Facebook Ads vs. Googe PPC (Pay Per Click)

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This is a guest post by SmallBox Web Design

These two avenues of the marketing world are just beginning to be tapped. People who are graduating college now with marketing degrees most likely have not been trained in Google PPC or on the efficacy of Facebook pay per click advertising. That’s alright. They’ll learn soon enough. To an extent these ad-strategies are intuitive and easily available for use by almost anyone. However, there is an art to both of them.

To some extent, Google PPC and Facebook Ads are yin and yang to one another. Google PPC gives you access to audiences with high commercial intent, and allows you to gauge their moods and attitudes by trial and error. You bid for keyword searches that you think will capture consumers surfing around who might be interested in your product, and their interface gives you the option to bid for different combinations of search terms as frequently as you like.

Say that your selling used cars in Indianapolis. Ideally, you would be able to bid for the search terms: used cars Indianapolis, and win the top slot. A combination of keywords like that is likely to have a high asking price. The price of search terms are dictated by the bidding process. Whoever is willing to pay the most, will win the top slot, and appear at the top of the search in the ‘sponsored links section.’

We refer to users entering search terms like ‘used cars Indianapolis,’ as being pretty, ‘far down the cone.’ That is – from the number of possible people in your audience at the top of the cone, where the cone is widest, to the bottom of the cone where it narrows to where people are actually buying your product–people who are entering search terms to search for your product are probably already thinking about buying it. On the other hand, you are only reaching people who are entering the search terms that you’ve bid for.

Facebook Ads, on the other hand, are the reverse of this. You can choose your demographic with incredible precision–based on their ‘likes’–but you’re not necessarily reaching people who are already in the mood for shopping. That hardly matters, though. The small percentage of people who click on your ad are the only people who matter, and the conversions that you get from that small-percentage can be elaborately fine-tuned as your ad campaign continues.

What is exciting about these marketing tools is the feedback loop of information that advertisers have access to. Instead of researching how you should target and launch your ad-campaign through focus-groups or just raw intuition, and then waiting for results with your fingers crossed, with PPC or Facebook Ads, you know exactly how your market is responding IMMEDIATELY and you have the ability to constantly tweak, recalibrate, respond. Advertising along these lines is an art, for sure–but it’s also a science. If you watch the numbers diligently, you can hardly fail to make an impact. And by ‘impact,’ I mean, ‘sales.’

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