Just Nancy – Facebook Pay Per Click Advertising

Is Facebook pay per click right for you?
Is Facebook pay per click right for you?

Facebook pay per click advertising – does it work? Should I use it?

The answer to both questions is yes and yes.  First does it work? Yes Facebook pay per click advertising does work to drive traffic to your website or Facebook page – you choose where you want the traffic to go. I personally like sending a reader to your website to a specially designed landing page that works to elicit a response from the prospect;  like downloading an ebook or signing up for a newsletter or better yet completing an information request form.

Second, should you use it? Well, this depends on your budget and goals. If you are not using Google AdWords, Facebook is great place to get low cost activity. However typically you will need to be a do it yourselfer for set up and management due to Facebook’s nature and location of the credit card for an account. I do like the ability to target by demographic and the click cost is typically much lower than AdWords.

Here’s the big caveat – if your potential customer is over 35 years old Facebook is the place. For a young set up customers Snapchat and Intagram are where your customers are spending their time. They may be feeding updates to Facebook, but are typically not on the Facebook platform.

Although we do not manage Facebook advertising for most customers, for a select set of VIP clients we do perform management services. My recommendations are based on what I see happening in real client accounts.

Yahoo Sponsored Search 1/2 Price Sale

That’s right if you have the right product, you can generate as many conversions as you can on Google AdWords but at nearly half the click cost! The big caveat is, is your product the right product for Yahoo Sponsored Search?

Not every Yahoo account will out perform a Google account, but here’s what I have found:

Beauty products will do better on Yahoo PPC  than Google AdWords.

Real estate will do better on Yahoo PPC than Google AdWords.

Some education programs and course offerings will do better on Yahoo than Google.

The biggest rule of thumb is if the product is personal in nature or needs a personal relationship to sell or provide it, then Yahoo will be better. If the product is more technical in nature then Google AdWords will beat Yahoo Sponsored Search hands down.

Sometimes you simply need to try Yahoo to see what will happen after you have a mature Google AdWords program. If you have success on Yahoo, you will most likely be successful on Microsoft adCenter. If you are not successful on Yahoo then don’t expand to adCenter in most cases you won’t do any better there. These are  just my personal observations from years of account management. Your best bet is always to start on Google AdWords first and then expand carefully from there.

AdWords Escalating Costs Force Advertisers to Yahoo

With the cost of Google AdWords for some markets and business escalating since the AdWords September 15th update, Yahoo is looking better all the time.

Here’s just one example of the many changes that we have seen happen this week since the September 15th AdWords update:

1. For bed bug extermination and bed bug related keywords in 2006 we paid around $1.25 per click, now to be competitive in the New York City market we are over $4.00 a click. Yahoo is still serving quality converting clicks for this account at about $1.65.

2. Here’s another example of the competition on AdWords since the update. For a dentist in the Washington DC metro area, Google states their account control panel that to appear in the firs page of search results they should now pay $57 per click for the phrase family dental care. Mind you, this is not to be in position one, but rather in position 11. What I don’t understand is that this same client has been getting clicks with Google showing the average ad position to be over 6 in the data and he is paying around $7 or so per click – so why the $57 note in the control panel?

3. Some accounts that we manage are totally being hammered with the update. One client who typically gets 70 to 80 conversions from Google each month is down to 20 so far month to date and we upped his cost per click twice since September 15th! Yahoo has brought in 16 conversions for him so far this month and at a significantly lower cost.

Yahoo is looking better all the time. In fact if you are not seriously contemplating advertising in Yahoo and trimming back your advertising in Google AdWords while this shakedown is occurring, it may be a good time to give it very serious consideration. I think that Google may have gotten too greedy in this last change and will be chasing out advertisers with these new cost per click figures to retain their desired average ad position.