Top 10 Online advertising services

Last updated: May 23, 2023

Online advertising services allow to publish ads in search engines, social networks and on websites that participate in various advertising networks.
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Google Ads (former Adwords) is an online advertising service that places advertising copy at the top or bottom of, or beside, the list of results Google displays for a particular search query. The choice and placement of the ads is based in part on a proprietary determination of the relevance of the search query to the advertising copy.
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Engage people where they're already engaged. On Facebook, you can target your ads to exactly the people you'd like to connect with. A powerful tool for managing your Facebooks Ads and sponsored stories. Monitor likes, click-through rates, impressions, reach and more.
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Optimize your Facebook Ads Easily, Like Morning Coffee. Create thousands of variants of your Facebook Ads with only 3 clicks. Have multiple target audiences? Easily test all the versions of your creatives across all your target audiences, building powerful Ads that convert. Save your preferences, for audience demographics instantly to be reused for any campaign.
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Taboola is an AI-powered content discovery platform that connects people with content on the web that suits their interests.
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Madgicx is an AI-backed omnichannel marketing platform with creative intelligence and autonomous ad buying capabilities that optimizes ads across Facebook and Google.
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Award-winning Ad platform helps optimise your Google, Microsoft and Facebook Ads in one place. Grow your business in less time.
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Connect with the most receptive Twitter users at the most relevant moment with our Promoted Products. Build your community of vocal and motivated brand advocates quickly by reaching the Twitter users most likely to be interested in your brand. Deliver your message to non-followers and more of your existing followers with precision thanks to a range of targeting options.
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With Instagram ads, businesses can drive awareness and increase its customer base through visuals. Learn how to advertise on Instagram and our ad formats.
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Microsoft Advertising enables to use Bing search engine marketing and audience solutions to help you build your business.
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Advertise on LinkedIn. Create an ad. Narrow your target audience by job function, geography, and more. Pay per click. Connect with the world's largest audience of active, influential professionals. Launch your campaign in minutes. All you need is a LinkedIn account.
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Premium solution for managing, automating, and optimizing search engine marketing campaigns at scale. Advanced platform to automate the creation, management, and optimization of highly-targeted social marketing campaigns. Get insights on the campaigns you manage through Kenshoo anytime, anywhere.
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Infolinks is one of the largest publisher marketplaces in the world. Infolinks’ real-time contextual intent targeting uses keywords to ensure that your ads reach an audience with an enthusiastic interest in your message.
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Smartly.io automates every step of social advertising, empowering teams to deliver beautifully effective brand experiences across social platforms.
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Collect all your Facebook assets in Qwaya by connecting multiple Facebook user accounts. All your ad accounts, Pages, Apps and Events in one place. Use your goals from Google Analytics to track campaign and ad performance on any KPI - Goals, Conversions, Transactions, Revenue. You choose.
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Amazon Advertising helps grow businesses and brands of all sizes. Its platform provides advanced tools for buying ad placements both on and off Amazon.
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BuySellAds.com is an online advertising network which operates one of the largest advertising marketplaces on the Web, selling well over 6 billion ad impressions each month. Our approach is unique, genuine, and transparent — that's why thousands of advertisers and publishers love doing business with us. It's just so easy.
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Ezoic uses machine learning to adapt ads, layouts, and frameworks to maximize the revenue of each visit according to exact testing specifications and preferences.

Latest news about Online advertising services


2020. LinkedIn introduces new retargeting tools



LinkedIn is announcing some new features for advertisers — retargeting capabilities tied to video ads and lead-generation forms, as well as new brand safety integrations for the LinkedIn Audience Network. On the retargeting side, that means advertisers can now create and target ads specifically to users who watched 25, 50, 75 or 100% of their video ads. They also can target ads at users who opened or submitted a Lead Gen Form.


