As the battle for online advertising heats up, I have had several small business owners ask me if they should be using Adwords or Facebook PPC.

What should you be using of Pay Per Click?

The short answer is, it depends…

I would say that while Facebook is fairly young in terms of the PPC game, they are a very viable player. In the testing that I am doing now, I am seeing some promising results.

Here are a couple reasons I would consider Facebook ads over Adwords:

1) Less Expensive – Facebook ads are costing me less per click than my Adwords accounts that I manage for clients.

2) Laser Targeted – With Facebooks 380+ million user base, they have much deeper and more relevant demographic data than Google does. I can actually target the users age, gender, and geographic location much easier than on Adwords. With Adwords I can’t always tell by just the context of keywords that were used.

3) No Slaps – So far, I haven’t seen the same wrath that I have experienced in the path from Google. It seems to be more user friendly with less restrictions for landing page content etc..I imagine that will change over time, but so far so good.

The bottom line is that as a small business owner I would for sure give it a shot. The same principles still apply for Facebook Ads for the most part. The biggest benefit is the ability to filter your ads for the exact audience.This ultimately save money as you have a higher conversion and a lower acquisition cost than Adwords.

If you dive into the Facebook PPC system and you have questions let me know. Would love to help!

Cheers,

Matt

From a marketing perspective, how do you know if it is broken or not without split testing, otherwise knows as A/B testing.

As a small business owner you need every marketing dollar to pack the biggest punch possible. You don’t have the marketing muscle and budget of a Fortune 500 company. As such, your marketing system must have a split testing company to verify you are maximizing your results and ROI on every dollar spent.

The obvious goal is you put $1 of marketing in and you get $2 out. Otherwise known as 100% ROI.

Do you even know what the ROI is on your existing marketing? Do you track your performance?

If not, you aren’t being a good steward of your marketing dollars. Worst yet, you may have a piece of marketing that is pulling and converting leads into paying customers but it hasn’t reached it’s full potential. Imagine if you increase the performance of each piece of marketing by 10-20%. Imagine what that would do for your revenues and profits.

Bring in A/B split testing…

Split testing has been used by sophisticated marketers for a long time. The thought is that you take your first piece of marketing and establish a “control”. The key part of establishing the control is gathering the data and the metrics in the first place. If you aren’t doing this right now, build that into your system now.

If it is direct mail you are using, start using a unique 1-800 number, or on your marketing piece specify an extension. Make sure your office tracks these individually so you have a better understanding as to what ad, direct mail piece, or online advertisement created the lead in the first place.

Now that we have our control, it’s time to tweak our original offer. If this is a display ad or direct mail piece, my advice is to start with the headline. If you aren’t grabbing their attention, they won’t read any further. The 2nd item I usually focus on is the offer itself, and the call to action.

It is shocking how many marketing pieces I see from small business owners don’t even have an offer, let alone a strong call to action.

The key here is to change one item at a time, and start comparing your results to the control. When you find a new winner, THAT is now your new control. Your marketing system should be a process of continuous improvement. If you are happy with the results in one marketing campaign, advertisement, or promotion move onto the next one and leverage A/B testing to maximize profits there as well.

The key here is to integrate A/B testing as part of your marketing system, not a one time event that you do once a year.

To Your Prosperity,