Although Facebook is a popular social networking platform, from an advertising perspective, it’s more noteworthy as a large marketplace replete with a generous amount of user demographic data that can be readily translated into more targeted ads to carry your message. But not all products and services are profitably suited to advertising on Facebook.

What Products and Services Sell Best on Facebook?

Facebook primarily caters to individuals inclined towards communicating about their lives to friends and family. Hence, products or services that are business-to-consumer oriented (B2C), have a better opportunity at establishing positive results than a company which is advertising business-to-business (B2B) products or services.

Having said that, if you do sell B2B products/services, recognize that you are more likely to successfully advertise to small business owners who are on Facebook, rather than larger company buyers. (Statistically, there are more of the former).

Facebook is a good advertising channel for generating business for art, music, clubs, shared beliefs (ie. political, religious, social causes, etc.), live events, travel, entertainment or for marketing custom or personalized products, as well as things that express individual tastes and preferences.

Facebook Advertising is Not for Everyone

Some examples of B2B products or services that would not likely yield positive results on Facebook would be technical, industrial, or complex products/services.

Also, if you sell products that can be readily purchased anywhere with a price that is well known, then – unless you have a compelling price – your product may not do well on Facebook.

Facebook Advertising Conclusion

Facebook offers a unique opportunity to demographically target a large audience of users, with qualifiers such as likes and interests, geography, age, gender, single or married, and education level.

Even so, if you have a product or service that fits the criteria outlined in this article, then you would be wise to stick your toes in the water first via market testing to develop and refine your advertising, rather than diving in head first with a large ad budget just because it appears so promising.

For many businesses, ONLY advertising on Google’s search pages is the mainstay of their paid traffic strategy.

However, the Content Network is workable for other businesses.

Google’s Content Network includes all the websites that host ads for Google, and whose publishers are paid when their visitors click on the ads.

One advantage of the Content Network is that ad costs are lower than on the search pages.

But since traffic from the Content Networks comprises a different mindset in relation to viewer interest in such ads, these ads not only necessitate a different copywriting strategy, they may simply NOT be workable for a given business.

Of course, in both circumstances, the ads are displayed only when they are contextually relevant. For example, if you are paying to advertise motorcycles, those ads will only show up for people who are searching for motorcycles (for the search page ads), and they will only show up on website pages that have content that has to do with motorcycles (via the Google’s Content Network).

A DIFFERENT MINDSET ON THE CONTENT NETWORK

The thinking underlying the difference between buying ads on search pages and buying ads on the Content Network could be summed up as follows:

1. Paid ads that are displayed on the search pages represent ads that are relevant to what the searcher has actually indicated they are looking for “right now.” So the ads have a greater potential tendency to engage visitors. (Someone searches for “motorcycles” and sees search results for “motorcycles” as well as ads for “motorcycles.”)
2. Paid ads that are displayed on the Content Network, however, are presented to viewers who have already gone to a website for information, and the ads “may” be deemed more of a distraction. However, the ads are still contextually relevant, in the same way they are on the search pages. (Searcher arrives on a website that has an article about “motorcycles” and sees ads about “motorcycles.”)

As an example, let’s say someone is searching for information about “buying a motorcycle.” When the searcher is reviewing the displayed results of his/her search, he will likely also see paid ads from advertisers who are selling motorcycles. Depending upon where such a searcher is in the process of possibly buying a motorcycle, he may, or may not, be interested in advertisements to buy motorcycles at that moment. He may only be interested in free information about the process of selecting motorcycles.

If that same person then clicks on a search result and goes to a website page that has an article on selecting the best motorcycle, the searcher has found something they are interested in. If that website ALSO happens to be hosting Google’s paid ads (as part of the Google Content Network), then the searcher may once again see ads on buying motorcycles. So, an important question would be, “Is this searcher more inclined, or less inclined, to click on an ad about ‘buying motorcycles’ on the web page he/she has visited, as compared to the search page?”

Market testing will provide the answer for any given product or service.

The distinction is significant enough to recognize that if you are interested in maximizing the performance of your ad budget, ads should be tested on the search pages and ads should be tested on the Content Network separately.

On the other hand, the different mindset of the searcher/visitor on the Content Network “MAY” represent a lower cost media opportunity and even a better quality lead. To continue the example above, let’s suppose the searcher elects to read an article on the process of buying motorcycles and as a result of reading the articles, discovers that there is much more to know about this subject than he/she originally considered.

And then let’s suppose this website visitor sees an advertisement for a book on selecting motorcycles.

At this point, such a person may be considerably MORE inclined to click on such an ad, even if the same ad were displayed on the original search results page. And to further emphasize the different mindset that could be established after a searcher lands on a website, what if that same article about the process of buying motorcycles also recommended the reader buy a book?

