts more than 166 million daily users and its advertising revenue is expected to reach almost 900 million by the end of this year.
Compared to last year, that is more than double. Every campaign must have one of the following objectives:
- Send people to your website
- Drive app installs
- Increase brand awareness
- Get people to view your content
We always pick to send people on my website because that way we’re able to capture new leads, acquire new customers, and so on.
Here are Snapchat Ad formats:
- Sponsored Lenses
- Sponsored Geofilters
- Snap Ad Videos
Sponsored Lenses are truly unique ad formats developed by Snapchatโs developers and API partners. Lenses are activated by facial triggers or tapping the screen.
Snapchat stated that compared to other mobile applications Lenses drive 3x more brand awareness. Sponsored Geofilters are videos and photos whose appearance is determined by the user’s account location.
Thatโs why they are best for raising local awareness.
Snap Ad Videos are vertical videos that can last maximally 10 seconds. But there is the option for interactive attachment if users chose to continue engaging with your brand.
Advertising on Snapchat is an option for raising brand awareness. Maybe youโve noticed that most big brands are advertising on Snapchat. Itโs because of the costs, risks, and lack of standardization.
However, if youโre aiming to raise brand awareness, and especially if youโre locally orientated, give it a shot. You might just benefit more than you could imagine.
10. Quora
Quora has more than 200 million unique monthly visitors and 23.03% of them are U.S. visitors.
But how many people actually use Quora?
With trendy questions about everything and usually great deeply explained answers, Quora is a goldmine for marketers in many ways, including advertising.
Hereโs how it works.
To access the Quora Ads Manager you need to have a Quora account. Also, you need to create an ad account.
When creating an ad youโll get to choose your objective, and then audience, headline, description text, landing page URL, and call to action for your text ad.
You can also target the audience by topic, platform, or location.
If you already have experience with Facebook Ads then transition Quora will be a piece of cake because they have the same campaign structure with three layers:
- Campaign
- Ad Set
- Ad
Another similarity is a conversion pixel that allows you to track conversions on your website.
At this moment, you can only one conversion pixel per account. Apart from Facebook Ads, Quora also share some resemblance to Google Ads because itโs a CPC-based model. It works as a real-time auction.
You can set and adjust bids and budgets at any time and pay only when someone clicks on your ad.
Conclusion
There are many alternatives to Facebook Ads Manager for those who want to run successful ad campaigns. From self-serve platforms to full-service agencies, some options fit all budgets and business needs. Ultimately, the right choice will depend on the individual, but the options listed here should give anyone a good starting point. With the right tool, businesses can maximize their advertising efforts and reach the right people with the right message.