Marketing Debate

Have we finally moved past the dreaded phone call waiting line? I can hear you cheering from the other side of the screen because so are we. 

Chat support is becoming more common as we advance into a more technologically advanced world. When you visit a website with a burning question, that little pop-up box is the perfect alert to greet you. Cue the sighs of relief! 

Throughout this post, we will review two of the most popular customer service strategies for 2021: Live Chat Vs. Chatbots. What is the difference between Live Chat and Chatbots, you ask? We’ll highlight everything you need to know as a small to medium-sized business, including:

 

Live Chat What is Live Chat?

Live chat is an online communication app. It allows you to interact with your customers on your website in real-time through messaging compared to email or over the phone. This option is designed to be quick and easy and answers the users within seconds. In other words, Live chat is a real person, managed by service agents within a company.

Live chats offer efficient solutions to customer issues with limited frustrations. Most B2B companies have utilised this app on their websites and are converting because of it.

Do customers like Live Chat?

Consumers like Live Chat because they are greeted with instant responses. Complex queries are interpreted easily with Live chat and can process customers without the difficulty of technical terminologies. It can be significant for customers who do not fully understand your service or product yet. 

Live chats also allow for agents to share their screens to further assist with customer queries. This option is not available to Chatbots and can be superior if your product or service requires detailed assistance for your customers. 

Is Live Chat important?

Customers tend to prefer talking to an actual person when they have genuine questions.

Live chat widgets allow for more human connection. Humans can understand, empathize and overall communicate better with other humans. Your customers can get a sense of your brand and the agent's personality. It can help to quickly build rapport and establish an authentic relationship. 

You can observe your customer through their online journey through their tone and sentiment. It can give you valuable insights to optimise for further development.

Responding quickly to a potential customer or a lead will leave them with a better impression of your business. It will be beneficial when it comes to converting. 

Why use a Live Chat? Live chats are a great option to create trustworthy relationships with customers and solve in-depth queries. But, as you scale up your business, handling various chats at once may not be feasible. This is where Chatbots may come into play. 

 

ChatBots  What is a Chatbot?

A Chatbot is a programmable addition to your website that imitates human conversation through text to answer questions and queries. The Chatbot works automatically without the need for humans. When programmed correctly, Chatbots have the potential to move customers down the sales funnel more quickly.

Are Chatbots really effective?

Imagine having to reply to hundreds of customers all at once, often with the same question. If you are a small or even medium-sized business, the chances are you will not have many people available to answer questions all day. It may mean customers are still waiting for a response at the end of the day, who will later switch to your competitors. 

Do customers prefer Chatbots?

Chatbots bridge human limitations by responding instantly with relevant information and guidance. It can save you money, time, and energy in the long run. These Chatbots are designed to answer questions and continue the conversation to drive customer engagement. 

Chatbots generally don't need any human intervention, which is optimal for businesses with a limited budget or employees.

Chatbots can bring value to customers by becoming a self-service source of information. This strategy allows your customers to find the information they need at any given moment. This instantaneous interaction will leave your customers feeling satisfied. That means no more listening to telephone music as you wait in line for your call to go through. We have all been there, and we all know it is not a great experience.

When to use Chatbots?

Businesses usually implement Chatbots as their primary source of information for their customers. They appear on landing pages to introduce the customer to your page and are predominantly on the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page. 

If the Chatbot is unable to answer the questions, it gathers enough information regarding the topic summary, customer details and demographic, product data regarding the specific product or service.

The Chatbot then forwards this customer to a specific agent who can assist with the customer's query. This approach will save your business time and energy and will result in a simple customer service workflow. 

It sounds like having one less thing to worry about.

Who needs a Chatbot?

There are several reasons why your business should consider using a Chatbot, which includes: 24/7 customer support, scale-up your business, help your customers quicker, targeting millennials, better user interaction, more affordable.

Chatbots, however, are programmed and cannot always give answers beyond what they’re programmed to say. Although, with more and more advancements in technology, we know that it’s only a matter of time before this problem is no longer occurring. 

The best thing you can do for a customer is to answer their questions. A Chatbot has a quicker response rate to humans. However, these machines still have their limitations. 

How to know when to use Chatbots and when to use Live Chats?