You can probably imagine your own scenarios where the Content Network could be a better or worse media. Hence, they need to be tested separately.

TEST THE GOOGLE CONTENT NETWORK SEPARATELY

Bear in mind that Google charges less to advertise on their Content Network because it is not as effective for most advertisers. However, not all advertisers are savvy enough to test DIFFERENT ads on the Content Network, so these advertisers are missing out on a potential opportunity to generate more leads/sales for less money. The fact that some advertisers simply choose NOT to advertise on the Content Network because their results are not as profitable, is part of why the price is lower. But if they never tested DIFFERENT ads on the Content Network, they never actually found out if there is a real opportunity or not. (And again, for some products/services, the testing may confirm that the Content Network does not present an opportunity).

To establish the most fruitful pay-per-click ad testing, it is best to run such ad campaigns independent of each other: Conduct one series of tests on the search pages and another series of tests on the Content Network.

Depending upon the resources you have available to devote to testing, you might even test each area one-at-a-time, instead of concurrently, for the sake of simplicity.

Click here to view the current Introduction to Google Adwords series, and check back to see more as the series continues to expand.

Target Your Ads For Your Business

If you are a regional consultant, contractor, restaurant owner or ANY local business who caters to a local market, it makes no sense to advertise all over the world, or even all over your own country, for that matter. Of course, even if you do sell a product that could be shipped anywhere in the world, you still might only advertise in English-speaking countries, until you could at least generate ads in the language pertinent to each country.

Furthermore, if you only ship products within one country or continent, it makes no sense to pay for advertising in places where you don’t ship.

This may seem obvious, but I have encountered business owners who have been discouraged by their advertising results on AdWords, only to learn that they were paying for a North American campaign when their service primarily catered to the northern part of Los Angeles County.

Types of Geographical Location Targeting

Some of the ways you can geographically target your Google AdWords PPC advertising is by selecting the country, state, region, city or zip code(s) that you want your ads to appear in. There are also customized geographical zones that you can select. For example, you could designate that your ads only display to searchers within a radius of a certain amount of miles around a point on a map (such as your business). Furthermore, you could exclude areas if you wanted. So, for example, if you market a product or service that is legally restricted in specific U.S. states (such as certain financial services), then you would target your ads in the United States and exclude the restricted states.

Conversely, even if you sell and deliver a product or service all over North America, you might still want to use location targeting as part of a testing process that might start in a smaller region before expanding to larger regions as your advertising is refined via testing, testing and more testing. Having said that, a more common way to test your initial ads is by controlling how much you spend per day for your AdWords advertising, which is a simple setting within your AdWords account.

OK, without belaboring this anymore, the point here is to take advantage of the geographical locations you can designate so that you are not paying for clicks that won’t turn into revenue for you.

Click here to view the current Introduction to Google Adwords series, and check back to see more as the series continues to expand.

Conversely, you can also lose money through these little advertisements that are somewhat akin to online classified ads, which show up along search results (or within websites and blogs). In fact, it’s likely that when you start using AdWords to drive traffic to your website that you will lose money – at least in the beginning.

AdWords is Google’s main source of revenue, which is a testament to its popularity to advertisers around the world. And its popularity is a result of a profitable fact: It works.

And by “works,” what I mean is that you can readily drive traffic to your website. And you only need to pay for those visitors who click on an ad to arrive on your website.

Therein lies the simple elegance of AdWords: You pay for targeted traffic. Not only that, you choose the targeting of the ads by way of the selection of keywords.

If you are selling digital cameras, you can create ads that show up when web searchers enter the term “digital cameras” into Google’s search engine. If the ads are compelling enough, visitors will click on the ads and arrive on your site.

Furthermore, you can influence how high your ad is positioned on the search results page by bidding a higher amount to display your ad than your competitors. In reality, there is more to this than just how much you pay (such as how effective your ad and landing page are), but the bidding does serve as an important factor determining the position of your ad.

There is more to know about AdWords as an advertising media to drive traffic to your website.  This is the first part of what will be a several part series on using AdWords to successfully increase your online profits.

Click here to view the current Introduction to Google Adwords series, and check back to see more as the series continues to expand.

The source of the data is from a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, released today, which focuses on the first 6 months of 2009.

Here’s a couple takeaways from the report:

• Search revenue accounted for 47 percent of 2009 second-quarter revenues, up from the 44 percent reported in the second quarter of 2008. Display advertising, the second largest format, accounted for 35 percent, followed by classifieds (10 percent) and Lead Generation (7 percent) of 2009 second-quarter revenues.
• Search has remained the leading format since 2004, and has had strong sequential growth over this period. Search is followed by Display Banners and Classified/Directories in percentage share of Internet advertising.

