Google Adwords versus Facebook ads, my experience

With a series of seminars coming up in September and October, 2012, I decided that I would try a little internet and social media marketing. Last year I sent 2,000 direct mail pieces and received a decent response to the seminars. The downside was the $1,000 cost to print and mail the pieces. This year I figured I would create some Google Adwords and Facebook ad campaigns to see what sort of response I received.

What’s better than Free

The advertisements were for a series of free educational seminars on Medicare. I created both ads in Google Adwords and Facebook as closely as possible to mirror my target market: people 64 years + in the Sacramento region. I had already developed a blog post with SEO tags and there was a PDF file that could be downloaded from the blog post.

Ad parameters

Since I had done both Google and Facebook pay per click ads before, setting up the new campaigns was fairly easy for me. I set up my daily budget to get approximately 3 clicks per day based on their estimated bid price. This worked out to a daily budget of $6 for Facebook and $5 for Google Adwords.

On the Facebook campaign I selected to show the ad in a 25 mile radius around Sacramento to only users who were 64 years old or higher. For Google Adwords I selected a 20 mile radius around Citrus Heights, where the seminars are to be held. There was probably a way to get both geographic target areas to be equal, but I just went with what was offered in both programs.

 

Both of the campaign display parameters encompass the core geographical areas that have the highest concentration of my target audience which is the Sacramento metro area and outlying suburban areas to the west and north including Roseville. The Google Adword campaign has a slew of keywords that might be entered by a person looking for Medicare information and are present in the blog post that is linked to it.

Battle of the ad campaigns

Both ads started running on the same day. After seven days I thought it would be fun to compare the two and this is what I found. The Facebook ads seem to be performing better than the Google Adwords from the perspective of reach, impressions and clicks. Because I don’t have a specific “call to action” such as “liking” a page or registering for an event, it is difficult to know if the one ad is having more of the desired impact than the other.

Reach: total number of unique people that that the ad was displayed to.

Impressions: total numbers of times the ad was displayed, includes multiple times to the same person.

CTR: calculated differently by each company, FB is clicks divided by reach, Google is clicks divided by impressions.

I can’t necessarily attribute the better performance to the larger geographical area of the facebook ad because so much of the area to the west of Sacramento is agricultural and lightly populated with  the exception of Davis.

From the statistics of my website, the page views pretty much match the total of all campaigns reported clicks. If I had double or triple the page views over the clicks, that would be an indicator that folks were finding the content through normal search engine requests. In that case, I would drop all the ad campaigns.

 

 

 

I am fairly certain that not all the clicks and downloads are from my target audience. Some people may be curious and my competition, other insurance agents, have viewed and downloaded my information to see what I am up to.

Facebook ad edge

There are a couple reasons I believe the Facebook ad is out performing Google Adwords. First, there is a tremendous amount of competition for anything involving Medicare as we approach the annual enrollment period in October. It is virtually impossible to get a decent page rank in a Google search, even for a free event, when you are competing with companies willing to pay $10 – $20 per click and you are bidding $1.

The second issue is that the Facebook ad has a photo attached to it. Images get clicks. Finally, the Facebook ad is targeted to folks 64 older. I can’t use an age range in Google Adwords so there are a good chunk of impressions that are lost on people that have a less compelling interest in Medicare and educational seminars.

Certainly, my results on the first week are not indicative of other more professional and detailed campaigns through either service. In my case, Facebook is meeting my daily budget which means they are constantly displaying the ad to get clicks. As far is Google is concerned, I am flat out being out bid for position on the page. If Google Adwords can’t meet my daily budget, like they have in other campaigns I have run, it means they are having a tough time getting my ad ranked high enough to get clicks.

I will continue to monitor how both campaigns progress over the next week. I may tweak one or both, but I haven’t decided. If something really changes, I will update this blog post or create a new one.

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[schema type=”review” url=”www.insuremekevin.com” name=”Google Adwords versus Facebook ads” description=”First week comparison of similar Google Adwords and Facebook ad campaigns for a series of free seminars on Medicare. I was surprised the Facebook ad was outperforming the Google Adwords.” author=”Kevin Knauss” pubdate=”2012-08-25″ ]