Facebook and Google advertising can be a lucrative form of advertising compared to traditional advertising like the Yellow Pages, Newspapers, Television and Radio.
The great advantage of online advertising is two fold:
Now not every industry is well suited to google advertising so don’t get too excited just yet. There are many different companies that are selling things like SEO and Adwords management online. However there is a difference between a successful campaign statistically and a successful campaign for your business. Here are some metrics ‘experts’ use to measure campaign success:
So before you even get started on things like your ad targeting, keywords, ad content etc. you need to first think about what warrants a successful campaign and how you are going to measure that. As you can start to see this measure is going to be totally unique for every business. What you need to aim for is something successful for your business, not successful for your consultant or what Google/Facebook considers success to be.
One of the big disadvantages you will find in Google and Facebook advertising is the power to present your brand. Whether you are advertising through Google or Facebook or anywhere else online for that matter your ads are going to be restricted to standards. If you are doing text based advertising you will have 2 tiny lines that you can work with and not only does this narrow your creative scope, but it also limits the amount of information you can utilise to filter the right people onto your website. Depending on your business it can be sometimes really difficult to communicate your product or brand in 2 lines, and choose keywords that don’t have alternate connotations. There are of course ways you can mitigate these risks by using clever phrase and exact keywords, negative keywords or image/video ads but it is still something to consider.
In online advertising there are 2 main payment methodologies which I will explain below:
The next thing you need to consider is the level of saturation in the advertising market. Many SEO companies let’s be honest just want your business no matter what. They act as if they have tailored solutions and act as if they have never failed one of their customers before but it is likely not true. Some keywords and some industries are extremely competitive so much so that it is hard for one to even break even; the value of the customer simply doesn’t exceed the acquisition cost to get the customer in the first place. The question you need to ask is, how much is a customer worth? Some lawyers even bid up to $20 per a click through Google! Granted lawyers can make a lot of money from a client, but this is still a lot of money. So depending on your industry will depend on how lucrative online advertising will be for you.
From my experience industries which are closely related to computers, or computers are required to run a lot of their business these industries tend to be more competitive. Ironically the most competitive online advertising market is people selling online advertising as this is what they do, and this is what they are good at. Companies like auto repair shops, and trade services tend to fair well online as computers aren’t exactly a core part of their work experience. Another aspect related to this is the location of your business. If you are a fashion label advertising online it will be very difficult as you are competitive against potentially the whole world of fashion labels as importing individual clothes items isn’t that expensive. Whereas Joe the butcher on Sydney’s Northern Beaches only has to worry about other butchers on the Northern Beaches.
These are all important things to consider when stepping into the world of online advertising, but of course I haven’t got to my key point which is what is right for me, Facebook or Google? The way I like to think about this is Facebook is the place to go where people want to discover content, whereas people go onto Google to find things they already have in mind. So if your product is very specific like a computer called the “R345” this is something people would search for specifically so there’s no point advertising on Facebook for people who like computer and aged between 20-40. A better strategy would be to try and dominate the people searching for R345 as most people don’t recognise something as specific as a product code. However if one was selling a range of wedding cakes online, it might be better to use Facebook as Facebook can target demographics a whole lot better than Google. So one might want to target females who have the relationship status “engaged”. When targeting demographics definitely consider using Facebook, if you are looking at targeting searches definitely consider Google. A great advantage of using Facebook advertising is the interface is very user friendly compared to Google. If you are considering Google advertising unless you are prepared to learn and study for hours and hours you should look into a consultant.
This is where Northern Beaches Websites comes in with our online experience. We don’t push these services at all, if we believe you wont get a return on investment we wont even bother taking the project on, this is our standard. We believe in a holistic online presence. If your best strategy is to focus on your website content we will look at this, if you can gain significant money using Facebook we will focus on this, if you need work building networks and your natural search rankings we will explore this.
Article by Martin Gibson