Facebook Ads Vs Google Ads
You may have heard that since I learned of the new types of ads available on Facebook from the Beers Blokes and Business episode “What’s Up Zuck?”, I immediately started trialling it for ourselves and some of our clients. I admit that up until then I had not been much of a fan of Facebook ads. My trials of them in the past had resulted in all the demographics you can eat but with little to show in the way of real traffic. As I wrote in my digital marketing post, this year I have not only sold my house using facebook ads I’ve also got good traffic to our website and my videos for a fraction of the cost when compared to say Google Adwords. On Monday I took some of our team to a training session of Facebook ads run by @sportsgeek Sean Callanan.
Cost of Traffic Between Facebook & Adwords
Do you know how costly adwords is for SEO related keywords? REALLY costly. I know this because last year I threw a bunch of money at an adwords campaign for ourselves. You are looking at between $15 – $20 per click for SEO keywords. You could argue that those are highly relevant clicks and therefore more likely to convert. The user intent is that they are looking for an SEO company. You would be right of course, however when you compare that to the traffic I can get from Facebook It makes you stop and think. Earlier this year I ran a short campaign on Facebook to get traffic back to our site. Over the course of 10 days I got about 350 clicks. This would have cost me say $7000 on adwords. From facebook the cost was just over $200.
A Massive Cost Difference
The reason you can get better click throughs on Facebook now is because they have greatly improved their ad targeting by letting you create “custom audiences” as well as massively improved the way in which the ads are delivered into the users stream.
When To Use What
I’m not saying Facebook is an adwords killer. What I am saying is that you need to use these venues very differently when it comes to an adspend. For instance for ourselves I will never buy SEO keywords in adwords again. It is ridiculous but I buy other keywords that are only around 80 cents CPC. The keywords we are buying for ourselves in adwords are cheap and are showing real buyer intent. I am using Facebook to build our general audience, much the same way I use the videos. I’m targeting people in Facebook who can benefit from our content but not really doing any sort of sales pitch. I think this works given the difference of the venues. People in Facebook have not asked to see my ads where as people in Google really have, given the keywords I am buying.
Scary Creepy Good
Have a look at today’s video to see some of the scary creepy good things you can now do in Facebook. It may surprise you. Special thanks goes out to Sean Callanan & Steve Vallas for converting me :).
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
