Now that I've had a chance to use both of them I can safely say that I will never use google adwords again unless I find the magic keyword that attracts the demographic that has always bought my sweaters offline. I have a narrow target market of plus size women from 35-65 who have a significant amount of discretionary income and google ads just scatter-shot at everyone with no targeting. IMO that's a waste of money unless what you sell appeals to a very wide audience. On Facebook I got to use $50 in free ad money and target each version very specifically to people who at least have a chance of being the right targets. They're very fun to use because you can can have several versions of ads running and compare them to each other to see how they're doing. I found that the ads that used product shots did much better than the ads that used my logo and the ads that sent people to my shop generated much more interest than the ones aimed at my FB page. The people that came in from the ads that I specifically targeted to women over 40 that liked luxury goods had a much, much lower bounce rate than I've ever had before and the average person looked at at least 4 sweaters.
On the downside, after rushing around trying to get to 50 likes I needed for more free ad money I found out that only people who had never used them before were eligible. Oh well.
Update: Facebook doesn't seem to keep track of who has already used free ads because they gave me the $50 more anyway. For starters I'm using it as one of those "like this to enter" things with a hefty coupon and I got 6 new likes in 10 minutes. It sure would be nice if this keeps up.
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com
Karen! watch out for those "like this to enter" things!! liking something cannot be a requirement on a facebook contest!
ReplyDeleteglad you got the $50 though :)
ReplyDeleteHmm - at any given moment that's the format of half of the ads on my newsfeed and a lot of them are big established things with thousands and thousands of likes. How else would those sites know who entered their giveaway? I checked a bunch of them and didn't see anyone using any other method.
ReplyDeleteOh well, I'll read more about it but hopefully FB isn't full of the recreationally outraged who wander around reporting things that have no negative effect on them whatsoever.
there's a few of those people.
ReplyDeleteI just stay away from any wording like that, stay away from giveaways of any kind.
Couldn't get my head around the rules