After being a long time user of Google Adwords I was a bit skeptical when thinking about Facebook Advertising. Google Adwords has been a tried and true method for marketing and I really saw no compelling reason to look elsewhere when the need arose to drive traffic fast to a website. That is, until now.

Facebook Advertising has opened up a new world of possibilities. The reporting data you can see for demographics is amazing and the fact that you can create ad copy AND an image specific for a certain type of profile has really made it a contender for me if someone wants to walk the path of pay per click marketing.

Targeting with Facebook Ads

The real power of Facebook advertising is realized when you go through the motions of selecting who will see your ads. With Google Adwords you can target people who are searching for your specified keywords within a certain distance from a geographic location. This is very powerful to keep costs down as well as to make sure that people within your target areas are the only ones who see your advertisement.

With Facebook Ads you take the same ad delivery filters much further. Here are all of the additional parameters for reach and targeting you can set when creating a Facebook ad:

•Location
•Age
•Sex
•“Interested In?”
•Relationship Status
•Language
•Likes and Interest

The ability to target like this is extremely powerful especially when you start thinking about how to tailor your ad for peoples specific likes and interest.

Google Adwords vs Facebook Ads:

The big differenceThe main difference between Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising is the reasons behind why a user would see your ad in the first place.

Google Adwords will display your ad if a user is searching for a key-phrase that is a close match to the keywords specified in your campaign. There are many more parameters involved such as bid price, the score Google gives your ad and the relevance of your Ad text compared to the search terms.

Facebook Ads will show automatically if the bid is high enough and targeting parameters match closely to a users profile information. There is no search involved with Facebook Ads. It is a match of your ads with the data Facebook has on file for a user.

Arguments can be made for both delivery methodologies. On the one hand a Google user is seeing your Ad because they just did a search for a web page just like the one your ad is made for. While a Facebook user is seeing your ad simply because their profile is a match to what you deem as the perfect type of user to see your ad.

Facebook Ad Targeting Examples

Here are a few possible examples of the amazing targeting capabilities of Facebook Ads.

•Create an ad that you only show to women between the age of 18 and 50 where their relationship status is set to “engaged”. You could then make an alternative ad displaying to only men with the same relationship status.
•Create an ad that only shows between 6pm and 11pm to men who have an interest in video games.
•Create an ad that only shows to people who live in a certain city between the ages of 25-30 and have “liked” one of your Facebook Fan Pages.
•Only show an ad on someones birthday.
The possibilities are endless and a really solid strategy for advertising targeting can quickly be formulated for just about any business type you could imagine.

The Bottom Line

There are times to use both of these solutions in my opinion. In my opinion if you really feel that your customers are heavy Facebook users then trying out Facebook Advertising is worth a try. Facebook is one of the most heavily used websites in the world and from time to time even passes the mighty Google in daily visits. It may not be right for everyone but I’m sure any business owner can picture the power of this ad delivery method when they put some thought into it.

If you have any questions or comments about Facebook ads feel free to drop a comment below. If you would like some help in setting up Facebook Advertising you contact me here
 

Let me begin this post on the hot-topic of Basic on site SEO Tips by saying something counter-intuitive: DO NOT care too much about search engine optimization. In fact, forget about it all together for now. It’s worlds better for yourself, your tribe, and yes, even search engines if you do.

Instead, channel your energies into producing material that is helpful, interesting and worthy of ranking high with your readers and other “critters” that crawl your site. Put out as much high quality content as you can – and do it often. Even without the basics of best practices in search engine optimization, it’s a general rule of common sense that if your content has legitimate usefulness to its existence and readership, then the windfall of your target market will follow – and they’ll want to.

If your content is really well thought out, and you’re now looking for a nudge towards higher rankings and increased find-ability there is much you can do to give your content as much potential as you can. The following notes will outline some basic on site SEO tips and techniques.

Covering The Basics: An SEO Primer

An SEO project should start with solid research. Study the page, take notes, do some research on how people look for a web page like this and then do some competitive analysis. Churn this information until you have a solid plan in mind for what keywords you want to focus on. Based on the outcome of the information digestion, the following can be adjusted:

•Tweak the URL or web page address to reflect the nature of the page and your target key phrase.

•Title tag makeover: This is the heading for each search result in Google and is also the text a user sees when they bookmark your page. It has to look good.

