Advertising on Multiple Platforms: Why or Why Not?

Should you advertise on multiple platforms or stick with just one?

Everyone likes the idea of their brand showing up in more places, the question is whether you actually get better performance dividing up your budget to do so.

Most of our clients at IBA use multiple platforms because addressing all parts of their marketing funnel has many moving parts, and a diversified approach is useful. However, in some cases there are reasons to keep it simple and focus on one thing.

We’ll give you 5 arguments for each, so buckle up and let’s get into it.

Benefits of Advertising on Multiple Platforms

1) More Available Tools

Different campaign types don’t merely address different goals, they offer different features as well. Within Meta Ads, for example, the setup of a new campaign starts with selecting a category of outcome you’re looking for, such as maximizing website traffic or visibility, but beyond that, they have options for how people can interact with your ads, and many of those options are exclusive to certain campaign types.

Likewise, the differences extend from platform to platform. At the time of writing this, search ads are available in Google, but not in Spotify, and audio ads within podcasts are available in Spotify but not LinkedIn, and so on. Experimenting with a variety of ad formats is a valuable way to learn how your target audience wants to engage online, and using different platforms can help.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…

2) Untapped Audiences

Each of the various platforms would love to be an all-in-one solution, but the fact is, their audiences aren’t identical, and users engage with each platform in their own way. Some people like TikTok, some people like Instagram, and they have their reasons.

You could argue that two given platforms have similar audiences therefore it’s close enough, but that’s a judgment call on whether to have no presence on one entirely. Most people aren’t locked into just one app or social media network, and so understanding who tends to use which platform gives you an advantage.

Audience targeting being at odds with privacy is also a huge conversation in the industry. Platforms have been forced to restrict targeting options for certain categories such as age, meaning if you wanted to target a particular age group, you don’t always have the option to narrow down by that criteria. If that’s the case, instead of trying to bypass the rules, it would make sense to advertise on a platform that your ideal audience uses more than others, and go where they are present.

3) Professional Optics

Have you ever seen ads for a new company or brand in multiple places over a short period of time, and thought to yourself “they’re everywhere these days”? That moment in your brain is exactly what they were going for.

Having a presence on multiple platforms can help the advertiser look established, and improve overall performance. Customers seeing a brand consistently leads to familiarity, which subconsciously starts to form trust. For newer businesses especially, looking legitimate is a key step in that first impression.

It’s not something that can be accomplished by showing an ad once or twice on each platform and calling it a day, mind you, so make sure your budget is healthy enough to support your efforts of omnipresence (and we talk about how to forecast advertising budgets in this post).

4) Incremental Lift

This is related to the previous example, whereby the desired outcome happens thanks to the combined efforts of multiple platforms.

While some businesses obsess over trying to isolate the exact moment or click that inspired someone to take action, research (from Google and others with mountains of data) shows that the customer decision-making process is long and complicated, involving more touchpoints than we realize.

So yes, it’s difficult to measure, but taking a step back and seeing that introducing a campaign caused a lift in activity from other sources is a positive result. We get into the flipside of conversion attribution in the “why not” section below, so read on.

5) Reduced Dependence

Having a backup plan is always a good idea, and just like keeping a box of matches for when your lighter doesn’t work, it can be a good idea to have ad accounts in multiple platforms in case of the unexpected.

If you’re only using one ad account, what do you do if it has a technical outage? Or the performance drops? Or a scandal in the news causes users to flock to another platform?

Trends come and go, and so having multiple platforms at your disposal allows you to stay agile and shift your presence as needed.

Before you declare it’s a universal slam dunk, let’s discuss some reasons why an advertiser might choose not to adopt multiple platforms for their needs. These can be more nuanced, but are valid nonetheless.

Benefits of Advertising on Just One Ad Platform

1) Simplified Management

This is the most straightforward reason why some advertisers are hesitant to use multiple platforms: using one platform takes less work.

From the setup of accounts to pixel integrations to exporting data, not everyone has experience with other platforms, and those are things you have to sort out before you even start running campaigns.