2020. Contextual advertising company GumGum raises $22M



Contextual advertising company GumGum has raised $22 million. GumGum developed computer vision technology that could identify the content of an image and then place an appropriate ad alongside the picture. This is the core business that GumGum has used as a “foundation” to expand into new areas like sports sponsorships and in-video advertising. The in-video unit has already been tested with Sprint and other brands, with a broader launch scheduled for the second quarter of this year.




2019. Amazon launches sponsored display advertising



Amazon launched a new advertising campaign type for Vendors and professional Sellers on Amazon: Sponsored Display. The new ad type addresses a big gap in Amazon’s pay-per-click advertising suite: the ability to retarget Amazon shoppers. Retargeting is a popular feature for retail brands in particular, and has been long available on display ad networks, Facebook, and Google. It’s also a feature that has been available on Amazon’s programmatic media solution, its Demand Side Platform (DSP). But the DSP requires significant monthly spend in order for advertisers to access it, and ideally also a skilled media professional to effectively manage the channel.


2019. Facebook unveiled automated ad builder and an appointment manager for small businesses



Facebook has launched two new products aimed at small businesses. The first is Automated AdsThe idea is that business owners can answer a few questions about what kind of company they are and about their goals for the campaign. Then based on their answers — as well as the information on their Facebook Page - Facebook will create recommendations for the audience they should target, the budget they should set and even how the different versions of the ad should look and what they should say. And while Facebook said it’s provided lightweight support for booking appointments in Messenger in the past, it’s now expanding that functionality, so businesses can accept appointments and manage all appointments through Facebook and Instagram. These appointments also can be synced with the business owner’s personal calendar, or with third-party appointment tools like MyTime and HomeAdvisor.


2019. Bing Ads rebrands to Microsoft Advertising



Bing Ads has been rebranded to Microsoft Advertising, with the business saying the move intends "to signal offerings that extend beyond search inventory and search data." Microsoft also placed a big focus on personalization and AI in the announcement - promised to introduce more advertising products with built-in AI, more connected to your data and business. Bing will remain the consumer search brand for Microsoft, with the computing giant insisting the Google rival will "only become more important as intent data drives more personalisation and product innovation."


2018. Adwords rebrands as Google Ads, adds AI for small business


In July Google’s ad service AdWords will become Google Ads. But it’s not just a name change. Google is also launching something it calls Smart Campaigns, which will become the default mode for advertisers. It allows those advertisers to identify the actions (whether it’s phone calls, store visits or purchases) that they’re prioritizing, then Google Ads will use machine learning to optimize the images, text and targeting to drive more of those actions.


2017. LinkedIn launched own advertising network



LinkedIn launched a new service LinkedIn Audience Network: a way for advertisers to buy inventory on a network of mobile sites and apps beyond LinkedIn itself, but still using LinkedIn’s demographic data, to broadcast their Sponsored Content — LinkedIn’s term for updates posted by companies that can be reports or other links, which the companies pay to promote. Initially, the LinkedIn Audience Network will cover tens of thousands of sites and apps globally, as well as ad exchanges like MoPub, Sharethrough, Google Ad Exchange and Rubicon and Microsoft-owned services like MSN.com and Outlook.com. The audience network is rolling out globally to all English-speaking countries first.


2016. Facebook tests ads in Groups



Facebook is going to serve ads to the 1 billion users of its Groups feature.  The ads will look the same as News Feed ads. They’ll be targeted by Group topic as well as the standard identity-based targeting. It’s that diversity of purposes that could boost the value of Groups ads. If Facebook can find a way to reliably categorize the Groups to enhance ad targeting, it could reach people of different interests with highly relevant and lucrative ads. For example, if someone likes Manchester United football team’s Page it indicates that he is likely to buy sports merchandise.


2016. Twitter invented sponsored stickers for brands



Twitter launched its first branded stickers. Pepsi is the first partner on board in an undisclosed deal that allows Twitter users to plaster stickers designed by the fizzy pop company onto their photos. Doing so and posting the photo triggers a hashtag to appear inside the tweet, which makes it discoverable to Pepsi — perhaps for further promotion or competitions — and that, in turn, helps promote the brand in a different way on Twitter.  Brands can design four or eight stickers — like accessories and other props — for users to add to their own photos. Photos with a brand’s stickers are shared with all of a user’s followers, allowing brands to be featured by their fans in a truly authentic way.


