Monday, June 11, 2012

Google AdWords or Facebook Advertising. What’s the Best Strategy for Hitting Your Target?


Prior to this week, I had not given much thought to the differences between advertising on Facebook and Google. Both platforms offer businesses of all sizes affordable options to create highly targeted, adaptable advertising campaigns. Both sites have a huge user-base and both primarily sell pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. BUT the targeting strategy for each is very unique.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as “The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitability.”  Online platforms like Google and Facebook use valuable data which helps in eliminating the guesswork of identifying and anticipating your customer needs. By delivering messages to a highly-targeted audience, Facebook and Google help you to reach potential customers who are most likely to use your business. The services also help to avoid what Marty Neumeier refers to as the “advertising death spiral” during which consumers filter out advertising because it’s not relevant to their current task. (Neumeier, 2007).

They both sound pretty great, but how do you choose the right advertising platform for your business? Although there is no reason (except for maybe budgetary) that you can’t experiment with both, choosing one or the other comes down to the goals of your campaign. What’s more important? Building awareness or converting traffic to sales? According to Larry Kim, CTO of the online marketing firm WordStream, “because a Facebook session tends to last much longer than the typical Google search, the former be a better match for building brand awareness or getting a specific message across. But Kim notes that Facebook isn't strong in pure Web searches; Google has the clear advantage there, and as a result could be the better fit for driving actual clicks and conversions around specific products. Google searchers typically have a much more specific goal.” (Casey, 2011).

Below is a side-by-side comparison of some key features of Facebook and Google AdWords advertising. Whichever you choose, both platforms offer terrific opportunities to hone in on your target markets in ways traditional advertising can’t match.

FEATURE
FACEBOOK ADVERTISING
GOOGLE ADWORDS
Budget
No minimum.
No minimum.
Targeting Criteria
Target based on profile data. User location, interests and demographics.
Target based on search (keyword) data, geography. Select keywords that match ads to potential customers. Select words and phrases relative to your business.
Number of Users
Nearly one billion.
Approx. one billion.
Audience Size
Target large or small audience.
Target large or small audience.
Pricing
Bid on cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.  Set daily or (campaign) lifetime budget.
Cost-per-click. User bids to get ads higher on the page. Set daily budget. Bid on specific search terms.
Adaptability
Change campaigns every few days – adjust based on results. Test different options. Adjust campaign by modifying the target audience.
Make changes at any time. Start or stop ads at any time. Adjust campaigns based on keywords which are proving more effective.
Tracking Features
Stats show impressions, clicks, click through rate (CTR), and spend.
Track the effectiveness (and conversion rates) of search terms.
Key Strength
Brand building. (Users spend much more time on Facebook pages and will have more exposure to your ads.)
Conversions. Click-through rates are as much as 1,000 higher on Google campaigns as opposed to Facebook.

Definition of marketing. (n.d.). The Chartered Institute of Marketing. Retrieved June 11, 2012, from http://www.cim.co.uk/resources/understandingmarket/definitionmkting.aspx

Neumeier, M. (2007). Zag: the number-one strategy of high-performance brands : a whiteboard overview. Berkeley, California. AIGA.

Casey, K. (2011, September 28). How to Choose Between Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. InformationWeek. Retrieved June 10, 2012, from http://www.informationweek.com/news/smb/services/231602311

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