It’s not unusual for online publishers to require minimum campaign expenditures of $10,000 and up.

Although PPC advertising via search engines may be pertinent for a number of budget applications (including low), the choices and options for online advertising expand considerably beyond search.

“The Definitive List of Self-Serve Online Ad Buying,” by Hollis Thomases (link below), offers a useful list of do-it-yourself ad buying services, compartmented into the following categories.

♦ Self-Serve Display Ads

♦ Self-Serve Text and Contextually Targeted Ads

♦ Self-Serve Multiple Ad Types

♦ Self-Serve Lead Generation

♦ Self-Serve Local Ads

♦ Self-Serve Social Media Ads

♦ Self-Serve Mobile Ads

♦ Self-Serve Video Ads

Also, be sure to review the comments under that post for additional resources.

Here’s the link to the article: The Definitive List of Self-Serve Online Ad Buying.

“Media planning and buying is all about independent research and being able to grasp complex advertising concepts and technologies.”

Click the following link to review how he has delineated online media buying, using the title “Research Tips for Landing a First Online Media Job.”

1) Watch for significant variations in campaign performance: Look at your reports to identify sudden peaks and other anomalies in your daily traffic and costs. If you cannot determine the cause and the peaks are not associated with corresponding lifts in performance, consider stopping your campaign and/or asking your network to investigate further.

2) Prevent competitive click fraud: Do a few searches on your keywords to compile a list of relevant competitors. Then open your Command Prompt on your PC (or Terminal on your Mac) and ping each competitor’s domain (e.g. type “ping www.COMPETITORDOMAINNAME.com”) to ascertain their company IP address. You can find their entire range of IPs by using services such as www.arin.net. Be sure to check that the IPs are registered to the company directly, as opposed to the company’s hosting provider. If they are, add those IPs to your account IP exclusion lists (when available).

3) Don’t drain your own budget: If you’re concerned about clicks coming from your own employees, add your company’s IPs to your account IP exclusion lists (when available).

4) Block poor performing referrers: Assuming your analytics package provides referral and conversion information, start with your highest volume referrers and determine which sites fail to drive any conversions or other useful user sessions. If you notice that your ads/keywords are performing poorly on particular sites, reduce your bids for those publishers/channels. For high volume sites that generate zero conversions, selectively use the domain/channelblocking feature to prevent your ads from appearing on those sites in the future.

5) Monitor high dollar CPC terms closely: Keywords with high CPCs have historically been more vulnerable to click fraud attacks than those with low CPCs. So pay particular attention to these keywords and the referrers that generate disproportionately more traffic to your site through these keywords. Determine whether or not you’re seeing a positive ROI on your bids. If not, consider lowering your bids on poor-performing keywords/ads and allocating more spend to higher performing keywords/ads.

6) Geo-target your ads appropriately: If you do not sell products outside of North America, be sure to limit your geo-targeting to North America. If you do sell products abroad, monitor the performance of your international ads. If you find that your ads perform poorly in certain geographies, update your geo-targeting preferences accordingly. Keep a critical eye out for countries such as UAE, China, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Anchor has seen relatively high volumes of fraud originating from these countries.

7) Use ad scheduling: Monitor the quality of your traffic according to time of day and day of the week. For instance, we find that humans typically use the internet during the day, while bots can run 24 hours a day. If you find that your conversion rates are higher in the mornings than late at night, you may want to daypart your bids to reduce exposure to lower-converting traffic.

8) Leverage a 3rd party traffic quality solution: Your ad network/search engine is not infallible. In order to ensure that you are not being charged for fraudulent clicks, consider using a 3rd party traffic quality solution, such as Anchor Intelligence. By providing deep insight into the quality of each click/impression as well as the factors that contribute to each click/impression score, Anchor Intelligence helps to educate you on click fraud and traffic quality. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to improve your ad spend allocation decisions and ensure you are not paying for unwanted traffic.

9) Investigate your network: Before signing up with an ad network or search engine, do some research into its policies. For instance, you should determine whether the network uses frequency caps to prevent duplicate clicks originating from the same IP from being charged to your account. Also check to ensure that they are using the IAB/ABCe International Spiders & Bots List and not charging you for clicks from these robots. Finally, peruse their Terms of Use to determine the extent to which they care about the quality of traffic you receive. For example, look for restrictions against authorizing, encouraging, or generating fraudulent clicks or impressions; editing, modifying, removing, or obscuring ads; and displaying ads on error pages or “thank you” pages.

