I had to try a little bit of advertising for the Founder Conference on August 17, to see if I could spread the word beyond our usual partners such as Startup Weekend, VentureBeat, Startup Digest and so on. I had used both Google AdWords and Facebook Ads in the past but it was a good opportunity to revisit both.
I’ll give you the conclusion first: FaceBook rocks. Google was completely useless, managing to generate a grand total of one click in two weeks.
How can this be? For my purpose, FaceBook ads had two killer features:
- The allowed text is long enough to put the key benefits of the conference. With Google AdWords, I just couldn’t find a way to make a compelling case with its meager two lines.
- Targeting is laser-focused, when Google is keyword-based (as in, 20th century technology). On Facebook, you can put an ad that will only be displayed if someone is a current Grad student at Stanford, less than 30 years old and likes Techcrunch. On Google AdWords, you can specify that your ad runs for the US. After looking around a lot, I finally discovered that you can target a city or region by using one of the advanced and unintuitive features.
So here I am: with Google AdWords, no matter how much budget I specify, I can’t get any clicks. FaceBook brings me a steady stream of people who are nicely targeted and often register for the conference. Exactly what I wanted.
Privacy concerns? Sure. But very impressive.
