With retailers like Tammy & Benjamin in the UK reporting stellar results with using both Google ads and Facebook ads, where does the future of SEO leads generation really lie? Should SEO agencies be diverting more of their budgets to the social networking giant, or the search engine giant?
Admittedly, the Facebook ecosystem is just flooded with businesses focused on their lead generation strategies.
To add to the turmoil is the fact that Facebook has been getting a lot of flak as of late as their automated system often filters out ads ‘for no apparent reason’ and this is driving creative teams to the edge because they still want to build some sort of consistency when working with Facebook ads.
There is also the fact that CPM or impressions appear to be better suited for building fruitful, long-term engagement with customers. More qualified leads emerge from social engagement and slow-but-sure brand awareness campaigns.
This is especially true when you have a mostly jaded audience that is fast becoming ‘immune’ to paid placements on their favorite social network.
On the creative side, users are more likely to engage with Facebook ads that have great digital assets and have been optimized for different devices – especially mobile devices. Agencies that wish to survive the landscape of the social media giant will have to be nimble and extremely adaptable – or face the possibility of losses.
The lowdown on Google ads
Paid placements on the search engine giant have traditionally made businesses flourish if the advertisers had good knowledge of targeting. However, the rising problem with Google ads is no longer keyword research or targeting, but ad decomposition.
There is now the reality that businesses will not be aware of how their ads are actually constituted/remixed and/or customized for user preferences based on the individual data available to Google when potential customers type target keywords on the search engine.
Ad decomposition (as opposed to True View) requires businesses to reassess their digital assets, ad campaign strategy and advertising copy because these are likely to be mixed up and contextualized to align with the preferences of Google users.
Dynamic ad composition is ad decomposition are both here to stay, and the same can be said of the ad system on Facebook, which now splits the ad into four different phases before the identity of the ad is finally revealed.
This higher reliance on data and customization means digital marketers have to be more adaptive, or risk missing out on better results with their paid placements.
Google’s Discovery Ads for example (which is a relatively new product) takes keyword and copy from the user’s existing Google accounts like YouTube, Gmail and Google Discover. Then the advertiser will be asked to provide variations so the search engine can automatically recompose ads later on.
As with anything, brand consistency is key. It is going to be tough to build brand consistency with the reality of decomposition, but it’s here to stay, so we need to adapt ASAP.
