Facebook Ads: More Valuable than AdWords?
Posted by Leisa Hall on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 9:38 am
We talk a lot about building a presence on social media in order to build your online reputation. What many businesses don’t do, however, is take advantage of advertising on Facebook to make that presence even more powerful.
Similar to Google AdWords and other PPC engines in that the advertiser pays each time their ad receives a click, Facebook advertising has something the others don’t. They have an incredible amount of demographic data from the user profiles that each and every Facebooker creates. Advertisers, then, are able to harness that data to pinpoint target ads to Facebook users. So for example, while on AdWords you can target users’ search queries and geo-location, on Facebook, you can target based on any combination of the following attributes:
- Location (country, city, state)
- Age
- Birthday
- Sex
- Keywords
- Level of education
- Workplace(s)
- Martial status
- Language
At last count, Facebook shows that there are nearly 90,000,000 users in the United States alone that could potentially be displayed an ad. With the targeting options, advertisers on Facebook have an incredible opportunity speak to an audience of potential customers. That audience also happens to be one of the most captive audiences online right now – according to a recent Nielsen Online study, users spend an average of just under 6 hours each month on Facebook – 2x more than they spend on Google! That could mean some serious face time for any business.
January 4th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
What the author fails to explain is the commercial inclination of facebook users vs. google searchers. where users are in the sales cycle. Facebook is most definitely not a direct response channel for most consumer products companies and online retailers. not even close. Comparing Facebook to Google is a false comparison b/c it misses the point of why users use those very different tools.
For ex, users come to fb to chat, connect with friends, play games, socialize. These are not activities highly correlated to shopping and transaction behavior. Moreover, the act of search w/in facebook is a very different animal as well. FB searchers are usually looking for people or groups, NOT for products to purchase. There is no shopping cart per se w/in Facebook. Therefore, while targeting keywords in FB will give you a large ‘potential audience’ it won’t give you a ‘ready to buy now’ audience.
The fact remains that return on ad spend w/in google is dramatically higher than on facebook specifically for that reason. moreover, the targeting ability w/in facebook is ‘horseshoes and hand grenades’ by comparison to where the author implies it is.
Much much more needs to be done w/in FB to make search function better, to create more legible functional SERPs, to create more effective bulk uploading and mgt of keyword campaigns and display campaigns. Their analytics capabilities are remedial to say the least. FB has light years to go before it is a true direct response vehicle.