Trustworthiness and cost-efficiency are two of the main priorities for most small to medium businesses. When it comes to deciding whether to install Chatbots or rather utilise Live Chat on your website, you must understand your customer, your business goals, and what is feasible.

We've learned this in many of our debates where a combination of both is the best solution. 

You can use Chatbots to automate otherwise manual processes that a Live Chat agent would have to say "Tell us your name and number." Do you know what I mean? And then save the human-based interaction for things that couldn't be programmed in the Chatbot or through machine learning and AI for the time being that is. Would you agree, Joe?

Transcript

James Banks:
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. I'm your host, James Banks.

Joseph Chesterton:
And I'm your host, Joseph Chesterton.

James Banks:
And today, we have a niche debate. Live Chat versus Chatbots, which one is better for business? So for this debate, I'll be backing the Chatbots, go the robots! How about you, Joe?

Joseph Chesterton:
Of course, I'm on the Live Chat side of the ring.

James Banks:
Alrighty. Well, without further ado, let's get started. So Joe, why would you say... Or actually, I think for this one, we're going to need a definition.

Joseph Chesterton:
Oh, I was about to say, do we need a definition?

James Banks:
We need a definition of terms. So, I'll kick this one off. So a Chatbot, you've been on a website where a little bubble pops up in the corner. It asks you, "Hey, how can I help you today?" Or, "Can I help you with ‘blah’?" And it gives you some options, or prompts you to start typing. 

You start typing, and then before you know it, it's either answered your question or then it palms you off to a Live Chat operator. Which is a good segue way to explain what we mean by Live Chat, Joe?

Joseph Chesterton:
So Live Chat is, you type your message into the little Chatbox, and then someone on the other end is sitting there, and they reply back. So it's Live chatting.

James Banks:
Yeah, of course. And it's obvious why Chatbots is better because it's automated. You're not relying on a human being, and you have to pay by the hour to do this correctly. Or would you say otherwise?

Joseph Chesterton:
How many times have you gone to a website you've typed in, whatever it is. And then it comes back with a response that was not what you asked in the first place?

James Banks:
Is it the Chatbots' fault, or did the person programming the Chatbot do a poor job?

Joseph Chesterton:
Isn't the Chatbot capable of being programmed the right way in the first place?

James Banks:
Potentially. I mean, that's arguable. But a lot of it goes down to people thinking Chatbots are genius, whizzbang AIs. They're not. They require someone to say, "Okay, when someone says something, say this back." And of course, you can program it for every single thing that some person could have to say, that's not possible yet. It will be with machine learning and AI advancements. 

But I think a lot boils down to whoever designed the experience of the Chatbot, which has done a poor job. It can cause the opposite of what you would have a Chatbot in the business to do. That is to improve customer experience, and it does the exact opposite. It takes away from the customer experience. 

But I don't see how Live Chat is exactly the solution to that. Joe, it could go the same way you get a poorly trained Live Chat operator and produce a negative customer experience rather than a positive one.

Joseph Chesterton:
Have you ever been to a bank and used one of the bank Live Chats?

James Banks:
Yes, it's terrible.

Joseph Chesterton:
It's a Chatbot. It's not a live person. You can't replicate the customer service of someone answering the questions straight up. I can't remember what I was trying to do on the bank's website, but the response was, "Do you want to sign up for a credit card?" And it was completely different from what I was doing.

James Banks:
Because the Chatbot was poorly programmed. It shouldn't have asked you that.

Joseph Chesterton:
Maybe it was perfectly programmed. That's the point of the bank.

James Banks:
Yeah. The bank, all they care about is bottom lines. They don't care about customer experience.

Joseph Chesterton:
Yeah, but they should. That's the whole point.

James Banks:
Exactly. But whose problem is that? Is it the platform, the Chatbots, or how the banks are running their business? Do you see we're comparing apples to oranges here?

Joseph Chesterton:
Well, there's a reason why the big four banks are in the top five biggest businesses in Australia.

James Banks:
And most top five hated organisations in the country. But let's not get too sidetracked from what we're debating here. All right. I'm going to throw some spanners in the works. Chatbots can be extremely useful if you understand your audience, have a good track record, and data on every single question that they have either put through from help desk, email support, or so on and so forth.

You analyse and make human-driven decisions based on how you can create and build workflows that could potentially be automating a manual activity. That means saving money and arguably producing a better customer experience because the answers are immediate. The person doesn't have to wait to connect with a chat agent. They get their answers immediately.