2016. LinkedIn Ads allows advertisers to use their own data for targeting



LinkedIn advertisers are getting a new way to target their campaigns toward companies where they’re actually trying to make sales. Now, with LinkedIn Account Targeting, businesses can bring their own list of accounts (i.e. sales accounts — companies, not individual user accounts). LinkedIn then cross-references that list with the 8 million company pages on the site and creates a user segment for ad targeting. This can be combined with LinkedIn’s other targeting features, so marketers can limit their campaign to, say, specific job titles in specific geographies at a few thousand companies.


2015. Google Adwords will allow to target customers by email



Google Customer Match is a new product designed to help you reach your highest-value customers on Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail. It allows you to upload a list of email addresses, which can be matched to signed-in users on Google in a secure and privacy-safe way. From there, you can build campaigns and ads specifically designed to reach your audience. Users can control the ads they see, including Customer Match ads, by opting out of personalized ads or by muting or blocking ads from individual advertisers through Google Ads Settings. Another way Customer Match can be used is to generate new business by showing ads to prospective customers with similar interests as the rewards members as they are on YouTube and Gmail.


2015. Twitter launched Mobile Ads Manager



Twitter officially launched its new mobile Ads Manager, which allows users of Twitter’s smartphone applications to track their ad campaigns’ performance – including their impressions, engagements, spend, cost per engagement, and engagement rate – while on the go. The feature, while designed for mobile use, stops short of letting users actually build their ad campaigns from their smartphone. Instead, those campaigns must first be started on the web using a desktop or laptop computer. That’s a different path than Facebook recently took with its dedicated Facebook Ads Manager App which lets advertisers to track their current ad campaigns’ performance, as well as create new ones on the fly.


2015. Google testing mobile ads with images



Google is replacing some of its text-only Google Ads on mobile phones with produced photo versions. The visual ads, which are now available for cars like the Dodge Challenger, allow you to flip through photos, research product information and book reservations directly from the search screen—a major departure from the text ads that fade into the general noise of search results. For car buyers closer to making a purchase, the search giant is offering franchise auto dealerships better location-based ads with a click-to-call button and directions to stores. A beta version of the ad is available this week. Brands that choose not to pay for the revamped auto ads can stick with the conventional text-only listings. While Google's mobile search results already pulls click-to-call phone numbers, directions and sometimes images for many business or product searches, the updates will give companies more means to alter the user experience of their search results than ever before.


2015. Facebook partners with IBM to make ads targeting easier for big brands



Facebook and IBM announced that they will put some of their advertising tools and experts together to help big companies more closely personalize their marketing to customers. The partnership should boost the relevancy of ads. Theoretically, an avertiser might use IBM's data to determine current customers it wants to target through marketing in e-mail and Facebook. Or a sporting brand might work with IBM and Facebook to target real-time Facebook ads to customers who are currently at a game, based on IBM's location data. The collaboration allows the two Big Blues to double down on big advertisers. The partnership should add an incentive for IBM's Fortune 500 roster of clients to come closer to Facebook, which is looking for more advertising revenue. IBM, in turn, can now take advantage of the incredible wealth of data about consumers that Facebook collects.


2015. Twitter Ads gets Google DoubleClick integration



Twitter will now allow its ads to be bought through DoubleClick’s bid manager to help advertisers centralize their buying. Through the partnership with Google’s DoubleClick ad exchange, ad agencies and other buyers will be able to purchase inventory on websites around the web, as well as Twitter Promoted Tweets from a single interface. Making Twitter ads easier to buy from one of the world’s most popular tools could help boost revenue. That’s something Twitter needs given it missed revenue estimates in today’s earnings. Twitter is also hoping to strengthen advertiser confidence in the return on investment of its direct response commerce ads by working with DoubleClick to properly measure when clicks or actions on Twitter lead to a purchase or conversion. The program will roll out later this year, so advertisers can attribute purchases to Twitter ads across platforms, regardless of whether the ad views or purchases happened on the web or mobile.


