Google will remain a big player in the paid advertising space for years to come. But if you are a small business owner, investing all your money on Google ads may not be a wise decision. After all, there are plenty of companies that have lots of money to burn and don’t mind making life difficult for other players in their space. Facebook Ads is not as popular as Google Adwords and is quite a different animal. Nevertheless, Facebook is taking in a ton of traffic and has the tools for small businesses and startups to reach out to more people and get them to interact with their ads and brands.

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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.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, there have been a lot going on in the search industry. First, we have Facebook pickup Friendfeed, and then change its advertising system to allow you to target others by their birthday or their connection to your pages. And then we have Google showcasing Google Caffeine. You can’t forget about Google Adwords latest changes to include related ads in the sponsored section. So let’s see what has changed in detail:

Facebook:

As you can see, Facebook has added a few new fields to its ad form, making it so easy to target customers by their birth date. So you can essentially give out discount coupons for their birthday. Another interesting Facebook Ads feature is two brand new fields that help you target people who are and are not interacting with your fan and product pages. For those who are not part of your fan club, you can use Facebook Ads to target them and give them some incentive to join your club. And for those who are a part of your fan page community, you can put up ads to make them interact more with your pages. (more…)

When you talk to people about PPC, everybody assumes that the only networks that matter are Adwords, YSM, and MSN Adcenter. These networks can drive you a whole lot of traffic, and the traffic that you get are more targeted here than some of the 2nd tier networks out there. But there is more to life than just Google Adwords. They are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to a website, and as long as you are in the PPC game, you need to test these methods out to find out which one works the best for you and your business.

Here are some top alternatives to top search advertising networks:

Facebook Ads: a great way to reach out to Facebook community and advertise your business in front of them. You can get a whole lot of Facebook users to come and visit your website, but be ready to walk them through what you have to offer to retain these users and get their business.

StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a great way to get your feed wet with social media advertising and drive a whole lot of cheap traffic to your website. Each impression costs you only 5 cents, but if your visitors favorite your site, you are going to get a whole lot of free traffic from the StumbleUpon community.

ClickRiver: ClickRiver is an advertising network that allows you to get your product/services in front of Amazon customers. Amazon is one of the top web properties on the web, and you can’t afford not to test ClickRiver to see how it works for your business.

LinkedIn:LinkedIn Direct ads are another great way to get your product or website in front of more people. LinkedIn is another top social networking website that is worth testing if you are looking for more traffic.

YouTube Ads: advertising on YouTube is a no brainer these days. You’ve got to be ready to test things out to find out whether YouTube is the right market for you to be involved in. You are not going to be short of traffic, so you may as well try.

There are many other places that you can put your ads on to drive traffic to your website. Your goal should be to test all these different networks to find the ones that give you the best results. There is no such thing as too much traffic. The above networks can drive a whole lot of traffic to your website if you play your cards right. You just have to track and test!

You have probably heard the concept of red oceans before. In case, you haven’t heard of it, a red ocean is a market that is highly competitive and has a set of defined boundaries. Basically, the competitors try to outdo each other by grabbing more market-share in these defined areas. I believe, the Adwords game has become a red ocean strategy, and that is probably why folks are using other sources such as Facebook social ads to avoid paying a fortune for traffic.

Facebook social ads, Stumbleupon, and even LinkedIn ads are all great areas to explore. But folks who are going to these markets thinking that they are going to get a high conversion rate are highly mistaken. I am all for adopting a blue ocean strategy, but throwing money at social media hoping to get Adwords results is not a good strategy. The truth is, the audience is very different between these channels, and as such the conversion rate will be different as well.

I am not claiming that spending money in the social media is a total waste of time. You can get nice traffic from Facebook and Stumbleupon, but converting that traffic will be difficult. And you can say the same thing about Digg traffic. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t hurt to spend some money in the social media, but don’t go around throwing your Adwords budget at Facebook as that would only lead to heartbreak.

Google Adwords is the king of search advertising. A whole lot of folks use Google’s pay per click system to reach out to prospects. But with the state of economy getting worse and small businesses feeling the pain of their cash strapped customers, many have to find other ways to spread the word around about their services without breaking the bank. While you should approach some of these services with care, you should definitely give them a try to figure out if they work for your business.

Google Adwords Alternatives:

1. Yahoo & MSN: this is really a gimme here. A lot of folks start with Google Adwords and then graduate to other services such as Yahoo. Others, start will all there engines. I personally like the first approach, but I have done it both ways. Sometimes, it’s possible to get much lower bids on these alternative networks, but they are getting competitive as well.

2. Facebook Social Ads: I have been critical of Facebook social ads in the past, but you can’t question the innovative technology behind the social ads. For instance, you can target 55 years old folks who are small business owners and live in the city of San Diego. That’s extremely valuable if you have data on your audience. You can also create a Facebook page and advertise that instead of your own landing page. Definitely worth testing.

3. StumbleUpon: Stumbleupon ads can drive lots of traffic to your site. Not only you get what you pay for, but if folks give your site thumbs up, you are going to get free traffic. I remember spending $100 for a week on StumbleUpon. I am still getting free traffic from StumbleUpon without me having to actually do anything.

4. LinkedIn Ads: Linkedin DirectAds are made for small businesses who want to spend money on LinkedIn to reach out to business professionals. Folks on LinkedIn do not play around. My conversion rates are higher on LinkedIn than Facebook, but I suppose it all comes down to your product. DirectAds is still primitive in comparison to Google, and you will have to pay on a CPM basis. But nevertheless, you get nice exposure among some serious folks on LinkedIn.

5. ClickRiver: Clickriver can be a goldmine or just a waste of time depending on your niche. I have used Clickriver successfully on my technology sites, but I have heard folks who haven’t had that much success in some other niches. Being able to show your ads below Amazon products is too huge of an opportunity for me to pass by. It’s definitely worth the try.

There are thousands of other networks and methods that you can use to buy traffic to your site (see here). But you shouldn’t spend all your fortune on these outside-the-box ideas. You should always test, test, and test some more. When you hit the jackpot, you know it.

Did I miss anything?

Innovation is the only way to survive in a hyper-competitive market. If you can’t stay relevant in your area of expertise, you may as well choose a different career. This concept applies to us pay per click marketers as well. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and all other search networks are changing all the time, and old methods won’t work in these new days. You are going to have to constantly innovate, optimize, and find other ways to grow.

But folks often think of innovation as recreating the wheel or coming up with something out of this world. The fact is, you don’t have to actually create a new box for yourself to continue your growth. There is such a thing as gradual, evolutionary innovation. In other words, you don’t necessarily have to add new search networks to grow your PPC business. It is possible to improve the existing campaigns and find innovative ways to increase your CTR, quality score, and reduce your bids.

It’s true that folks keep jumping on these new networks (e.g. FaceBook, LinkedIn), and that is just fine, but that is not innovation. That’s early adoption. Folks who jump from one network to another are often left frustrated by their lack of success and keep jumping in hope of better results. But innovating is a few steps above adoption, so unless you take these extra few steps you are going to be an adopter and not an innovator.

Which one are you? Are you an adopter or an innovator?