With CPC advertising a business can effectively reach new customers by directing advertising at people interested in your product or service. Because there are so many users on Facebook and Google data can be aggregated and analyzed easily for advertisers to display products and services directly to customers that might be interested. This is very useful tool for small businesses; based on the amount attention you would like your ads to receive, as well as the budget you are willing to spend (it can be infinite $$$), you can generate additional traffic to a website and higher sales conversion to interested consumers.
The process is essentially the same for both Facebook and Google, but there are some slight differences.
Facebook -
Facebook uses interests and demographics to target advertising. To place an ad you must choose which interests, age groups and geographic locations; there are a number of tools for adding interests and locations. Once these have been chosen, there are number of options for how you would like to place your ad. These are described in detail on the Facebook Ads page, but essentially you can either choose to receive more likes, or attract more attention to the page in general. Once this is complete a budget can be set by day or month, a suggested bid per click is given which may be followed or not (lower bids are ineffective, as Facebook has calculated a minimum, higher bids achieve slightly better results) and the duration of the campaign. There is a detailed application for managing ads and viewing their performance; check this regularly to makes changes to ads and see how effective they are. Facebook regularly updates their advertising program, making it easier and easier to promote posts; make sure that it is understood what these changes are, and use the new tools provided.
Tips :
- Promote a product or service directly, do not promote random posts from the business' page.
- Provide discounts or other promotional devices in advertisements, these draw a lot more attention from purchasing consumers
- link to the main website if applicable
- short and sweet ads! get your point across in recognizable, keyword phrases.
Google - Google Ad-Words -
http://adwords.google.com
The process for advertising with Google is very similar. Instead of using interests, Google uses search terms and web analytics. Using the Google Keyword tool (which has recently been updated) search for keywords from a Facebook page or website for the business or product. These keywords can be used to target advertisements to the consumers that would be interested in the business, and show up when these people are searching for relevant keywords. Choose keywords that describe the product, set a budget per click, or overall; Google is very good at automatically determining an effective budget and CPC. Check back often to Google's advertising management page to determine the success of an ad, results on Google Ad-Words are quite fast!
Using Google advertising also increases a business' relevance in the search database; this means the website or Facebook page will show up higher in the results of a search which include keywords applied to the website. SEO (search engine optimization), key-wording, and increasing the search relevance of a website can be a very complex process, there are many experts online that provide this service. Advertising success on Google to increase sales conversion on a website is largely dependant on SEO and keywords to drive traffic to a website.
Tips:
-Watch the budget, Google advertising expense can get out of hand
-Try different advertising strategies
Good luck implementing a new CPC advertising campaign!