•Meta Description gets some love: This is the code that sums up the web page to a search engine. It’s the text that appears directly below the Title Tag on search result pages cluing end users into the point of the page. It needs to make people want to click.

Rolling our sleeves up, and digging into the page, images and structure.

Now we can dig a little deeper into the visible headers on the page (think of this as the title to your page of content, like a chapter heading in a book). Headers should concisely sum up what a user is about to read while grabbing their attention. Tastefully sprinkling keywords into headers can help solidify the message of the page. Search engines give more importance to the text between header tags than the copy on the rest of the web page.

Are there images on the page? If yes, make sure that all of the proper alt tags are set. This allows you to describe the image in text form so screen readers and search engines alike can deduce the point of the image.

Now take a look at the keyword density of the page. Making sure that terms are used in the copy of the page that correlates to the queries that a user would type to find a page like this is very important. This can be overdone – I have written a post on the tasteful and not-so tasteful use of keyword density here.

Take a look at interlinking as well. For example, do you have content on a different page that relates well to a part of this page? Would it be useful for the reader to see? Link to it. Interlinking between pages on your site with carefully planned anchor text reinforces your website as an authoritative resource.

Under the hood of your website, Or turning your site into an SEO Optimized Machine

Look under the hood to see if the code is up to snuff. Are the headers done correctly and are they wrapping the correct content? How does the code to content ratio look? Did the last developer utilize antiquated techniques?

While you are in there, install some tracking code so you can benchmark and monitor how things are coming along. Any system can be used but Google Analytics is free and certainly provides enough data to work with…and by “enough” I mean way more than you could ever want.

Make sure that human and non-human sitemaps are present. Not only is a sitemap a viable navigational tool, it also ensures that there is access to every page from every other page on your website. This is a sitemap that a user can navigate to and see providing a list of all pages on the website. For the search engine spiders, we build an XML sitemap. This type of sitemap is built and formatted specifically for search engines to digest your content easily so they know how to index you and how often to come back looking for more content.

While making 100% sure that you do not degrade the quality of the content (even a smidge), there is much that can be done using these basic on site seo tips to make your award winning content more visible.

I do not intend to imply that artistic input has no place in conversion rate optimization. As a matter of fact having professionally designed landing pages that resonate with your website visitors is probably the most important thing. I mean to say that making the decision on what headline copy to use, which color scheme to implement, how to arrange your page elements and what images would tip the scales on turning a visitor into a customer can and should be decided by your website visitors themselves.

WhatisCRO!?!

“Conversion Rate” is the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators. If 1 visitor out of 10 fills out the form on the page and 9 of them leave the site or go to a different page without filling out the desired form then you have a conversion rate of 10% for that particular goal. Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is the practice of Optimizing a web page to increase the chances of this conversion and therefor increasing the conversion rate.

There are many elements and factors on a landing page that can be scrutinized when trying to improve your conversion rates. Here are a few examples of web page elements that can be looked at:

•The headline text
•An image on the page
•Color of a submit button
•The layout and order of the elements
Would more people fill out the form if your headline said “Subscribe to Email” instead of “Receive My Newsletter”? If there was a different image on the page would people be more likely to fill out the form? Maybe if the form was at the top of the page instead of after all the copy you could convert more? These are just a few of some very basic items that can be optimized for better conversion rates.

WheretoStartConversionRateOptimization

A great place to start your CRO efforts would be with the Google Website Optimizer Tool. This tool allows you to conduct multi-variate testing and provides a wide array of statistics while doing so. You could run a simple test to alternate the display of two images on your landing page with them alternating to every other visitor. You would then let the test run until there is enough conversions and data to determine which of the two headlines has the greatest success rate. Then you would simply make the better of the two variants the one that displays to everyone.

With Multi Variant Testing you can set up as many variables as you like and Google will track all of them to help you determine what works best. It can be as simple as standard A/B split testing or as complex as having many variables rotating while only performing the test to 75% of your visitors leaving 25% of the people out of the process.

There is always room for improvement to increase landing page conversion rates. This is one of the few internet marketing efforts that can be easily translated to your bottom line. More conversions = more sales. An increase of 5% in your conversion rate is 5% more subscribers, 5% more purchasers or 5% more people wanting to interact with you. Utilizing readily available tools like Google Website Optimizer is a perfect way to take the guessing out of what works and what doesn’t.

If you have any success stories regarding CRO feel free to leave a comment below or use the following link to learn more about professional conversion rate optimization services.