We like to do things properly here at Hummingbird Web Design. Great designs, fantastic wording that generates sales inquiries for our clients, and tight, focused SEO strategy on each page. As we say on our website, we’re “always aiming for PAGE ONE”. You’d expect nothing less with our team, dedicated to top-ranking, beautiful-looking web design in New York.
In this article, we’re pointing you to the opportunities out there for your business with the world’s two biggest search engines, Facebook and Google. “Woah!”, I can hear you say, “but Facebook is not a search engine!”. And to an extent, you’d be right. Facebook is not really good if you’re doing everyday-type searches but for businesses looking for customers, it’s the ultimate search engine.
Let’s say you run a beauty business targeting 18-35 year-old females in Tribeca. You run a typical B2C (business to consumer) company. Business is OK, you’re meeting the bills, but you want a few more customers through your doors so you can pay yourself more at the end of the month and keep a bit extra back in your business checking account.
You have an extra $1,000, and you want to know which advertising platform would be best, Facebook or Google. There are lots of different ways of measuring success in advertising but, for the purpose of this article, all we’re going to consider is “cost of conversion” – how much you have to pay to get someone to buy from you.
But first, what are the main differences between the two platforms?
Let’s take this scenario:
To start, you only want customers from the Tribeca area – no one is going to travel to your shop from the Upper West Side so you don’t want to pay for those people in that location clicking on your advertisement. Both Google and Facebook allow ultra-local targeting.
Next, you only want to target women aged 18-35 years old in Tribeca. This is where Google falls flat – that option doesn’t exist. So, if you bought a Google ad, it might be clicked on by women outside your desired age range and even by men. With Facebook, however, you can be incredibly precise. You can choose who sees your ad by age, likes, interests, income bracket and much more. You can be ultra-targeted and there’s much less chance of spending money paying for clicks from people you don’t want to sell to.
Beauty is a very personal thing. What type of ad will each platform display? Google only allows three lines of text. Facebook allows images and videos – everything you need to capture the attention and then the hearts of your would-be clients.
Just on these features alone, we’d recommend Facebook to you. But do the statistics back that up? There’s years and years’ worth of evidence to look through but what does it actually say?
Experts believe the conversion rate for leads are LOWER on Facebook than Google – in other words, people who visit your website from Google are more likely to buy from you. The problem is that the cost per click is much higher. An average B2C client, like our beauty business, pays 90 cents a click with Facebook but they’d be paying $8 a click with Google.
How does this work out? If you were paying $8 a click from Google and you turned 8 out of 100 visitors into a customer, each cost of conversion is $100. If you were paying 70 cents a click from Facebook and only 3% turned into customers, each cost of conversion is $23.33.
In other words, it costs 328% more to find a customer on Google than it does on Facebook if your primary business is selling to people and not to companies.
As a web design company in New York who cares about small business, we love the opportunity to help and advise you with your advertising goals. Want to start a conversation with us about web design, search engine optimization, and online advertising? Call Nancy at 516 883 3851 or email nancy@hummingbirdwebdesign.com.
P.S. Our next article is about branding – a big topic. When it comes to logo design in NY, we’ve got a load of useful information to share with you so check back here.
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