Compairing online ad campaigns

I recently read on a local blog that ads that could not be tracked were a waste of money. So I decided that from now on we would only advertize on media that could be verified and analyzed.

In the internet, we immediately thought of the following two that had sparked our curiosity before:

1. Google adwords
2. Facebook ads

The thought process for choosing these two for our online ads was that the wizards for creating them were super easy and yes… fun!

Well actually, Facebook’s was real fun; Google’s was systematic and organized but not as fun as i had to do a lot of work to find proper keywords.

Facebook Ads Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. You can choose the exact demographic you want to target in a super friendly user interface. It even tells you the maximum number of people in the targeted group.
2. Limit your daily budget whenever you please.
3. Stop campaigns at any time.
4. Ads are prominently placed in the site (My Opinion).
5. You bid for how much you are willing to pay on a daily basis.
6. Billing is timely.
   

Cons:

1. You are only really targeting people from Facebook.
2. The bidding system is creative but sometimes Facebook just wouldn’t place my ads, even if I bid 50 cents per click.
3. You can’t edit ads! This was very frustrating as I had to go through all the creation and ‘waiting for approval’ process just to change a typo.
4. The analytics area is ok, but I hoped for more. Graphs specifically are buggy as they approach the current date.

Google AdWords Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. Your ads will show in all corners of the internet. Their propagation is truly ubiquitous you see adSense ads throughout the internet and your Granny’s site.
2. Create a monthly budget. This is so-so but still a pro; I would rather be able to change daily budgets on the run.
3. Stop campaigns at any time.
4. You can edit ads. As dumb as this sounds it is really nice to have.
5. You can easily link this to your Google Analytics account. Analytics can’t get better than that, you’ll have conversion rates, link sources etc.

Cons:

1. Google ads are the poster boy for ignored dead space of the internet.
2. There is a world behind AdWords that often gets shady and smelly the reason is keywords, as you are associating your ad with search results and web page content some people try to outsmart Google with keyword schemes and it is really very confusing as I for one can’t interpret Google’s contradictory stand point on this. I should make another blog post about this subject.
3. When will they bill me? I remember reading it when I created  the ad, but where’s the bill? This was a big no no as I forgot about the ads. That meant running the ad for a couple of months more that the specific week I chose for making this blog post.

If I have to choose a winner it would be facebook and you can find my reasons in the following chart:

Results of ad campaigns.

Furthermore, as I chose a targeted demographic I’m certain those clicks were more relevant than Google’s, in fact conversion rates from facebook were higher too. However I had to measure all effectiveness with the  Google Analytics tool.

So these are the pros and cons I found, please tell me what you think and alternatives to online advertising.