To a certainly extent the data below is merely trivia. Facebook will soon surpass Google as the most popular site on the web from a unique visitors perspective. Compete.com provides us with a look into how the battle for the most unique visitors is shaping up:
NOTE: July and August data has been extrapolated and are our own projections. We used Facebook’s three month rolling average growth rate of 8% per month, and Google’s 1% per month for our analysis. You can download the data set here.
At the current projected growth rates, Facebook will have more unique visitors than Google by the end of August. It’s interesting to see data like this and then map it back to what we’re seeing in our own client work. In sum, the past few paid search campaigns we’ve run haven’t actually been in Google Adwords as one might expect. They’ve been Facebook Social Ads campaigns.
We’re finding that demand for the hyper-targeted ads that only Facebook can provide are increasingly of interest to brand marketers. We’ve been honing our campaigns to target users by zeroing in on their companies, geographies, interests and Page fan status. For example, we can serve ads ONLY to users who are 25-30 years old who live in New York City and work for Goldman Sachs. There are 880 people that fit that bill who are users of Facebook.
We’ve seen our average click through rate at 3x to 4x what ‘typical’ keyword targeting might yeild, and at an effect CPM of much less than Google has delivered in the past. While we might be benefiting from being early adopters – the cost per click in Facebook will certainly go up as more marketers use the their platform – it’s amazing to see Google finally challenged by a rival ad product.
Bing aside – Facebook Social Ads should be Google’s greatest fear.
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