Joseph Chesterton:
I was going to say that if you didn't mention it. Which I knew you would but, that is probably the main factor, time. So people want to have the answers straight away. If you look at all the good Live Chats, either services or businesses using it properly, they're almost instant anyway.

James Banks:
Yeah.

Joseph Chesterton:
So you could say that if you do it right, then that's a novel point.

James Banks:
So we've talked a lot about chat and Chatbots for customer support. What about using them for lead generation? Like why would you say Live Chat is better than using a Chatbot for lead generation purposes?

Joseph Chesterton:
Would you say that it is a suitable lead generation? 

James Banks:
Well, we've tested this at Web3. We've tested Chatbots on landing pages that drive highly relevant commercial traffic versus ones that don't. Usually, we see at least a 30% increase in customer engagement. So when I say customer engagement, you also take that further to customer conversion. 

That is someone giving us their name, email, and or phone number. We would consider that a captured lead. Having Live Chats on the website increases our ability to capture those details by approximately 30% on average. That's through the testing that we've done in the past.

Joseph Chesterton:
So you're saying that Live Chat wins?

James Banks:
No. Not necessarily because you've got to have someone on Live Chat, trained that knows how to handle a sales lead. And then if you want people coming into your site and hitting it 24/7, you want to resource that. It gets very costly to do. 

You look at the classic multi-step form funnel, that is, we have a choice question. A classic example we use is that a free 120 point SEO audit will point out all of the problems with your website and send it back to you in a report for free in under a day. So the first step in that funnel would be for them to give us your website. 

Then once we have their website, we can then usually forward them through to provide their name, email, or whatever it is, a little bit more about their business. So that would be a traditional form-based process. 

You can build it into a Chatbot. It creates a more native experience, and there's less resistance there because it doesn't feel like they're being pushed down a marketing funnel, even though they are. So that's where a Chatbot can be very effective from lead generation.  

Joseph Chesterton:
And I guess it goes back to your original point of, "As long as it's been programmed, right?"

James Banks:
One hundred percent. I think this is the biggest problem. Even on both sides and particularly with Chatbots, everyone has experienced bad Chatbots. It's not that the idea or the concept of a Chatbot is bad, or it shouldn't be on a website. It's whoever has built the Chatbot and the data that they fed into it, and the pathways and everything in between. They haven't done a good job on the customer's needs, wants, pains and desires, and then being able to provide them efficiently with good quality solutions. 

A lot of that is customer experience design and customer journey mapping. We've done this before and do this a lot at Web3. And it's such a critical cornerstone component to make any automated system successful. Whether it be a Chatbot or a multiform process, or even a website customer journey, per se.

Joseph Chesterton:
What I would say works well is both. So one of our service providers, they have a bot. Initially, you type in the message. If it isn't right, then some other options potentially are. If it isn't, then it says something like, "Speak to support." You type that in and it goes directly to support.

James Banks:
Yeah, it checks you are a paying customer through the Chatbot. Once it figures out you're a paying customer, it puts you in front of a person. So the person isn't wasting their time with people that aren't actual real paying customers. That's a great example. And I think you're right. We've learned this in many of our debates where a combination of both is the best solution. 

You can use Chatbots to automate otherwise manual processes that someone in Live Chat would have to say "Tell us your name and number." Do you know what I mean? And then save the human-based interaction for things that couldn't be programmed in the Chatbot or through machine learning and AI for the time being that is. Would you agree, Joe?

Joseph Chesterton:
Yeah. For example, they have program responses. So it fits like 60% or even more on a growing basis based on what they're getting, like the data that they're getting from it.

James Banks:
Yeah.

Joseph Chesterton:
So, it's constantly improving. And then if they can't, obviously it just falls back to Live Chat, but it means that they then have to hire less-

James Banks:
Absolutely, at the end of the day, what business problem you're solving, you're making a manual process more efficient, more cost-effective, and creating more scalability in your business. 

So if you're interested in implementing Live Chat and Chatbots on your website, and you've got no idea how to approach it. Feel free to drop us a line at web3.com.au. We've done this for many businesses before, and we'd love to help you out. 

Joseph Chesterton:
Talk to us in our Live Chat.

James Banks:
Is that still enabled, Joe? 

