Thursday, June 11, 2015

Facebook Ads and Google Adwords Cost Compared to Print Advertising

Our media company publishes 6 weekly local shopper publications reaching over 83,000 homes. We publish a monthly agricultural magazine which  focuses heavily on the marketing of new and used equipment and land auctions. We work with thousands of small business each year; and along with our own experience using Facebook and Google have formed the following thoughts.


It has been well documented that Google’s SERP is filled with paid advertisements. Google Adwords work great for businesses selling products online, but offline businesses don’t receive the same value in most cases. Service businesses might benefit, but the cost is still high compared to advertising in a publication like ours. We evaluated four different ad campaigns. The cost per click (CPC) ranged from $.74 for our horizontal classified ad website to over $1.47 per click when advertising an available manufacturing building. Per thousand, the $.74 is 74 times greater than a color quarter page ad in our publications, which cost $.01 to reach over 83,000 homes. The $.01 doesn’t represent a click, but two things should be considered. A click on a Google Adword does not guarantee a sale, and an ad, in our publications, has to only work 1 out of every 74 times to equal the results of Adwords; and if the ratio is better than 1 out of 74, the publication delivers a greater return for the advertiser.


Facebook is racing Google to give small businesses way too many advertising metrics to cloudy the water. Facebook is lost when it comes to how they want local businesses to measure their ROI derived from the amount of money the business spends on Facebook advertising. Our Ads Reporting screen in Facebook has 14 columns with different metrics. Facebook gives advertisers this much information not because all the figures look good, but to hopefully return one number the small business sees beneficial. Small businesses mostly care about direct results, which means they want clicks on Facebook. Facebook offers campaigns based on impressions (CPM), but most small businesses do not have the budget to focus on image advertising.


We compared CPC for Facebook to Google and found the following: Facebook CPC were $.17, which is a lot lower than Google Adwords, but 17 times higher than a quarter page ad in our weekly publications. Page Likes were vogue when Facebook was new, but now Facebook only shows your posts organically to a small percentage of people that Like your page. I intentionally use the words “small percentage” because it continues to drop. One post we used several times dropped from 501 organic impressions on March 28th to 47 on June 7th. The content of the post did not change between those two dates.


You can’t blame Facebook for transitioning from a free marketing platform to a model that requires businesses to pay. They have shareholders to please and must drive their profits higher every quarter. They also must cut down the fire hose of information being fed into users’ feeds. As written earlier, Facebook allows business pages to create campaigns based on impressions. Our test using multiple variations of ads based on impressions returned results of $17.35 per thousand for unique people reached on Facebook. We would compare Facebook’s unique people reached to unique homes reached for our publications. Our cost of $13.36 per thousand homes reached is 23% lower than Facebook’s cost per thousand for unique people reached.

Facebook and Google both provide advertisers great tools for targeting ads to very specific groups of people. However, the cost per thousand for clicks and impressions in our test were exceedingly higher than advertising in our print publications. Advertisers should also consider, when comparing costs, the figures used above don’t account for the cost to manage and design campaigns for Google and Facebook, whereas, our cost includes design and printing. You can create your own ads, but you will then have to learn how their programs work, which is a cost and can be complicated. We would like to hear feedback that is not in line with our findings.

1 comment:

  1. This was a very informative read, Will! I never thought about the differences between google and Facebook when it came to online business versus offline business marketing. I have a website, but my business is mainly offline, so I think I'll be looking more into Facebook ads soon. I do miss the days when Facebook reach was larger, but if ads get the job done, so be it!

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