The UK guide to advertising, written for the people who pay for it

Plain-English explanations of how advertising works, what it costs, and what the rules require, for business owners and marketers. The latest UK advertising news sits just below.

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UK advertising news

What UK advertisers are talking about this week, from platform pricing changes to ASA rulings, drawn from named industry sources.

What's on the site

Guides, tools and reference pages for anyone planning UK advertising spend, from a first Google Ads budget to ASA compliance.

How Digital Ad Auctions Work

How Digital Ad Auctions Work

How Google, Meta, and programmatic platforms price ad inventory through real-time auctions — explained for UK advertisers who want to understand what they are bidding on.

How Your Data Is Used in Advertising

How Your Data Is Used in Advertising

How platforms collect, match, and use personal data to target ads — explained plainly for UK business owners and the consumers seeing those ads.

Where to start

Find your way around UK advertising

Six starting points for working out what to advertise, where to spend, and what the rules require, before you commit a budget.

Guides for every channel

Step-by-step explanations of budgets, platforms and pricing models, written for people who haven't bought media before.

Explore guides

Tools that do the sums

Calculators for ad budgets, A/B test significance and CPM/CPC benchmarks, so you can check a plan before committing to it.

Explore the tools

The channels directory

A reference of UK advertising channels, from paid social to out-of-home, to help you compare where a budget might go.

Compare channels

Where the rules sit

A map of who regulates what in UK advertising, from the ASA's CAP Code to sector-specific rules.

See the regulation map

UK ad spend reference

Reference tables on UK advertising spend by channel, useful for sense-checking a budget against the wider market.

Find the tables

Advertising news, UK-focused

Coverage of UK-relevant advertising stories, kept separate from global news that may not apply here.

Read the news

Is that result real, or just noise?

A change in click-through rate can look decisive when it's really just noise, and the calculator shows you which one you're looking at before you act on it.