Joseph Chesterton:
It's there.

James Banks:
Awesome. Well, that's a wrap for another episode of the Web3 Marketing and Debate Show. Tune in next time, we'll be talking to you all real soon. Have a nice day.

Discover more at: https://www.web3.com.au/ https://web3.com.au/live-chat-vs-chatbots/

Are you currently tossing up between boosting your already made content on social media or creating advertisements for Facebook?

In this article, we review two popular social media marketing strategies: Facebook Ads and Boosted Posts.

We dive deep into the benefits and disadvantages of both strategies to uncover the good, the bad, and most importantly, the unnecessary. 

Throughout this page, we outline the best options and strategies for Facebook marketing. If you want to skip to the action, listen to our marketing debate now.

Product overview

Before we dive in, here is our simple breakdown of the significant aspects of each option. important 

As with most startup businesses, we started with a shoestring budget. Understanding the tricks of the trade and when to spend, spare and save was integral to our success. For over eight years, we’ve learned what works best and what isn’t necessary. 

Boosted Posts

Have you come across that button on your social media posts saying: Boost? We see many businesses misusing this option of their profiles, costing them large chunks of their marketing budget. But, is it better to create an ad or boost a post on Facebook?

Boosted posts offer many targeting options based on specific demographics including, interests, age, and gender. It means reaching people who will most likely be interested in clicking to take further action and drive traffic to your Facebook page or Instagram profile.  

Boosted posts are not created in Facebook Ad manager and therefore do not have all the features that come with them. Boosting a post means making sure it shows up in your audience's News Feed as an advertisement on any platform, particularly Facebook and Instagram. The feature optimises engagement with the profile of the brand and its target audience. These posts receive more likes, comments, and shares. 

This option is at the top of your post on Facebook or Instagram next to your most recent or most engaging previous content pieces.

Is it worth boosting a Facebook Post?

Boosting a post does not necessarily mean a higher conversion rate, however it is optimal for creating engagement. Boosted posts are just reusing your previous content to show up in more of your audience's newsfeed. 

The majority of those additional views probably won't take action or make a significant impact on your ROI initially. As mentioned before, this is merely just boosting a post. It implies selling your brand, as opposed to selling your product or service. 

However, leveraging what Facebook offers means building a better brand presence and getting in front of more people online. If this one boosted post does not translate into a sale, a couple of consistent boosted posts will remind your audience who you are. 

How long should I boost a Facebook post?

After defining your target audience, your business should set a clear budget. Facebook has a minimum of one dollar per day and a maximum duration of 14 days. It calculates to be quite reasonable for a marketing budget, particularly for small to medium-sized businesses. Ultimately, the span and consistency would depend on the nature of your post, your social media goals and objectives, and your overall budget. 

As with most brand awareness campaigns and marketing strategies, your boosted post must have a clear call to action (CTA), brand personality, and a reason for your audience to follow, comment, or share. 

Facebook Ads Why is advertising on Facebook better than boosting posts?

Boosting posts does not give you as much freedom as creating an ad does. 

Facebook Ads contains more advanced tools and features to create lookalike audiences for the target demographic and micro-targeting. Microtargeting involves targeting the smallest geolocations to the specific detail to reach only the intended audience, increasing ROI and reducing cost.

With already most of the world on Facebook, it offers a large platform with broad reach and the capability to gain followers in one space. Facebook is constantly updating, which means the platform will continue to improve its advertising options. Users now have the opportunity to conduct a marketing campaign or create an ad. Facebook then optimises your ad and gives valuable data for what performs well and what does not.

Facebook ads help to translate your brand's presence into tangible outcomes.

Although running Facebook ads translates better, it is much more expensive compared to boosting posts. Fluctuating costs is hard for small to medium-sized businesses with a limited marketing budget.

How much do Facebook ads cost in 2021?

Facebook ads depend on your bidding model. It is different compared to boosting a post which costs a flat rate per day. These models include Cost-per-click (CPC) and Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM). Facebook ads charge shy of $1 per click and $7 per 1000 impressions. Businesses can adjust the campaign settings based on their marketing objectives to focus on likes, app downloads, views, or clicks. 

How does Facebook advertising work?

After selecting your metrics to optimise, Facebook analyses ad quality estimated action rates to determine its effectiveness and relevance. The value of the ad is calculated based on this data, delivering the most effective ad to run. With these insights, businesses are encouraged to improve the ad quality and relevance to decrease the cost. 

