Hi! I’m Ben. For 15 years, I’ve been an award-winning expert in digital advertising, building and managing campaigns for Large, Small & Medium businesses, from startup to massive national brands.

I’ve worked on everything from political campaigns to millions of dollars’ worth of Six Flags, Giorgio Armani, and Applebee’s accounts. I’ve also had a long history of teaching professional digital advertising classes online, covering every corner of the industry.

As the decades have passed, digital marketing has kept evolving, with such a pace that it keeps raising a lot of questions with the Clients and students I work with.

I have personally been asked tons of questions, ranging from how to make money through online content, to how to bag a job in digital marketing and understand trends in digital marketing. That’s why I have decided to write a blog to answer these questions. I want to give you an insight into digital marketing that you won’t get if you simply read typical articles on the topic. Below are some of the most frequently asked questions about digital marketing. I’ll try to give you a bit more insight into these questions.

Let’s start with the basics:

1. What is Digital Advertising?

Digital advertising is any type of advertising that is shown on digital devices, like phones, tablets, desktops or any connected IoT devices. Unlike TV, radio or any print advertising, digital advertising is associated with digital-native platforms: social media, websites and applications, and even smart devices.

2. Is More Money Spent on Digital or Traditional Media?

Despite the increasing amount of time that individuals spend on digital media, traditional media still receive a majority of the advertising money spent. Traditional media (eg TV and radio) offers a more predictable ROI, which makes advertisers more comfortable using traditional channels. Digital media is also in constant flux, and what makes sense for advertisers this month might not next month.

3. What is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic advertising is a form of automation that handles the buying and selling of digital advertising space. In traditional advertising, a contract between the advertiser and a single website is negotiated directly. The process is more cumbersome and often produces less accurate results than with programmatic advertising. With programmatic, advertisers can bid on multiple platforms in real-time via a demand‑side platform (DSP) on the advertiser side, and a supply-side platform (SSP) on the ad space side.

4. What Are the Differences Between DSP, SSP, and Ad Networks?

 DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) bid on behalf of advertisers to reach target audiences, while SSPs (Supply Side Platforms) help publishers sell inventory. Ad networks used to buy ad space in advance from publishers and resell it, but this inventory-based model is changing with programmatic ad buying.

5. What Determines the Success of Social Media Advertising Compared to Traditional Media?

 This success depends on whether you are delivering personalised content to sellers, whether your messaging is on target, and whether the platform is a good fit for your campaign goals. Social media offers an incredible opportunity for tailored, individualised targets such as reaching hyper-local audiences by location or interest. Traditional media as a mass market continues to be important for reaching large audiences. For instance, it’s ideal when you simply need to put your brand ‘top of mind’.

6. Why Do I Keep Seeing Ads for a Specific Company?

 More likely, this is ad retargeting. If you have just visited their website or searched for similar goods, that brand can follow you to other platforms, where it is more likely to generate a conversion.

7. Is Print Dead?

 Not quite. While digital rules, print holds its own, especially in some niche markets and with certain demographics. Print remains relevant, especially in conjunction with digital strategies. It’s about the feel.

8. How Does Google Analytics Know Audience Demographics?

It’s all down to the cookie data that Google Analytics uses to track user behaviour: it’s possible to predict with remarkable accuracy someone’s age, gender, and interests based on their browsing habits. (Just think of all the incongruous adverts that have been heaved onto your Facebook feed.) These tracking tools help advertisers to get a handle on their audiences in a way that’s not entirely different from the old days when a company might employ a market researcher to condense a thousand people into a representative few. Once you get inside a chamber and learn to speak the language, you can hammer out the same campaign targeted at the same audience, and it’s highly likely to succeed. Having honed this recipe in the past, it’s hard to let go of a process that might carry on working every time.

9. What Is an Impression, and Is It Based on Views?

It occurs every time an ad loads on a site, whether or not anyone looks at it. Advertisers can also choose to pay for viewable impressions (when an ad is actually seen), a metric that’s much more representative of what’s going on.

10. How Do Advertisers Get Location Data?

By using IP address, GPS or Wi-Fi, advertisers try to approximate location. Apps that ask to know where you are, if you allow it, such as a weather app, might sell this information onward to advertisers and get paid in the process, so that you see more relevant ads.