Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing some advertising experiments for Foojee. While our original strategy was to avoid pay-per-click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords, Sponsored Tweets, Facebook Advertising and more, I decided it was time for us to give it a shot in order to bring in more potential clients.
Google Adwords
Having worked with PPC advertising in my last job, I felt comfortable preparing a limited budget in order to determine which platform(s) would best serve Foojee and our goals. At the end of my Adwords experiment, we ended paying an average of $2.22 per click in our Atlanta-based advertisements and $1.71 per click in our Nashville-based ads. That’s really not bad! However, Google recently announced some changes coming to the Adwords platform that will make it more difficult for your ads to be seen and those that are seen will cost you more. It is worth noting that within the Adwords platform, you can also advertise on YouTube. If you have short form video content (15-30 seconds) you can pay to have your ads shown before actual videos on the platform. We will be testing out that capability in the near future.
Twitter Ads
Twitter is a bit of a mixed bag because sponsored tweets and accounts, the only advertising options, kind of stick out like a sore thumb on the platform. In my opinion that reduces the likeliness that a user will interact and engage with the ads. Other platforms have worked a bit more to at least attempt to make the ads feel like part of the ecosystem. Regardless, I wanted to give Twitter Ads a shot to at least test the viability of drawing leads in this way. I ran a brief campaign using Twitter and we ended up receiving 20 clicks to our website for a cost per click of $1.25. So Twitter is less expensive than Adwords, but more expensive than Facebook, and the majority of our target demographic does no use Twitter.
LinkedIn Advertising
LinkedIn was on my list of platforms to test out as well. My previous job was at a nonprofit and advertising via LinkedIn wasn’t a great fit so I took some time to familiarize myself with the platform and do some research online before diving in. What I’ve found is that LinkedIn can be effective at advertising. If your target demographic is older and corporate minded, then it maybe exactly where you can spend money. One option is post content on your business page and then sponsor that post so more people see it. However with LinkedIn, we saw an average of $5.00 per click. I’m not sure the skewed demographics of LinkedIn warrant paying an extra $3 per click when there are other platforms with better targeting. One of the great things about LinkedIn’s platform is that you can choose to target your advertisements towards people who work for a specific company. If you’re trying to go after one company, then this could be worth the extra money to get your advertisements seen by the right people.
Facebook Ads
Speaking of great targeting, let’s talk about Facebook. Facebook has the most active users of any social network in the world. When it started, it was absolutely a platform for more youthful users, but as the years have passed the older crowds have made their way to Facebook, which means it going to be hard to beat this advertising platform. Because of the amount of information Facebook has about their users, they can allow marketers to micro target who they advertise to. Knowing all of this, I tried to go in to my advertising experiment with as little bias as possible to get a true grasp on the possibilities available. I was not disappointed. For my Atlanta experiment we ended up paying only $0.81 per click and in Nashville only $0.93 per click! Not only were the clicks cheaper on Facebook, they were more targeted than Adwords.
In fact, i was so encouraged by these results that I decided to do another test by “boosting” one of our business page posts. It happened to be about a video we shot a few weeks ago about the iPad Pro. I put simple budget behind it for a couple days and the results were somewhat astonishing. In a matter of days we had hundreds and hundreds of new views. In fact, for the duration of the experiment we ended up paying $0.01 per view! For about $20 we were able to get close to 1,500 views. Most of those views being from people who probably don’t know us and have never heard of Foojee until that video. You can’t get a much better bang for your buck in my opinion.
Next Steps
The next step in our process is to continue creating content that adds great value to stranger, clients, and friends. This way when our advertisements succeed in directing people to our website, we have something useful to offer them for their time. We never take anyone’s time for granted and want to make sure we show people just how much we appreciate them.
Thanks so much for reading! If you saw one of our advertisements over the last few months, what did you like or dislike about them? We'd love to hear from you!
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