It all depends how local you are and how transactional the ad is. I did some marketing as a part-time thing for a private school. The online platforms were very hit or miss in terms of attracting people, and tended to be expensive.

We found that:

- Our market was too niche and local for adwords to be super effective. We basically didn't have enough volume with productive keywords to make it work, and broadening the keywords resulted in alot of spend for junk results. It did pull in some people though.

- Facebook, Instagram and Bing ads were useless.

- Facebook and Instagram content was shared by the community and generated conversions for events. They didn't make a dent in new admissions/tours.

- Many people saw and were were excited by Waze ads, but no new folks were attracted to it, and existing people used it as a lazy way to navigate to school/church. It was interesting though, I literally had people coming up to me to tell me how cool Waze was, which was surprising.

- Newspaper ads were expensive, but generated 5x more response than all of the other channels.

- Signs, lawn-signs and flyers were expensive in terms of labor, but 2x more response than newspaper.