Unlike Facebook advertising, the key to Google Adwords is keywords. But like Facebook, it is important to know your target and how to draw them in. When using Google AdWords, an advertiser is allowed to select keywords that will enable their ad to pop up when the keyword(s) are searched. In this way, Google AdWords is different because an advertiser is targeting their audience based upon what they are searching for, and since the ads are Pay Per Click (PPC), it is important to generate narrow keywords that are specific to help avoid unwanted clicks.

Fortunately, Google has a keyword generator on their site so, before you even get started, you can generate ideas from the content on your web site or a competitor’s web site. You can also check out your estimated CPC (Cost Per Click) so you know how much you are getting into before you think about committing.

Google AdWords has also introduced bid ideas to aid in the reduction of costs and the increase of website traffic. Google tries to identify which of your keywords seem to be good candidates for bid changes and targets them based upon whether or not you would like to decrease costs or increase traffic. Check out their help blog about bid ideas for more information.

In addition to building a larger Web presence, Google has announced the addition of phone extensions into AdWords. By including phone extensions, users can call the business directly from their smart phones when viewing the ad on their mobile device. This feature appears as the last line of text of the advertisement and only costs the same as a PPC.

When examining these two popular digital advertising channels , it’s clear to see that advertising on Facebook and Google AdWords works best when under a more specific umbrella. There are tons of resources on how to best work with keywords so that an ad will make the most impression with the lowest overall cost, as well as what not to do when generating keywords and creating an ad. The important thing to remember is to keep it specific and not overdo the amount of keywords attached to an ad.

Of course, we are more than happy to help.

A comScore survey looked exclusively at the impact of ad impressions on visitation to the advertiser’s site and found that though there was a 65.0% lift after one week of ad circulation, lifts in site visitation varies between categories. Results show that the more narrowly tailored an advertisement is, the better the lift in site visitation.

This was specifically seen in automotive advertising that referred users to highly specific automotive Web sites. On the other hand, apparel and retail advertisers’ site visitation dropped the least over the four week period while CPG & restaurants continued to drop sharply after the first week.

The best thing to remember when approaching Facebook for advertising is that it is somewhat different than utilizing other advertising tools. In an interview with Tim Kendall, Facebook’s Director of Monetization and performance advertising head, on insidefacebook .com, he reminded advertisers that Facebook is a people targeting system and not a keyword targeting system. This makes it even more important for a company to really know their audience and how to target them.

Luckily, using Facebook for advertising to target audiences has become easier with the ability to filter ad placement based on specific qualifications like location, age, sex, marital status, connections, friends of connections and more. There is even a keyword section to allow ad placers the opportunity to target based on keywords in a user’s profile. It is because of a user’s willingness to share niche interests on their profile that allow categories like entertainment to work well with Facebook advertising. The ability to set-up a page and have fans enables an advertiser the opportunity to branch to friends of friends and beyond. This works well for Facebook’s ability to  targeting users based on what pages they are already affiliated with.

As far as whether or not Facebook advertising is effective, the answer to that lies in how well an ad is tailored to fit an audience. Another study by comScore (found on InspireMedia.com) showed that 28% of respondents were likely to notice advertising on social media sites, this placed user-generated content sites fifth behind television, print, news and corporate Web sites. However, Kendall believes that there is a 100% improvement on a click through rate basis when an impression is a Social ad (or event ads). “People come to Facebook to learn about their friends, so if you can make the advertising about their friends, it’s more effective.”

A great place to go for more information on what rules to follow when setting up a Facebook ad is the 10 rules for advertising on Facebook article by Nick O’Neill. This article gives great advice for how to keep the target audience in mind as well as establishing and keeping advertising goals.