10) Encourage your ad network(s) to also use 3rd party scoring solutions: Your ad network may not realize that you are concerned about click fraud. The more you and other advertisers ask networks to take additional steps to prevent and filter click fraud, the more likely these companies will be to proactively protect you. In particular, you should encourage your network(s) to engage the services of 3rd party traffic quality solutions providers. These 3rd parties monitor the traffic quality within and across networks, to help ensure that you see the highest possible ROI on your advertising spend while giving you confidence in the quality of your clicks.

The data for the chart was based upon a survey of “a few hundred online advertisers” regarding advertising strategies and tactics.

Some basic conclusions that can be gleaned by looking at the top and bottom rows are that:

“Users of non-standard, attention-getting ads are most likely to be marketers focused on brand awareness, while PPC search ad buyers are most likely to be focused on lead generation or direct sales.”

The bottom row lends some insight to the number of marketers that may be using the Reverse Banner Ad Tactic: 5% for “Brand Consideration/Education” and 6% for “Brand Awareness” for a potential total of 11% of marketers using PPC for the opposite of its primary purpose of lead generation and direct sales.

Following is some additional elaboration of the row descriptions:

Non-standard ads: Interstitials, floating, peel-backs

Non-Interactive Banner Ads: 1-click URL, no multimedia

Sponsorships, including co-branded content

Pop-Ups and pop-unders

Small Display Ads, such as buttons or tiles

Highly Interactive Display Advertising

Contextual Ads: Adsense, Content Match, etc.

PPC Search Ads: Google, Yahoo, MSN

Since you and I and most everyone else instinctively ignore banner ads, the notion that they would be irrelevant is understandable.

Historically, banner ads were more effective as an ad media from 1994 until the turn of the century when their valuations crashed. Out of that wreckage emerged a model of highly-targeted, small advertisements that are displayed on search results pages (as well as content pages) with related keywords. These online classified ads have been made most famous by Google’s Adwords program, which is Google’s main source of revenue and which has fueled the big G’s rise to online planetary prominence. (Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are two of the other larger PPC programs).

However, banner ads still exist, even though the percentage of people who click on them is very small, on average, less than 1/4 of 1%.

One way to take advantage of this low click-through rate is to intentionally create banner ads with copywriting that will further diminish the likelihood that they will be clicked. One example could be advertising a high price.

The net effect would be that the banner ad is displayed for a longer period of time (if it’s on a cost per click basis as opposed to cost per impression). This can be leveraged to raise awareness about your product/service. Further, for those few that do click the ad that displays a high price, there may be a higher likelihood that they are a quality prospect.

Click this Online Advertisement Comparison to see a chart that indicates that 11% or less of marketers may be using this tactic.

In short, intentionally creating banner ad images that will not be clicked can establish greater brand awareness in the mind space of your potential customers, over time.

Regardless, like all other elements of direct response marketing, such a reverse banner ad tactic should be tested for your particular product/service and your specific buyers.

Per force, any business would be biased towards their highest source of revenue. In the case of Google’s Adwords PPC program, this lends additional light to their necessity to give better PPC rankings for established Adwords accounts. (Or, stated differently, how newer Adwords advertisers get penalized by Google).

2) How do you know if you have the best headlines?

3) How do you determine the best offer for your product or service?

The answer is keyword research accompanied by TESTING, TESTING and more TESTING!

Of course there are a variety of ways to test keywords, to test headlines (and other copywriting points), as well as to test for the best offers.

You can certainly set up different pages that are focused on different sets of keywords, with different headlines, and different offers, and monitor key performance metrics, such as “visitors,” and “sales,” and compare them over time to see which perform the best and then continually refine their performance.

However, you can accomplish the same much faster using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

A) Write different PPC ads using your best selected keywords.  Which keywords get more visitors to click on them?

B) Write PPC ads using different combinations of headlines with the best performing keywords.  Which headlines get clicked on the most?

C) Write your best offers on your landing pages for your product or service, which are in harmony with your PPC ads.  Which landing page offers convert the most visitors to sales?  (Click the following link for #1 Copywriting Tip for more information on writing offers.)

With your testing results in hand, you can use this information to refine your long-term SEO campaign. Obviously, you want to keep the winners and get rid of the losers.  But don’t stop there.  Then the game becomes establishing new tests to beat the current “winner” (more technically referred to as the “control” item).

Of course you can accomplish all the above over time using natural traffic, but that takes much longer to be statistically significant.  For relatively small amounts of expenditures, you can test keyword effectiveness and other important factors much faster, using pay-per-click advertising, before embarking on a long and involved strategic SEO process.

In essence you’re trading money for time, so that you can generate higher performance and profits.

Or, stated more accurately, how Google reduces costs and gives better PPC rankings for established Adwords accounts.