Advertising Social Media & Google

Advertising on social media platforms is growing even further, as they are the destination that many consumers spend a lot of time on a daily basis. For example, according to Business Insider research, adults in America spent on average of 12 hours on social media per month and 18-24 years olds spent 20 hours in July 2012. This creates a way for advertisers to more easily reach their target audience on a regular basis. Also many social media platforms, especially Facebook allow for incredibly targeted advertising including, age, gender location and even interests.

Also as the use of mobile applications has started to increase in the past few years, mobile advertising has become increasingly important. In 2012 almost $8.5 billion was spent on mobile advertising and analysts have predicted this is going to rise two and a half times to $20.3 billion in 2014. This shows how important adapting your website for mobile users is as it will make sure you are engaging your audience properly and effectively monetizing your site.

Although social media platforms allow advertisers to target specific demographics, the Google advertising network AdSense lets people target users that have a precise goal. This is because when people search in Google they are showing exactly what they want which allows advertisers to get extremely targeted traffic especially for buyer keywords. Although, as this produces such good quality, targeted traffic, the price of each click can be extremely high. Some niches such as insurance can be over $30 per click so can immediately turn many advertisers away as it needs to be carefully monitored to ensure the traffic is being properly monetized. However, this has helped many other advertising platforms grow as many advertisers are ready to spend money on good quality traffic, regardless of the source. For example many advertisers believe Bing produces a higher quality of traffic which may stem from the fact that many Google users know exactly where the advertising section is and know to avoid it.

However, Google have also recently entered the social media market to try and expand their user base. Known as Google+ or Google Plus, it has very quickly become a popular resource with millions of users. It was launched in 2011 and within 2 weeks of launching it reached 10 million users and by the end of 2012 it reached 400 million, which grew significantly faster than Facebook. This has not only allowed Google to develop a whole new advertising platform but also increase the relevance of its search engine so is becoming more powerful every day.