Advertising has come a long way over the
years. With the advent of the Internet, marketers were able to reach consumers
in a much quicker way that they ever imagined. But the cost and inefficiency
was not all there. As a result, new methods found their way to the surface. Pay
per click and search based marketing quickly rose in popularity based on their cost
effectiveness and ease of set-up. Two platforms leading the way today are
Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. According to InformationWeek, these two platforms are very popular based on the sheer size of audience – with Google specifically dominating the search ad space with nearly two-thirds market share.
Google
Adwords
Google AdWords is a major revenue draw
for the giant search engine and their premier advertising platform. Through a
bidding process, advertising can quickly and easily develop campaigns where ads
appear in search results based on user keywords. Ads are featured at the very
top of the results as well as the side panel of the page. Since AdWords uses a
PPC approach, advertisers only pay for the number of clicks they attain, not
necessarily the number of impressions. However, the bidding process is what
determines cost and rank order of the ads. Unlike traditional forms of advertising, AdWords allows you to see exactly what you are getting out of your budget. Each dollar you spend and each click you receive are tracked clearly within your account, allowing you to make concrete, data-driven decisions,quickly and easily. Since the process and analysis is complex in
order to find the best keywords per target audience, it requires much time,
patient and effort on behalf of the marketing team.
Facebook
Ads
Facebook Ads are bit different from
AdWords in that they do not appear as search results. Instead, the ads live in
Facebook’s platform, either within users’ feeds or on the sidebar of pages.
According to Facebook, users want to engage with ‘stories,’ not ‘ads’—the difference being that ads are one-way communication and stories are more conversational and participatory. With this sponsored story, you have the ability to Like the brand, comment or share. To support this, they have presented data based on research done by Nielsen that showed significantly higher click-through and brand recall rates for ads that contained the social context of a friend’s name (i.e., “John Liked this”) versus a traditional advertising message alone. This is a very important point
drawn from Facebook’s very strategic approach. There are two forms of Facebook ads,
ones that are more traditional and ones that features a fan page that a friend
has already liked. As stated, the latter is where Facebook likes to focus since
this is much more engaging. Both ads appear in the side column of the page with
an image to try and obtain that click.
Although Facebook did introduce
search-based ads less than six months ago, they should not be compared to
AdWords. From Search Engine Land, Facebook’s ads allow marketers to utilize the searcher’s location, demographics and connections but it does not target based on keyword and does not link to external sites but rather pages and apps within Facebook’s own environment. By only directing users to
pages within Facebook, users are not given access to external locations.
AdWords and Facebook search engines should not even be compared as competitors
since similar brand sites would not be appearing in each.
Comparing
the Two
When determining which platform is
better for a specific campaign, marketers should first understand their goals
and how their target audience might arrive on the landing page. [Because] a Facebook session tends to last much longer than the typical Google search, the former [would] be a better match for building brand awareness or getting a specific message across. That's even more true if that message is intended fora very specific audience, such as a university alumni group or people that like True Blood. Simply put, the demographic details could be
extremely helpful to highly targeting users on Facebook. On the flip side, Casey
notes that Facebook is not strong in 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. It comes down to intent:Whereas Facebook users might just be checking up on their friends or posting vacation photos, Google searchers typically have a much more specific goal. AdWords is great for intercepting users who are typing keywords
in Google to find helpful resources.
That said, it is slightly nonsensical to
compare AdWords and Facebook Ads to each other since it is often like comparing
apples to oranges. They each offer their own unique benefits and appeal to many
of the same audience members. Thus, the two could really live cohesively
together. Marketers might see a high return if they run PPC campaigns on each
platform to target audience members on both search in Google and within
Facebook. Again, it depends where the promotion is living and what type of
audience members the brand is seeking. The key to a balanced PPC budget and
strategy is learning web habits of your target audience and deciding the
healthy level of focus/effort that should be placed on each ad platform.
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