How to create a digital advertising plan in 2026, step by step

It’s one thing to create a solid digital advertising plan to help organize your thoughts and share with your team. It’s another to create an engaging digital-advertising plan. This article explains how to do both, breaking down what a digital advertising plan is, what it must include, and how to present it effectively using modern digital tools. This Adobe Express guide also incorporates today’s most relevant advertising trends, including AI-powered optimization, privacy-first targeting, omnichannel measurement, and performance-based media buying.

Key takeaways

Summary/Overview

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What is a digital advertising plan?

A digital advertising plan is a formal document that outlines a brand’s planned online advertising activities, including channels, budgets, timelines, creative direction, targeting, and performance measurement. It may exist as part of a broader marketing strategy or function as a standalone advertising roadmap when your efforts are primarily digital.

Unlike traditional advertising, digital advertising allows for precise targeting, real-time performance tracking, and rapid optimization. Brands can reach audiences across search engines, social platforms, video streaming services, mobile apps, and websites — all while measuring performance at every stage of the funnel.

As digital-first customer journeys continue to dominate, advertising plans now account for:

Together, these shifts make digital advertising planning more strategic, more measurable, and more dynamic than ever before.

7 key elements to include in your digital advertising plan

Whether your digital advertising plan is a subsection of a larger overall marketing strategy or not, it needs to include all the details normally included in any marketing plan.

Here are seven important elements that you should feature. You can get more familiar with each of these by reading about how to write a marketing plan for your business.

1. Advertising goals

This is where you define the purpose of your advertising plan and when you intend to execute. Perhaps you want to boost sales, gain new customers, or attract return customers. Or maybe your aim is to heighten brand awareness, promote a new product, or generate e-commerce activity. Advertising goals define what success looks like and provide direction for all decisions that follow.

Declare your goals through an informative statement that’s clear and concise. Then outline the period of time you are proposing to achieve your goals through your advertising efforts.

The more specific you are in defining your advertising goals, the easier it will be for you to showcase how your plan is the pathway to achieving your goals.

Common digital advertising goals include:

Keep in mind that, when deciding your advertising goals, they should be clear, specific, adherent to time constraints, and aligned with broader business objectives.

2. A budget

Nearly every advertising effort costs money. An advertising budget ensures everyone in your company is clear on the proposed advertising spend and earmarks the dollars accordingly.

A digital advertising budget outlines:

Modern budgets often account for:

3. Your target market

Understanding your audience is critical to campaign success. Modern targeting strategies combine:

Segmenting audiences allows you to tailor messaging, creative, and channel strategy to different buyer needs, behaviors, and motivations.

4. The focus of your advertising initiatives

What are you trying to get in front of your target market? Maybe you want to remind them about your brand in time for holiday shopping, debut a new product or service, or share brand values with potential customers that share your beliefs. Whatever you’re highlighting, make it clear in your advertising plan. This section will clarify what message or value proposition your ads will emphasize.

Examples include:

5. A SWOT analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It’s a staple evaluation in advertising plans that addresses what you’re doing right, any competitive edge you may have, where your competition stands, and internal and external vulnerabilities that can affect success for better or for worse.

This is your chance to think through your business’s advantages, disadvantages, opportunities, and risks that may be influenced by your staff, the market, season, competitor flaws, or unforeseen circumstances.

6. Your digital advertising plan and digital advertising strategy

This is the what, where, and when of your plans.

What banner ads and other types of ads and ad campaigns do you want to run? Where will they appear, and when?

“Digital advertising” may make it clear that your campaigns will be online, but it doesn’t clarify the “how.” Your advertising plan should outline what types of digital advertising campaigns you intend to leverage, the advertising platforms you plan to showcase them on, and the timing in which they will appear online.

Here are the four different digital advertising avenues.

Paid search results

Paid search advertising places ads on search engine results pages when users actively search for specific keywords. Because it captures demand at the moment of intent, it is one of the most performance-driven digital advertising channels. Examples of paid search results include Google ads leveraging Google adwords, Yahoo! Ads, Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing ads), or pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

This is where you buy online ad space for your digital media ads on a variety of affiliate websites, which can include the above-mentioned search engines, YouTube (through Google ad buy), and other ad networks. Ads are shown based on a combination of bid amount, relevance, quality score, and expected performance. Today’s paid search platforms rely heavily on machine learning to optimize bids, ad copy, and placements in real time. These ads appear at the top, bottom, sides, or middle of content on a webpage rather than as part of a search result. They are also known as retargeting (remarketing) personal advertising.

Success is typically measured using metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), impression share, and return on ad spend (ROAS). Modern paid search strategies increasingly integrate first-party data, automated bidding, and privacy-safe measurement to maintain performance as tracking evolves.

