Have you ever seen an ad and thought, "How did they know I'd been looking for this?"
Digital ads have got smarter and more personalised, thanks to better integrations with marketing systems and more advanced targeting options on digital advertising platforms.
UK consumers even like the ads they see while scrolling through TikTok or Instagram, precisely because they're relevant. When you approach them right, ads help people find products they've been looking for or solve a problem they've been stuck on. Kantar's Media Reactions 2025 report found that more than half of consumers (57%) have positive feelings about ads.
For B2C brands, digital ads are part of a personalised omnichannel marketing strategy that reaches customers across all the channels where they engage, with meaningful content, when they're most active. UK digital ad spend hit £40.5bn in 2025, according to the IAB UK / PwC Digital Adspend Report, and continues to grow year on year.
With growing approval from consumers and significant investment from brands, B2C marketers need to make sure they're using the best digital advertising platforms to get the best possible return on ad spend (ROAS).
What are digital advertising platforms?
Digital advertising platforms allow you to target specific audiences with sponsored ads in formats like images, videos, carousels, and stories. Many platforms have bid-based payment structures using cost per impression, cost per engagement, or cost per conversion.
By connecting your B2C CRM with your digital advertising platform, you can target your existing audience with ads, find new audiences that match the characteristics of your customers, and use customer data to personalise ads.
How do digital advertising platforms help marketers reach their goals?
When using a digital advertising platform, your goals should align with your bidding strategy.
Here are some of the most common goals marketers have for digital ads, and the recommended bidding strategy for each:
- Increasing brand awareness: Optimise for impressions and reach.
- Bringing in new subscribers: Optimise for sign-ups.
- Driving engagement: Optimise for messages, video views, likes, comments, or saves.
- Generating sales: Optimise for conversions on your website.
After launching your ads, it's best practice to continuously update your creative, targeting parameters, and audiences. This helps reduce your costs and improve performance, driving up your ROAS.
8 of the best digital advertising platforms for engaging a B2C audience
As a B2C brand, you want to show up where your audience is active to make the most of your advertising budget. Here are 8 digital advertising platforms that can help you efficiently reach new and existing customers in the UK:
Google Ads
Google Ads campaigns come in several formats, including Performance Max campaigns, search ads, display ads, shopping ads, video ads, and app ads. These run across the Google ecosystem, including Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube. If you haven't run ads on Google before, new advertisers can claim ad credits to get started.
WordStream analysed over 16,000 search ad campaigns and found that the average cost per click is $5.26, while the average conversion rate is 7.52%. Overall, ecommerce and retail brands tend to have lower costs per click, and services businesses have higher costs per click.
To bring Google Ads into your wider marketing strategy and help reduce the cost of your ads, you can use Klaviyo's Google Ads integration to:
- Sync Klaviyo segments to Google Ads and target existing customers.
- Create integrated campaigns using Klaviyo data in Google Ads.
- Measure and improve ad performance using Klaviyo insights, like purchases, marketing engagement, or customer lifetime value.
Meta for Business
With Meta for Business, you can target audiences across Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and ads clicking to WhatsApp and Messenger, and these ads can reach billions of people. The Kepios data analysis shows an estimated audience of 2.35 billion on Facebook, 1.91 billion on Instagram, and 942 million on Messenger.
For reference, WordStream finds that for Facebook ads:
- The average click rate for traffic campaigns is 1.71%.
- The average cost per click for traffic campaigns is $0.70.
- The average click rate for leads campaigns is 2.59%.
- The average cost per click for leads campaigns is $1.92.
- The average conversion rate for leads campaigns is 7.72%.
- The average cost per lead is $27.66.
Meta ads are ideal for increasing sales, driving in-store traffic, and bringing in new customers more efficiently. With Klaviyo's Meta Ads integration, you can:
- Reach audiences like recent browsers, unengaged customers, or basket abandoners with retargeting ads.
- Save money by avoiding overlap, and focus on customers who are predicted to be high-value or who have shopped with you in the past.
- Cross-sell to recent buyers with products you know they'll love.
- Create lookalike audiences from lists of your best customers.
LinkedIn Ads
With over 45 million members in the UK, LinkedIn Ads reach a professional audience that's especially valuable for premium B2C brands, considered purchases, financial services, education, and luxury goods. Targeting options go beyond demographics to include job title, industry, seniority, and company size, which makes LinkedIn useful when your buyer is defined by what they do for a living rather than what they browse on a Saturday afternoon.
LinkedIn ad formats include sponsored content, message ads, dynamic ads, and text ads. The platform tends to have higher cost per click than other social channels, but the trade-off is the precision of the audience you reach.
For B2C brands selling high-consideration products, like a new mattress, a fitness programme, a financial product, or a postgraduate course, LinkedIn can be a strong complement to broader-reach channels like Meta and TikTok.
