Promoting a Blog through Facebook Advertising and Google Adwords

I recently experimented with running a 7-day advertising campaign for this blog on Facebook as well as the Google network using Adwords.

This was my second attempt and the results are pretty encouraging.

I mainly targeted the 20-35 age group on Facebook who are based in India with some level of education and any marital status. In the case of Google Adwords, the ads were only shown to Internet users in India where were looking for technology related websites.

First, here are the individual performance reports for AdWords and Facebook advertising:

Google Adwords (Ads were shown on Google search and sites that use AdSense)

Facebook Advertising (with a daily advertising budget of $5)

If you compare these tables, Facebook can deliver tons of impressions for a small amount of money but the average cost of visitor acquisition (CPC) is higher for Facebook than Google Adwords.

Now Google Analytics tells me that a visitor from either of these advertising networks spent anywhere between 2-3 minutes on the page which is not bad at all. The bounce rate for visitors from Google were nearly the same as the site average but in the case of Facebook, the bounce rate was 25% less than the site average.

This was just an experiment with a very low advertising budget but looking at the results, these advertising options are definitely worth exploring as they deliver if you can target the right crowd.

If you have never tried advertising with Facebook, it even allows you to target employees of a particular company or students of a particular college. For example, you may set your ad to appear only on the terminals of Google employees or students of IITs and IIMs.