Facebook Ads are not for everyone. It takes time to master this network. Facebook is making changes to its platform all the time, so what might work today, may not work tomorrow. At the same time, it gives businesses a great opportunity to reach out to more people and get them engaged in ways not possible using Adwords. Here are just 5 reasons Facebook Ads are the future:

• Facebook is growing fast: Facebook can overtake Google in traffic in the very near future. Unless something catastrophic happens to Facebook, it should keep growing. That means more opportunities for you to reach out to more folks.
• The playing field is more level: Google Adwords is becoming quite unplayable for small businesses. Unless you are in an obscure niche, you will have to pay Google a ton of money just to show up in a decent position. Google Adwords is worth investing in, but it should not be your only channel.
• Advertising pages (in & out): Facebook not only lets you advertise your own domain but it also covers pages that you create inside Facebook. So you can use your ad money to get your Facebook page more fans and get people to interact more with your brand on that site.
• The power of friends: you’d be surprised what people do when they see their friends doing the same thing. Facebook Ads can be used to show people how their friends are interacting with a specific page. That’s very powerful.
• The nature of the network: Facebook is a very social network. People go there to interact with others, including businesses, individuals, and everything in between. That’s not exactly the case on Google. Google and Facebook are two different animals, which is why your Adwords tactics won’t work for Facebook.

There is no better time to get started with Facebook ads. Who knows what the future holds. But Facebook Ads is here to stay.

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.

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.

Google:

There have been a lot of talks about Google Caffeine. After testing it for a few hours, I am very impressed with the speed and overall quality of results. In some cases, there aren’t too many differences between the old and new Google. But in many cases, there are some major differences, which should be exciting for SEOs. But I was most interested about was the changes that Google is implementing with Google Adwords. Now these changes have been going into effect over the past few weeks, but it’s interesting that you don’t have to actually click on the “related products” link to see related ads.

What these changes mean is you can better target your audience and provide better information for it to click on the ads and purchase products from you. I am starting to like Facebook Ads a lot. It’s getting so easy to target a specific audience with Facebook, and the latest features can only help. I wish StumbleUpon would pick up a few tips from Facebook, but as it is Facebook is a league of its own.

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?