Think you don’t have a large enough marketing budget to advertise online? With most search engine advertising platforms, there is no minimum to get started. Online advertising has very little cost of entry. Now, what can advertisers do to maximize their modest budgets?

With major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, there are options to set daily budgets. The advertiser has 100% control over what they spend each day. Ad scheduling is another feature that helps advertisers to maximize their budget. By allowing ads to only run during specified hours of the day, marketers can show ads only when they want and not at other times.

Geo-targeting is another tactic to help stretch a smaller budget. By only showing ads to searchers in a specific area, advertisers can limit traffic to their site and conserve their budget for a more qualified audience.

Using negatives will prevent your ads from being displayed when that particular word is searched. This feature will limit clicks from irrelevant searches and help to save marketing dollars. For example, if a company sells men’s jackets, a good negative would be “women’s” so that if someone searches for “women’s jackets”, the ad would not be shown because it is not relevant and the company doesn’t sell that product.

Even with a modest budget, there are many ways to advertise online. By making strategic choices, marketers have the ability to utilize their budget and get great results.

Google recently launched a new beta feature for sponsored search, called Ad Sitelinks. Ad Sitelinks allows advertisers to add extra links within their paid search ads.  This new feature enhances your text ads by adding up to four additional landing pages below your ads.  Ad Sitelinks are similar to site links in the organic search engine results, which link to deeper content beyond the main landing page. 

Ad Sitelinks is intended to make additional website information, such as special offers, promotions, and store locators more easily accessible to users without them having to search once they get to a website. In addition, the feature offers brand markets a new way to engage customers by making choices more interesting or relevant.

This new feature is not available to all advertisers.  It is only available for ads that meet a high quality threshold and for ads that mainly show up in the top position. Ad Sitelinks are set at the campaign level and you can change them as often as you want. You don’t even have to change your existing ad copy. Currently there is no reporting, but you can always code the destination url to see results in your analytics platform.

In a day and age when real estate on the search engine results page (SERP) is critical, especially for branding, Ad Sitelinks is another tool to gain that extra inch of space.

Digg launched a cost per click advertising platform for their homepage on October 1st. Many social media sites have been integrating CPC advertising in an effort to monetize their sites and allow advertisers to take advantage of the popularity of such channels.

Digg currently offers CPM banner advertising, which is displayed throughout the website. With the launch of the new CPC program, advertisers have more choices in which types of ads to display and advertisers with a limited budget now have an opportunity to market on Digg.com.

Digg Ads will show up on the home page of Digg.com. The ads blend in seamlessly with just a small line of text that declares the listing a sponsored ad. Users of the site can either digg or bury the listing, just like regular digg listings. There is also an option to share the post which can help your message to go viral. Each ad contains an 80×80 image, title and description.

Currently, Digg does not offer category based options. It is also limited in targeting capabilities. Other social sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn allow for geographic, demographic and behavioral targeting options. However, the program is so new, competition is at a minimum. This could mean potentially inexpensive traffic to your site via sponsored listings.

Digg ads are perfect for launch of new products, events, press releases or any newsworthy happenings.