A lot of marketers who have had great success with Google AdWords were particularly excited to see Facebook rollout their own pay-per-click advertising platform. Most assume that, because they had done well with search advertising, they would be set up to do great things with social ads as well.
What many of them quickly learned, however, is that search and social advertising are different endeavors. There are some similarities doing that too, but finding customers with paid traffic through Facebook is an art on its own.
To show you why, and help you understand why the differences matter, let’s take a look at a few of the things that make Facebook advertising unique…
Facebook Campaigns Are About Demographics
While Google ads are all about catching a potential customer at the moment they are thinking about your product or service, Facebook ads let you target groups of possible buyers based on demographics. You could narrow your market by age, location, gender, or even interest. You might target people who have already been to your website, or who have liked and followed certain pages.
There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to this method. On the one hand, you can get a much better idea of who your ads are being shown to. On the other hand, however, there’s no guarantee that the audience will be interested at the moment they see your offer.
Facebook Ads Are Image-Based
Although Google does offer image advertising, most marketers stick to text-based ads that focus on keywords and concrete offers. On Facebook, images aren’t just more popular – for advertisers, they are the standard.
Facebook will require your ad to be in an image format, and will actually reject your ad if there is too much text within the message itself (the rule of thumb seems to be about 20% text-to-image). That’s good for marketers who have stunning visuals to work with, but it can present some challenges for those who need to explain what it is they have to sell.
On Facebook You Pay For Impressions, Not Clicks
Another huge difference between Facebook and Google is that the social network lets you set a budget that equates to an estimated number of impressions rather than a fixed per-click cost. So, you can know who your ads will be shown to, and roughly how many of them, but not what the results will be.
Again, this isn’t necessarily a positive or negative, just a different way of working. It does put more responsibility on the advertiser to ensure that they are getting the right kinds of responses to their messaging, however. After all, they’re going to be charged whether the ad results in clicks or not.
If you haven’t tried advertising on the world’s largest social network already, you might be surprised at just how many opportunities there are to get thousands of clicks for a very low budget. At the same time, know that it takes a bit of creativity and expertise to turn those impressions into revenue.
Call the Biondo Creative team today at 267-362-WEB1 to schedule a free consultation to see how we can help you make the most of all of your Internet advertising and marketing opportunities!