TikTok for Business
According to a Kepios data analysis, brands can reach almost 2 billion people on TikTok globally, with around 24 million users in the UK. TikTok ads help brands build their TikTok community, find new customers, and convert visitors into buyers. The platform is particularly relevant for CPG and retail brands, and works at any budget since you only pay for the actions you want.
TikTok commissioned research with Nielsen to understand the impact of TikTok ads and found a 96% higher paid media ROAS than other digital media channels, and 2.9x higher sales efficiency. At the time, TikTok was also the fastest-growing channel for discovering new brands.
If you already have established lists and segments in Klaviyo B2C CRM, you can sync these audiences into TikTok for Business using Klaviyo's TikTok Audiences integration to target them with ads, or find lookalike audiences that reflect your top customers.
And in the other direction, once you generate new subscribers via TikTok ads, you can use Klaviyo's TikTok Lead Ads integration to automatically sync them into the CRM in real time, where you can continue the conversation via email, text messages, WhatsApp messages, and more.
Amazon Ads
For UK ecommerce brands, Amazon Ads reach shoppers at the point of purchase intent, and the audience is significant. Amazon is one of the most-used online shopping destinations in the UK, and ads on the platform appear when someone is already actively searching for a product.
Amazon Ads offers a range of formats including sponsored products, sponsored brands, sponsored display, and Amazon DSP for programmatic display, video, and audio. Sponsored products work well for brands that already sell on Amazon, while sponsored display and DSP let you retarget shoppers across the wider Amazon ecosystem, including Fire TV and Twitch.
If you sell on Amazon as well as your own DTC site, running ads on Amazon while building a direct customer relationship in Klaviyo gives you the best of both: high-intent reach on Amazon, and a first-party relationship through email, SMS, and WhatsApp that you own outright. Use Klaviyo to take Amazon buyers and turn them into repeat customers on your own site.
Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) runs across Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and the Microsoft Audience Network, including LinkedIn-powered targeting and inventory on MSN, Outlook.com, and Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft Advertising is often overlooked in favour of Google, but for UK B2C brands it can offer two specific advantages: lower average cost per click than Google in many categories, and an audience that skews slightly older and higher-income, which is useful for retail, travel, financial services, and home goods. The platform also makes it straightforward to import existing Google Ads campaigns, so you can test it without rebuilding from scratch.
Pinterest Ads Manager
Pinterest has a growing audience of about 350 million worldwide, with around 13 million users in the UK, according to the Kepios data analysis. Pinterest ads are sponsored posts that show up in users' Pinterest feeds. They can be geared towards awareness, consideration, or conversion, helping you reach customers across their entire journey.
According to Pinterest, the number one reason users are on the platform is to discover products and brands. That makes Pinterest a strong social media platform if you're looking to bring in new customers or promote new products to existing audiences, particularly in categories like home, beauty, fashion, food, and weddings.
As part of your Pinterest marketing strategy, ads are an efficient way to get in front of the people most likely to take action, rather than trying to reach everyone possible.
Using Klaviyo's Pinterest Audiences integration, you can bring Klaviyo audiences into Pinterest to target customers and subscribers, and build:
- Lookalike audiences that reflect the behaviours of your best customers.
- Exclusionary audiences that suppress recently converted audiences from ads.
- Engagement audiences of contacts who recently engaged but didn't convert.
X for Business
The Kepios analysis shows that X has a global audience of over 550 million. X reports that this audience is 76% more likely to be the first to try new things, and 45% more likely to click on ads.
For ecommerce brands specifically, X data shows that 89% of shoppers surveyed use X to discover new products, and 76% of people on X surveyed say that conversations on X have led them to buy something.
X Ads span a few different formats, including:
- Vertical Video Ads
- Dynamic Product Ads
- Amplify Pre-rolls
- Amplify Sponsorships
- Timeline Takeovers
- Spotlight Takeovers
With Klaviyo's X Audiences integration, you can deliver more personalised ads and increase ROAS by:
- Syncing lists and segments from Klaviyo to X Custom Audiences.
- Retargeting recently engaged audiences who didn't convert.
- Building lookalike audiences to find more of your best customers.
Drive more conversions across digital advertising channels with Klaviyo
Ads aren't cheap. You need to make sure the pounds you invest in them are bringing in solid returns, and helping you reach your audiences effectively.
By connecting known customers and subscribers with advertising platforms, you can improve targeting, save money by not showing ads to recent purchasers, and create lookalike audiences based on your most valuable customers.
Klaviyo integrates with popular advertising platforms like Google Ads, Meta for Business, TikTok for Business, and more, empowering you to:
- Simplify audience syncing.
- Build lookalike audiences.
- Boost conversions with smarter targeting.
- Save money by avoiding overlap.
- Find new fans.
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