Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Is It True That Facebook Can Out-Do Google In Terms Of Targeted Traffic?

By Kamil Hamad


When Facebook became a publicly traded company in on May 18, 2012, in addition to their huge infusion of operating capital, they also acquired enormous pressure to begin making money. This requirement of their investors made Facebook focus on how to increase their revenue, and that led them to improve their already decent advertising platform.



Facebook differs from Google in several ways on how they approach providing targeted traffic to their advertisers. Facebook, since it is a social platform, serves a different kind of visitor than Google does. Facebook users are generally looking first at connecting with friends and family, and do not normally go looking for solutions to their problems from products they could buy. They are most often seeking advice from their social network on what to buy. This can be a challenge to overcome for advertisers.

Google proponents have argued that even though Facebook has massive numbers and advanced targeting capabilities, the traffic is not targeted enough. This is because they argue that Facebook traffic is not buying traffic. Since it is people who are there on social interactions their main aim is to socialize rather than buy things or subscribe to services. In this regard Google clearly outshines Facebook. This is because a person on Google is actively looking for something while in Facebook they are not necessarily doing so.

When a person visits Facebook, they are looking to connect, and those connections are comprised of related characteristics of their friends, family, and other things they have liked on Facebook. This tends to put people in larger groups, based on demographics, geographic locations, similar things that they like such as music, pets, and so on. Finding the right group to target is the advertiser's goal, and when that target audience is found on Facebook, it can be a gold mine. If a product or service has a strong word of mouth potential, then Facebook can be the best solution. If a person would generally be looking for a specific solution based on a keyword phrase or some question words, then Google will usually work best.

So, deciding on how your potential customers are hunting their answers will determine if Facebook or Google will provide your best solution for targeted traffic. They both work well. They just require a different viewpoint from the advertiser. Both advertising methods utilize a pay per click method, and both have free advertising venues as well. Facebook offers the free Facebook page and Google offers the Google+ Business page. These both offer a great venue that a marketer can use to promote their products and ideas.

Probably a major difference between using Facebook or Google for your advertising in using either one to promote our product or idea is the purpose that you have in mind for the final result. The difference in purpose would revolve around the choice of selling a specific product or are you wishing to promote the brand awareness of a product or idea. The sessions with Facebook last much longer than a Google search session, which would make the building of a brand awareness more logical for the use of Facebook. However Google has a better CPC performance matrix and wildly differing ad formats that Facebook does not have, making Google the better choice for selling a specific product.




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