For months people have been talking about the potential of Facebook Ads, while complaining about the simple and not-so-organized interface of Facebook Ads that made managing ads more difficult. Facebook has listened and has given a make over to Facebook Ads. Now you can not only build your campaigns in a more effective fashion, you won’t have to jump through the hoops to track your campaigns either.

The new Ad manager displays your campaigns on the left side of your screen, allowing you to check on each campaign, run reports, and go through your billing information all in one place. The new service comes with in-line ad editing. So you can edit your campaigns easily on the main page without having to open up each campaign’s page.

The search functionality is improved as well. You can just enter the first few letters of the campaign you have in mind, and the search box will automatically show you all campaigns that match your input.

All in all, Facebook Ads is a great way to test new offers and get instant feedback from the community. I wouldn’t recommend it for every PPC project, but in some cases, Facebook Ads can perform very well. You should always test to figure out how Facebook Ads perform for you, and it all got easier with the latest Ad Manager redesign.

If you are a blogger or own a content portal, you have probably had to run ads on your website to monetize it and keep your business going. Many webmasters rely on Google Adsense to get their business going, and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as you know how to play your cards right and use your long-tail keywords to your advantage, there is a decent amount of money that can be earned from Google Adsense. Unfortunately, not all portal owners have the flexibility to play around with their content and change things around. If that is you, you’ve got a decision to make. You can either focus on third-party services such as Google to help you with your business, or you can use an ad-server system to serve your own ads.

Large content networks often partner up with Google and other display media services to sell their advertising space and generate revenue. Smaller websites do not necessarily have that option. Google Adsense does provide them with an easy way to monetize their website, and the fact that Google is working to take its Ad Exchange program to the next level is certainly good news for webmasters. (more…)

Google Adwords may be the king among search engine advertising networks. It not only allows you to create search engine ads, it also helps you reach out to the massive community of Adsense publishers. Google Adwords is a great place to start to push your business and market products online. But like any portfolio,  you will have to diversify to hedge your risks and maximize your bottom line. While testing will be too costly in the stock market, when it comes to advertising, you always have the chance to turn off your test campaigns and reflect on what results you have gotten.

Focusing on Google Adwords only would be a big mistake. While the service is capable of driving you traffic, you may be leaving money on the table if you are not taking advantage of 3rd party advertising networks such as Chitika and ClickRiver. I have talked about how ClickRiver can help you get your product in front of millions of Amazon customers in the past. Chitika is another popular advertising network that empowers many bloggers and publishers around the web by helping them make money online from their SEO content. And if they can make money from their SEO content, that means your product can be in those ads, in front of a highly targeted set of visitors.

Think about it. Let’s say you have an ebook reader or an accessory for Amazon Kindle. Wouldn’t you be more likely to gain clicks and leads when people are actually getting to your ad by searching for a highly relevant term? That’s what Chitika for Advertisers helps you do.

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Many small businesses take advantage of Google Adwords to bring traffic to their websites. You set up a keyword list, create your campaign and ad groups, get your targeting done, and go live. That’s all fine an dandy, but Google wants small businesses to have a better chance of reaching out to their prospects (for money of course). Google is test driving Local Listing Ads in California in order to launch the service nationwide in the near future. The service allows you to pay a fixed fee to show up on Google business listings (maps) above the SERPs.

So here is how Google Local Listing Ads work. You will have to add your business to Google’s Local Business Center. The process is painful and is free. You will have to verify your business before being able to move forward, but that’s nothing to sweat on.

Once you are listed on Google, you can take advantage of Google Local Listing Ads to not only reach out to new prospects in you area (through Google and Google Maps), but also have Google track your calls and user interactions with your ads. So how’s Google Local Listing different from “local ads” on Google Adwords? Local Listing Ads are much cheaper and don’t require small businesses to deal with keywords, campaigns, and so on. You can think of it as Paid Inclusion, except these are ads and won’t show up in the search results but rather above them as ads.

Should you try Google Local Listing Ads? It’s not currently available in a lot of areas, so you may not have the choice. But for those who do, Local Listing Ads is yet another simple, affordable way to get your business in front of your local customers. How affordable? That depends on how you define “affordable” for your business as well as your location and the category you want your business listed in. It never hurts to test it out.