Display and program advertising

Display and program advertising are technically a part of paid search advertising, but they’re so widely used that they deserve some special attention in this article. Banner ads are part of this group, as are video ads, which have become extremely influential in inspiring online purchasing decisions. Bonus: It’s easier than ever to create super sleek, on-brand digital banner ads or other ads with free online templates for banners, free online ad maker, and free online video editor.

Display advertising uses these visual formats to reach users across websites, apps, and digital platforms. Programmatic advertising refers to the automated buying and placement of these ads using real-time data and algorithms.

Programmatic technology evaluates signals such as context, device, location, and audience behavior to determine which ads to show and when, often through real-time bidding that occurs as a page loads. This allows advertisers to scale reach while maintaining targeting precision.

Display and programmatic advertising are especially effective for brand awareness, retargeting, and upper- to mid-funnel campaigns. Retargeting, in particular, enables brands to re-engage users who have previously visited a website or interacted with content, reinforcing messaging across multiple touchpoints.

Performance is evaluated using metrics such as impressions, reach, frequency, viewability, click-through rate, and conversion lift. Recent trends include the rise of connected TV (CTV), increased reliance on contextual targeting as cookies decline, AI-driven creative optimization, and stronger emphasis on brand safety and fraud prevention.

Social media advertising

Social media advertising places paid content directly within social platforms where users already spend time engaging with posts, videos, and creators. These ads are designed to blend naturally into feeds while leveraging detailed audience and interest-based targeting.

Advertisers can target users based on demographics, behaviors, engagement history, and first-party data, while platform algorithms optimize delivery toward users most likely to take action. Social media advertising supports a wide range of objectives, from awareness and engagement to lead generation and social commerce.

Common formats include image and carousel ads, short-form video, stories and reels, lead forms, and shoppable posts. Creative performance is especially important on social platforms, where authentic, platform-native content tends to outperform highly polished ads.

Key success metrics include engagement rate, click-through rate, cost per result, video completion rate, conversion rate, and return on ad spend. Current trends shaping social media advertising include AI-assisted creative production, in-platform checkout experiences, creator partnerships, and ongoing changes to targeting driven by privacy regulations.

All of the following social media platforms offer advertising opportunities in the form of text, images, and videos:

Check out this article to create a social media marketing campaign that works.

Influencer advertising

This is where you pay a social media influencer to promote your product or brand on their social media network(s). There are two traditional pricing models for influencers. One is a pay-per-post flat fee based on the size of their following and the other is a sliding fee based on user engagement or performance.

7. KPIs to measure success

Your ads are only as good as your results. Make sure your advertising plan includes a section on key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will use to measure your success. These metrics tend to fall into one of the following categories: conversion rate, click-through rate (CTR), cost per acquisition (CPA), or return on investment (ROI). Modern plans often emphasize cross-channel attribution, incrementality testing, and real-time dashboards. Additionally, modern plans are increasingly including Connected TV (CTV) and streaming ads, retail media networks (such as Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart), audio/podcast advertising, and AI-optimized creative testing.

Now, on to the creative stuff!

How to create an engaging digital advertising plan

You’ve done all the legwork in deciding what you want to do and why. You even have free tools to help you design your ads. Now it’s time to lay out your ideas in a way that is on-brand, polished, and visually exciting.

Fortunately, you can look to online tools for this, too. Adobe makes a free marketing plan template that works just as well for advertising plans. Start by adding your plan for all of the essentials listed above to the template.

Then dress it up with the following visual elements. You may already have these assets. If you don’t, you can easily create them for use in your ad plan, your ad campaigns, or both!

Add your logo on the first page and smaller on the bottom of every page. (Don’t have a logo? You can make a free logo and even use the template above by clicking on it!)

Create compelling graphics

Sometimes it’s easier to get your point across in graphics, with or without images. Use a free graphics template to make it effortless or click the graphic above to design from its template. Your visual callouts should highlight offers, strategic priorities, and key insights to drive understanding of your plan.

Highlight vibrant images

Sometimes you just need images to break up text. You can craft totally pro-looking layouts using free images. To access the above template, click on it.

Include relevant graphs and charts

Pie chart, bar graph, line graph, you name it, you can do it quickly and easily using free templates. This kind of visualization is great for showing data like budget allocation, performance benchmarks, and timelines or forecasts. Click any of the templates above to start your own.

Add video

Whether you want to share an actual video ad you’ve crafted or bring your plan messaging to life with another type of video, you can make and edit your own videos to include in your digital advertising plan.

The additional benefits of a quality digital advertising plan

Beyond organization, a strong digital advertising plan:

Whether your intention is to increase brand awareness, generate sales or new customers, drive repeat business, or announce exciting news, your digital ad plan will lead the way.

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