SEM vs SMM

Hi Wrario,

What you heard about the value of Google Search clicks being worth more is generally true, but not always. It varies a great deal from one niche to another and from one website to another within the same niche.

I recommend that you perform a little research to see if you can discover where your ideal customers hang out, if they are found in both places then that is where you need to place your ads. With proper campaign management you should have no trouble making either, or both, profitable.

A word of advice: CPC is irrelevant except in how it compares to Value Per Click. A $10 CPC with a $20 VPC is worth way more to you than a $0.02 CPC with a VPC of 0.021 Don't try to compare CPC across channels, it is a meaningless metric for comparison, instead use Conv. value / cost to compare performance across channels and segments.

Generally speaking, it is not useful to look at the marketing data in aggregate. You need to break things down into segments and analyse the performance of each individual segment. When you do that In Search you will likely see that your best converting keywords are typically much higher CPC, than average performing keywords. The same goes for Display campaigns based on ad variants and targeting options.

In most niches, If you are doing things correctly, you should see somewhat lower CPC on Remarketing campaigns, and often they have conversion rates well above anything you would see in Display networks that is outside of remarketing campaigns.

A word of caution, the default settings for a Google Ads Display campaign will be far from optimal. Ideally you should exclude all mobile app categories, and instead use managed placements if you want to do any advertising on mobile apps. There used to be an easy way to do this, however they changed the options and you are now forced to manually uncheck each of the hundred or so categories one by one.

Also, make sure that your Ad Groups' targeting settings have the "Targeting expansion" feature turned off, else your remarketing campaign for the most part will not be targeting a Remarketng audience. That feature will be turned on by default and it will ruin your Remaketing campaign performance. You must set it to "off"to get a true Remarketing audience.

Here's an article that explains how to turn off Targeting Expansion:

The Google Ads Display Setting You Need to Disable | Clix Marketing PPC Blog

If you are doing ad campaigns on Facebook Ads you probably should be using video ads, and if so you'll want to test video ads on Youtube as well. Youtube video ads can work great for Remarketing campaigns.

HTH,

Don Burk