It is no secret that the starting point for any effective marketing campaign is to identify and reach your ideal target audience. Marketers have been doing this for decades. The explosion of online marketing has caused a renewed interest in how narrowly marketers can effectively define, and find, target audiences. Two of the online advertising giants, Facebook and Google, bet their collective futures on their ability to serve very, very specific target audiences to advertisers.
In a previous post, I compared the advertising click-through-rates (CTR) and audience sizes for Facebook vs. Google. I thought it would also be useful to compare the different ways these two are able to help advertisers identify their target audiences online. We compared the targeting options available based on seven commonly used online targeting approaches:
- Contextual Advertising: Use keywords to find websites to advertising on that are all related to the same topic.
- Geo-Targeting: Ability to place ads based on where the user is located
- Demographic Targeting: Targeting ads based on users actual or estimated age
- Mobile: Mobile search is growing at an astounding pace – especially related to local search. The ability to place ads that are compatible with mobile devices is becoming critical.
- Audience Interests: Ability to show your ad to audiences that have the same interests. For example, if you operate a sporting goods store, you might want to have one ad shown only to fishing enthusiasts, another only to hunters, and yet another only to campers. Advertising networks that are able to target by audience interests allow you to do this.
- Education, Workplace: Targeting ads to users with specific places of work, schools attended, degrees attained, etc.
- Remarketing: Ability to show ads to the same person when they visit another website related to the content of a previous site they visited that contained your ad.
Table 1 compares the targeting options that are available via Facebook vs. Google. Google is able to target audiences in each of the above ways, with the exception of targeting by education and workplace. Of particular interest to me was Google’s ability to re-market, as this is an excellent way of building brand recognition as well as generate leads. Google is the only option at this point for advertising on mobile devices.
Facebook’s targeting options is limited to demographics, location, education, and workplace. Although Facebook does not have as many targeting options, the sheer size of the audience it can deliver may be of value to some.
Table 1 – A comparison of Facebook vs. Google advertising targeting options.
Source: WordStream Infographic (http://www.wordstream.com/articles/facebook-vs-google-display-network)
As you can see, there are many options when deciding how to market your business online, and there are many factors that combine to make the difference between success and failure. I recommend that you consult a qualified online marketing firm before making these decisions.