2015. LinkedIn expands its marketing platform with off-site ads



LinkedIn is launching an expanded version of its LinkedIn Ads platform. The platform now has five main pieces — LinkedIn Lead Accelerator, Sponsored Updates, LinkedIn Onsite Display, LinkedIn Network Display, and Sponsored InMail. Lead Accelerator is the big product launch, allowing businesses to divide their audiences into different segments, and then to deliver ads and content in the right sequence, targeted to each group. And the new Display Network allows advertisers to run ads on both LinkedIn itself and on 2,500 publisher sites across the web. With the new products, LinkedIn can now address the full sales funnel, first attracting customers with On Site Display and Network Display ads, moving them down the funnel with Sponsored Updates and Sponsored InMail, and helping with the final stages of customer acquisition through the Lead Accelerator.


2015. Facebook launched automated Product Ads



Facebook added new option Product Ads, a set of tools that lets businesses more effectively target Facebook's 1.4 billion or so users with a new, automated process. With Product Ads, businesses who upload their product catalogs to Facebook can manually create ad campaigns or let Facebook to automatically create campaigns and target various kinds of users with ads it thinks will perform well, based on things like a user's interests, general location and whether they've already been to the advertiser's app or website. Product Ads could prove useful to businesses with deep inventories of attractive products: furniture chains, clothing franchises and so on. (For one, those multi-product ads increase the odds of users finding items to buy.)


2014. Facebook launches hyper-local ads



Facebook Ads added hyper-local targeting that can convince people to visit stores and other businesses nearby. Soon, brick-and-mortar businesses will be able to target ads to anyone who lives or was recently within a specific distance of their store. Advertisers can set a radius as small as a mile and the ads will show up on people’s phones or web browsers. These new Local Awareness ads will be available for US business owners in a few weeks, and around the globe in the next several months. Facebook now has over 1 billion mobile users, many of which give Facebook access to their location, plus its desktop users who volunteer their current city or can be located by IP address. It even has real-time location on some users in the US thanks to its recently launched ambient proximity feature Nearby Friends.


2014. Facebook takes on Google AdWords with Atlas



Facebook have launched a new advertising platform Atlas that aims at users on any website making use of their Facebook details. Facebook purchased Atlas from Microsoft last year. The service is designed to match Google’s AdWords - it  will allow to publish ads that follow users throughout the web as well as on mobile devices. Advertisers can purchase can purchase ads on websites and apps outside of Facebook and they can choose whether or not to include Facebook social network. Facebook will use not cookies, but user's Facebook log-in information. Though, this is one move that may not sit well with Facebook users, it nonetheless, presents an option to all advertisers, while equally serving as a competition to Google AdWords.


2014. BuySellAds acquires SaaS ad startup LaunchBit



BuySellAds, the online advertising network based in Boston, acquires LaunchBit, an ad startup focused on helping SaaS businesses find new customers. Recently LaunchBit shifted focus to lead generation (though it included email ads) — a shift that involved partnering with BuySellAds. “We really like how LaunchBit is performance driven for advertisers, while also helping publishers monetize a medium that’s pretty tricky to monetize (email),” BuySellAds founder Todd Garland said. For now LaunchBit ad network will continue to operate, as usual.


2014. Google Adwords allows to track which ads generate phone calls



Google AdWords advertising platform is launching a new function - Website Call Conversions, that allows to track which ads generate phone calls. Here is how it works. You set up your regular search ads, but every time somebody clicks on them and lands on your site, they will see a dynamically generated phone number that is linked to those ads. When potential customers then click on the number or dial it directly from their phones, the call will automatically be linked to the original ad the customer saw and you can more easily track which ads drive phone calls. Based on the conversion data, advertisers can then optimize their ads and bids to drive calls that are more likely to generate sales leads, for example. To enable this feature, advertisers only have to add a small code snippet on their desktop and mobile sites.


