Welcome to part 3 of my FREE 8 part course.
Today, we’ll be looking at Facebook advertising, and we’re going to compare it to the other giant in online advertising – Google adwords.
Lets consider how the two services compare across pricing, targeting, quality, volume and flexibility and then conclude on which types of ads are going to work best on each platform.
Pricing
At the time of writing this post, Facebook advertising is much cheaper than Google. Some competitive markets are almost impossible to enter on google, where established big budget players run the show. However Facebook is a newer platform and so, for now at least, it’s less competitive between advertisers and so ads are cheaper.
Targeting
Google’s best method of targeting is it’s keywords system, where your ads only appear to users that have searched for a certain term. This can generate very targeted website visitors in terms of what they are looking for.
However, if you want to only Target French Women between the ages of 50 and 60 that are interested in cosmetics, then the keywords system is unable to offer you this type of profile marketing.
But it’s not that simple, as we’ll see in the next category…
Quality
Let’s define quality…
The quality of an advert may be measured by the relevance of it’s audience.
In other words how much does the audience really want to see the ad.
We’ve seen on Facebook, if your audience belongs to a particular demographic group, it MIGHT be interested in your product or service.
However on Google, if someone has searched for a particular product or service, and remember you can control your ads so they only appear to such an audience, then you can be pretty confident that the majority ARE interested in your product or service.
In my view, Google wins hands down in this area. A good well targeted ad on Google adwords can have up to 30% of the search audience clicking through to your site, and you can be sure they’re looking for the thing you’re offering, because they took the time and trouble to search for it.
With Facebook, just because someone fits your customer profile, it doesn’t mean they want to buy your product at a given moment in time when your ad appears. In my view this is one of the major differences between the two platforms.
Volume
A few months ago I’d have said Google wins once again in this area. Until recently Google was the site that everybody visited. And they still do to search for things.
But Facebook has become the site where everybody hangs out. Of the 400 million active users, half log in in any given day. And not only that, the length of time spent on the site seems to be increasing all the time. All this ads up to a lot of page impressions. More so than google.
But let’s remember that just because a lot eyeballs see your ad, this is not as effective as a smaller number of people seeing your ad that are much more interested in its content.
So this area is much less clear cut and it will depend on your product/service offer as to whether it’s desirable enough to attract a large volume of casual interest from Facebook, or whether you would want to limit it to a hardcore of very interested searchers from Google.
Flexibility
As some affiliate marketers will know, Google has been tightening its advertising rules lately and has told some regular advertisers that it’s not interested in their business.
Facebook doesn’t appear to have been quite so aggressive and has become a preferred channel for affiliates and internet marketers.
If you run a regular business this won’t really affect you, but if you’re into list building/funnel marketing then Facebook will probably be a more attractive platform.
So where does this get us….
Well let’s consider two scenarios
Senario 1 is a sole trader that sells a few ebooks on dog grooming at $20 each.
She’s fairly familiar with how internet marketing works and wants to list build and build a sales pipeline to sell her ebooks to and maybe recommend a few other canine products to customers.
In this scenario, I’d say Facebook advertising is a preferred route because…
It’s likely to be cheaper (and more suited to a low cost product)
It will appeal to a mildly interested audience if its targeted well – maybe with a freebie at first.
It can hit a high volume and relevant audience (e.g people in dog related groups)
Google will be more stringent if she’s just offering a freebie on her site (at time of writing)
So Facebook wins this Scenario on Cost, targeting, volume and flexibility
Let’s consider Scenario 2:
A business owner sells a high performance car polishing system that retails for $300. It’s a good product but will mainly appeal to owners that take a lot of pride in the appearance of their vehicle.
In this scenario I’d vote for Google.
The main reason is the quality of visitor that a Google search will generate. If the product costs $300 then a potential customer will need to be hungry enough to want to buy it. Hungry enough to go online and search for it!
It’s true that you could use Facebook to target your ads at automotive enthusiasts and this may well work, but the risk is they don’t need a solution to polish their car at that point in time, where as a Google searcher probably does.
Also, the ads may be more expensive on Google but the vendor has more chance of of making a higher margin on a sale that that of scenario 1.
Clearly, one has to generalise to a degree when comparing two massive advertising systems, but I hope my categories and scenarios in this part have given you some context as to assess which platform is most suited to generating your traffic.
Tomorrow we’ll be looking at…
Part 4: Killer Apps that will Flood your website with FREE traffic
also if you’d like to know a lot more about Facebook Marketing…check out my Social Network eBook here
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