Beyond that, different ad platforms use different formats, which increases the amount of creative assets you have to produce every time you introduce or change a promotion. Then you have to wade through approvals, system errors, and a whole new environment to run tests and monitor performance day-to-day.

There is plenty of money being spent in the industry on tools attempting to make this part easier. In our experience though, if you’re going to use multiple platforms, there’s no replacement for getting in there to do the work.

2) Speaking the Same Language

When compiling reports to get an overarching view of what’s going on with your advertising, you’re looking to combine metrics apples to apples. The problem is, not only does each platform sometimes name/count their metrics in unique ways, some metrics themselves aren’t available in all platforms.

Take the metric of reach, for example. It differs from impressions in that an impression is any instance of an ad showing, whereas reach refers to the number of individual users to whom ads were shown. Not every platform offers reach as a metric because they don’t require users to log in. Meta reports reach because they show ads to people who are logged into any of their networks, so they can tell you the number of users. Google, on the other hand, does not as they can show ads to users based on what they are searching/browsing at the time, and they could be using a public computer or incognito mode.

Data from different platforms has to be harmonized for reports, which can be difficult if you don’t have the right systems in place (like your friendly neighborhood agency, IBA). This point is closely related to the next, which is…

3) Clear Attribution

Scenario: you’re running ads on two platforms, with the same budget for each, and check the data for the last month. One platform reports 60 leads, meanwhile the other reports 40 leads, for 100 leads total. Your immediate thought is that the first one performed better, but checking your actual leads received, you only have 80. Something doesn’t add up.

This likely means you have some leads for which both platforms are taking credit based on how the customers behaved. Say a customer clicks on your Instagram ad, explores your site, then leaves. Later that day, they see your ad on Google, click on it to visit the site again, and submit a contact form. Which platform gets the credit for the lead? You can see the argument for both, but each platform doesn’t care about what the customer did on the other, they just saw what they did, and so they both claim their ad got you the lead.

Are they wrong? They both contributed, it just depends which touchpoint you think is more important, and chances are you have no way of knowing for sure. This can mislead decision-makers.

Some advertisers don’t consider the incremental effect we talked about earlier. They take the report at face value and drop the platform showing fewer leads, which is a classic misunderstanding and arguably a mistake, but by using one, they don’t have to wonder what’s doing the heavy lifting.

4) “Bird in the Hand”

For some businesses, it would be difficult to oversaturate one ad platform, especially if their product/service could appeal to a wide range of customers. Once they get momentum with one platform, they usually have plenty of room to scale up before passing the point of diminishing returns.

Plus, when they are established with one platform, starting from scratch on another might take time to get its own momentum, and not everyone has the appetite for patience if they can continue investing in what’s already working.

This is understandable as budgets are finite, and not every business can afford to wait for things to optimize in order to get good results (and we talk about when to expect results from advertising in this post)

5) Consolidated Efforts

We generally recommend not spreading yourself too thin, which can be as simple as having too many campaigns on a given budget. That’s true regardless of how many platforms you use, but gets magnified by adding more of them.

Most platforms actually enforce minimum spend amounts, where if you enter a desired daily spend below that, they flash an error and basically tell you to get serious because their system requires certain thresholds to enter your content into the bids for ad placements. Plus, besides the technical limitation, doing the minimum usually doesn’t have a noticeable impact (which is true in anything in life, and we talk about that idea further in this post).

Again, because budgets are finite, it can make sense to focus on one thing.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, just some practical examples of why an advertiser might stick with a known commodity.

So What?

Putting your brand out there and getting in front of your ideal audience means figuring out where they are and finding ways to get their attention, and to do so, you may need to show up in different places. Having a presence on multiple platforms diversifies where and how your ads deliver, plus it allows for more options and controls to adapt based on performance data.

That said, if adding more platforms into the mix doesn’t increase results, it would be like exchanging one dollar for ten dimes; unless you needed the dimes for some specific reason, it arguably makes sense to keep the one dollar.

Expanding your presence is great, you just want to be strategic about it.

There’s a time and place for advertising on multiple ad platforms, and if you’d like to brainstorm or get a second opinion about what’s right for you, we would be happy to talk!