Have you been reluctant to learn how to market your business on Facebook? Whether you're an SEO who thinks search engine optimization and AdWords will carry the day, or a website owner who figures social media is not for professional matters, you're missing out on the way of the future.
Let me start by addressing the SEOs in this group, as Brian Carter did recently for Search Engine Journal. It is true that search can capture customers as they're getting ready to buy. But if you really want to capture them at the right moment, according to Carter, your keyword choices for AdWords can be pretty limited. There may be 45 million searches for “shoes” every month on Google, but only 450,000 searches for “buy shoes.” Your safest bet to capture customers, “buy shoes online,” sees only about 90,000 searches every month.
That still looks pretty good...until you consider how many competitors are bidding to show their ads in Google for precisely that phrase. And don't think your customers won't comparison shop with your rivals online! As Carter notes, “we're also competing on price with all the other businesses who are only advertising at the bottom of the funnel. We lower our profits and our conversion rate with all that competitive shopping.”
But there's even uglier news. Carter says that he's managed a lot of AdWords accounts for advertisers over the last six years, and he's noticed a painful pattern: only about five to ten percent of the keywords actually turn a profit. Once you've discovered what those profitable keywords are and gotten the most out of them, does it make sense to throw more money at AdWords? And if it doesn't, what do you do when you're ready to expand?
Here's another situation: say you've created a new product. Its functionality combines that of two older products. Which keywords do you use? Your instinctive answer may be “keywords for both of the older products,” but it's not that simple. Google dishes out quality scores on AdWords ads; these scores affect how much (or how little) you can bid to get your ad in certain positions. Ad position plays a major factor in its click-through rate.
Given all that, what kind of quality score do you think you would get if your ad is for a new device that both melts and blends widgets, when most people search for either a “widget melter” or a “widget blender”? You can bid for “widget blender” and “widget melter,” but your ad's quality score in AdWords might not be very high – because your product and ad are not perfectly relevant to either of those phrases. If you need to bid more for your AdWords campaign, you'll need to sell more of your product to turn a profit. You might find, as one of Carter's students did, that you can't launch an affordable AdWords campaign for your new product.
Website Marketing 