2014. Twitter launches Promoted Video ads



Twitter starts beta testing a new feature called Promoted Video which is aimed at brands looking to upload and distribute their videos to the Twitter network. Advertisers will only pay when a user starts playing a video. The feature expands upon the Twitter Amplify program, which previously focused on big media companies, including the likes of ESPN, NFL, McDonald’s, American Express, BBC and Viacom, to give you an idea.  The company notes that video is one of the most popular forms of media on the network, as test with the newer Twitter Video Card have shown that native Twitter videos generate “better engagement” and more views than they did in the past. Along with Promoted Video’s launch into beta, the company is also working to make it easier for advertisers to set up campaigns by running ads with a Cost Per View (CPV) buying model.


2014. Adwords adds free dynamic sitelinks



Google Adwords is rolling out globally dynamic sitelinks: automatically generated sitelinks that appear below your ad text, connecting potential customers to relevant pages on your website more easily. They say that sitelinks enhance user experience by increasing the relevance of ads and the relevance of the user experience that is delivered after the click. Clicks on dynamic sitelinks are FREE. Advertisers will still be charged for clicks on the ad headline and other ad extensions. While dynamic sitelinks typically boost the average performance of an ad, advertisers always have the option to disable them.


2014. Bing Ads copies Google AdWords device targeting options



Bing Ads is rolling out two changes to its device targeting options: first, they will combine PCs and tablets into a single device, then eliminate mobile device targeting. The upcoming changes were driven by users basically telling Bing, “We want you to be more like AdWords,”. While Bing Ads still offered the flexibility of device targeting, it made it difficult for some to manage cross-channel tools. So the update reduces the number of targeting options available to advertisers to just two: desktop or mobile. The Bing Ads team notes that advertisers will still be able to make bid adjustments to their tablet bids. In addition, Bing is updating the allowable bid modifiers for tablet targeting – in September, the allowable bid modifier for tablets will range from +300% to -20%.


2014. Facebook unveils Business Manager for marketers



Facebook Business Manager is a new tool that lets marketers and agencies manage multiple campaigns via one interface. You can provide access and assign roles to people working on various campaigns, securely share campaign materials. Business Manager also lets marketers add and delete ad accounts connected to a company and revoke permissions to people using the accounts. The tool also provides workflows that make it easier to separate personal and business experiences on Facebook. People can use their Facebook Login to access ad accounts and Pages without having to be friends with other people to gain access.


2014. LinkedIn now allows to target Ads and posts by language



Marketers outside the US finally getting the opportunity to target LinkedIn Ads by language in order to show ads only to their native audience. Companies also will be able to specify the audience for each post in their feed, meaning they can identify which users will see which updates or ads. For example, a company could now share a post to members in the United States that differs from the post it shares with Brazilian users. Previously, when users visited a company's page, they would come across all posts from that company, regardless of relevance or language. The addition of new geo-targeting tools makes a lot of sense for LinkedIn, given its international user base. Of the 3.5 million companies with company pages on LinkedIn, "the majority" are also outside the US. Note Facebook that has offered geo-targeted ads for years.


2013. Google+ is not for ads. Ads are for Google+



Google still hasn't added ads to its social network Google+. You can't neither promote posts or pay for sidebar ads like on Facebook. But why? After all, Google - is the King of advertising and it has millions of advertisers ready to pay? Because Google already for two years is (unsuccessfully) trying to attract users from Facebook and doesn't want to scare them with ads. And you know what they invented? They decided to open ads service to Google+. And this services allows to turn any post (or Hangout) into ad block. But these blocks will be shown not on Google+, but on all the external sites in Google's advertising network (Adsense). This block will be like a window to Google+ on the third-party site and will attract users not only to the promoted post, but also to Google's social network. For now this Google+ advertising service is available only for big brands like Toyota. By the way, a year ago Google almost launched the normal Google+ ad service. They even published the page above for a couple of minutes. But then changed their minds and removed the page.