How to Start Advertising Online: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners
To start advertising online, pick an ad platform, fund your account, choose one audience and one offer, upload creatives, and launch a small test campaign. Budgets start from tens of dollars a day. The first week is for learning what converts, not for profit.
What Online Advertising Costs
Most advice on advertising for beginners skips the money question and goes straight to tactics. Start with the money.
Three things decide what you pay: the ad format you buy, the country you buy it in, and how many other advertisers want the same people at the same moment.
Formats are also priced in different units, which makes the numbers look further apart than they are. Onclick (popunder) traffic is sold per thousand impressions, so you pay a CPM. Push and in-page push are normally bought per click, so you pay a CPC.
Here is what advertisers paid on PropellerAds between 1 and 15 September 2026, taken from our own reporting. Each range runs from the average rate to the rate paid by the top campaign by spend in the same slice:
| Ad format | How you pay | United States | United Kingdom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onclick (popunder) | CPM (per 1,000 impressions) | $0.90 to $13 | $3.57 to $11.50 |
| Push | CPC (per click) | $0.04 to $0.055 | $0.041 to $0.14 |
| In-page push | CPC (per click) | $0.006 to $0.009 | $0.007 to $0.131 |
Three things to read into that table. The spread is not a daily swing. The first number is the average rate in that country and format, and the second is what a top campaign paid, so a beginner should plan around the first one. A $0.04 push click and a $0.90 onclick CPM are not comparable prices, and you only find out which one is cheaper for you after you count conversions rather than impressions. And these are network figures across every vertical, so your own numbers will land somewhere inside the range, not on a single point.
Geography moves the price more than anything else on the list. Over the same two weeks, the average onclick CPM in the UK was about four times the US average, and in lower-cost markets it sits well below the US level. On those averages, fifty dollars buys you roughly 55,000 onclick impressions in the US and about 14,000 in the UK.
Cheaper traffic is not automatically worse traffic, but the people behind it have different spending power, so the same $40 product will not convert the same way in both places. That is why a budget that looks generous in one country runs out in an afternoon in another.
One more number to check before you plan anything: the minimum deposit. It is listed on our self-serve ad platform page together with the rest of the account basics.
Choose Where to Advertise
You have three broad options.
- Search ads put you in front of people already looking for what you sell. The intent is excellent, and the competition is heavy, which is why clicks in commercial niches cost the most of the three.
- Social ads reach people by interest and behaviour rather than intent. They suit products people discover rather than search for, and the creative carries most of the weight.
- Ad networks buy space across thousands of publisher sites and apps at once. Entry costs are lower, volumes are large, and you set the targeting yourself instead of waiting for demand to show up.
PropellerAds is a multisource advertising platform. It belongs to the third group: you top up an account, pick a format and set targeting without a sales call, and the campaign goes to moderation before it runs.
What makes a decent beginner advertising platform is not a low headline price but a low cost of being wrong: a minimum deposit you are comfortable with, moderation you can plan around, and formats you can test for a few dollars.
There is no single cheapest advertising platform, and the question is a trap anyway. Pick based on where your product is allowed to run and how small a test you can afford there.
Set a Budget You Can Afford to Lose
Decide the number before you open the interface and ask what you can spend in the first week without caring how it ends. That is your test budget. Two rules keep it from getting away from you:
- Set a daily limit on the campaign, so one careless targeting choice cannot empty the account overnight;
- Keep the test budget separate from the scaling budget in your head.
Money spent in week one buys information about which creative, country, and audience work. Information is the only thing you should expect back from it. A workable first test is a few tens of dollars a day for three days in a single country. In many GEOs, that can be enough traffic to see whether people click and whether those clicks reach your landing page at all.
Pick One Offer and One Audience
One offer, one country, one device type – that is the whole rule.
The reason is arithmetic rather than discipline. Launch one campaign across five countries on both desktop and mobile, and you end up with ten small piles of data instead of one useful one, and no pile is big enough to tell you anything. Split later, once you know the offer converts somewhere.
Choose the country by where your offer is allowed to run and where you can actually read the ad you are writing. Choose the device based on where your landing page works properly. Then write the settings down, because in three days you will not remember what you set.
Build Your First Creatives
Make three to five versions: you are not trying to guess the winner, but trying to let the traffic point at it.
Keep each one plain – say what the thing is and what happens when someone clicks. Vary one element between versions, such as the promise in the headline or the image, so you can tell which change did the work. If the ad says one thing and the landing page says another, people leave before the page finishes loading, and that shows up as a click you paid for and nothing else.
Push ads and in-page push give you a headline, a short description, and an icon. That is very little room, which is good news for a first attempt. Our guide to the elements of an ad campaign covers how the pieces fit together.
Launch, Wait, Then Read the Data
Now you launch your first ad campaign, and then you do the hardest part, which is nothing.
Give the campaign two to three days before you judge it. During that learning period, the system is still working out which traffic sources suit your offer, so the early numbers move around a lot. Pausing on day one, raising the bid on day two, and swapping the creative on day three means you finish the week with three broken tests instead of one finished one.
After that, read the data in this order: impressions and clicks first, to check the creative is being seen and clicked; then clicks against landing page visits, to check the page loads and holds people; then conversions by traffic source and by creative, to see what to keep.
Our beginner’s checklist walks through the same sequence in more detail.
Five Mistakes Beginners Make
- Killing the campaign on day one. The first hours are the least representative hours you will ever get. Let the learning period finish.
- Launching five offers at once. Five offers on one budget means every one of them gets too little traffic to prove anything.
- Copying someone else’s settings from a forum. A bid and a whitelist that worked for another offer, in another country, in another month, tell you very little about yours.
- Running without tracking. Without conversion data, you are optimising on clicks rather than on the thing you actually want, and the two do not line up as often as you would hope.
- Writing creatives for yourself. You are not the audience. The ad that makes you wince is often the one that gets clicked, and the only way to find out is to run both.
Frequently Asked Questions
On an ad network, a test can run on tens of dollars a day once your account is funded. On PropellerAds, in the first half of September 2026, Onclick (popunder) traffic averaged about $0.90 CPM in the US and about $3.57 in the UK, while push clicks averaged around $0.04. Your cost depends on format, country, and competition.
Five steps. Choose where to advertise, set a budget you can afford to lose, pick one offer and one audience, build your first creatives, then launch, wait, and read the data once the learning period is over.
Cheap impressions and cheap conversions are different things, and only the second one matters. On our network, Onclick CPM averaged around $0.90 in the US and push clicks around $0.04 in early September 2026, but the format with the lowest entry price is not automatically the one with the lowest cost per conversion. That depends on your offer and your GEO, so compare platforms on cost per conversion after a test, not on the sticker price before one.
For a test, yes. At average US Onclick rates, $20 buys roughly 22,000 impressions a day, so a three-day learning period gives you around 66,000 impressions in one country. That is enough to see which creative gets clicked and whether your landing page holds the traffic. It is not enough to judge an offer that converts rarely, and it is not a scaling budget.
You can launch without one, but you will be blind past the click. A tracker records what happens after the click and reports it back to the ad platform through an S2S postback, a server-to-server call that sends each conversion to your campaign. Once conversions are arriving, you can move to CPA Goal bidding and let the system optimise towards them instead of towards clicks.
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