When launching an ad campaign, one important decision you’ll have to make is choosing the appropriate platform. After all, you want to be sure that your ad successfully reaches your intended audience.

With a multitude of platforms out there, it can be difficult to decide which one is right for you, especially as social media advertising becomes more and more ubiquitous. To help you, we asked the members of Ad Age Collective for some key considerations to make when choosing an ad platform. Here’s what they had to say.

1. Intent

Intent is the most important thing when choosing an ad platform for your business. A platform like Google is used to pull people in because people are already searching for what you’re putting out there. A platform like Facebook or Instagram relies on “pushing” ads in front of people, and it requires a completely different strategy because users need to be convinced you’re worth their time. – Michael Lisovetsky, JUICE

2. Relevance

In such a cluttered world, relevance is paramount. Relevance is the right content and the right context. It’s the ideal balance between effectiveness and efficiency — producing the intended or expected result and performing or functioning in the best possible manner with the least waste of time and effort. – Marcello Magalhaes, Speakeasy – Knowledge Brokers

3. The audience you’re targeting

When a campaign is targeting a niche audience, we choose a platform with the ability to get in front of that specific segment. For a campaign targeting a broader audience, we use platforms that can scale and expand our reach through data collection and optimization. – Matt Smolenski, 90octane

4. Connection to key customer insights

Effective engagement is driven by insights about customers. If your ad platform is disconnected from critical insights like which accounts to target, personas on the buying team or where they are in their journey, you’re basically just putting up a ton of digital billboards — it’s a pretty picture and cool slogan, but likely will not generate a ton of results. – Latane Conant, 6sense

5. Potential for acceleration

When dealing with social media ads or PPC, it can be tempting to get lost in a metrics comparison game. The question marketers should be asking is about acceleration: Which platform will accelerate my growth fastest when compared to the same activities conducted organically? Organic efforts tend to have a far higher profit margin so the case for using paid efforts is when growth is needed now. – Patrick Ward, Rootstrap

6. Whether you can take a holistic approach

Choose an ad platform that analyzes all parts of the campaign holistically is key — not just one component. That’s why working with one agency who does all parts of a campaign, not just one segment, is the best approach. Otherwise, each separate agency will try to fight as to why their portion is working better instead of being truly agnostic to what the best working media is. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne Advertising