It is important to note that ad costs fluctuate depending on the options you choose. Audience, placement, quality, and objectives all influence the overall budget. Choosing broad or highly competitive demographics will increase your spending.

Why do ads get rejected by Facebook?

Ads get rejected for numerous reasons. For example, if your link text does not match where you send your audience when they click on your ad. Ads also get rejected if the content contains any offensive or unethical imagery, text, or intent. 

Summary 

If you are after both engagement and return of investment, it will be worthwhile to use both strategies. Incorporating a mix of Facebook ads and boosted posts into your social media strategy is the best option to increase engagement and ROI. Your business should map out your marketing strategy objectives before investing in any paid social media advertising. 

However, not every brand needs to have an extensive social media presence. It may be worthwhile to invest time into producing well-designed content on your channels initially to increase your traffic organically. 

Marketing Debate Podcast Transcript

James Banks:
Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of The Web3 marketing debate show. I'm your host, James Banks.

Joseph Chesterton:
And I'm your host, Joseph Chesterton.

James Banks:
And today we've got another great, great, great topic. Facebook ads, or should I say Facebook ads from within the business manager versus boosting posts or the automated ad bidding. So for this debate, I'll be taking the boosted posts side of the ring.

Joseph Chesterton:
And obviously, I'll be on the Facebook ads side.

James Banks:
Before we dive into it, let’s define the difference between Facebook ads versus boosted posts?

Joseph Chesterton:
So in my mind, or in what I've written down, is that boosted posts are posts on your timeline that you apply money to, boosting them.

James Banks:
You've probably seen a post on your business's account that Facebook prompts you to boost it. You could then increase your reach by spending a dollar on this post. 

Joseph Chesterton:
Boosted posting allows you to get your posts into audiences that potentially might not have been able to reach.

James Banks:
Absolutely.

Joseph Chesterton:
As well as showing it to more people in the algorithm that Facebook chooses to do so. With Facebook ads, they're like boosted posts, but you have full control with more creative avenues and more platforms and targeting capabilities. And it's done through the Facebook ads manager.

James Banks:
Yeah, that's right through the business manager. So usually if we want to get very specific, very targeted and you want to do all the manual options and control yourself then through the business manager through Facebook ads is the way to do it. So with that said and done, why would you say that the more manual approach is better than the boosted approach? Joseph?

Joseph Chesterton:
One more question. Okay. I kind of said it before with my opinion, but why would you boost or use, yeah. Why would you boost the posts in the first place?

James Banks:
It goes back to objectives. You have to be clear on what your objectives are. Boosting is a very clear objective, which is, you want to increase reach potentially engagement, and impressions on a piece of content that you've released into your Facebook account. It also can be very handy when going through the Facebook business ads manager, and depending on how you build your campaign strategy, you can often get very isolated into a single audience. 

After a long term of doing this, depending on your audience size, business budgets, so on and so forth- is that you tend to start burning out your audience. Now you can rotate in creative. That's usually the best way to do it. Rotating in fresh creative, fresh copy so that your audience is being stimulated with new material.

However, if you're then not also rotating and testing a new audience's parameters, you can basically make it very narrow and it's like going down a single path on a gold mine. And you don't realise that there was a massive goldmine between another shaft that you just never decided to go down and prospect, whereas boosting posts, helps you to put it out. 

The algorithm decides what is most relevant for the audiences that have engaged with you. The information and data can be fed back into your business manager account, to test new creative, new campaigns, new objectives. That's why I believe it's still relevant depending on your objective and goals and also how you are managing and running the campaign and who you have in place managing and running your ad campaign as well.

Joseph Chesterton:
And how Facebook makes money is through advertising. And of course, with their algorithm, they don't allow your content to be shown to every single person. Otherwise, what's the point of advertising in the first place? So you have to pay to play essentially.

James Banks:
Yeah, definitely. I think like what we see in the past when someone comes to us like, "Hey, we're advertising on Facebook, but we're getting nowhere and getting no leads." To answer that we asked what the business has been doing and he replied: I've been boosting my posts. 

Yes, you are advertising on Facebook, but you're advertising under a mechanism that's designed for reach and engagement, not lead generation. The objectives are completely different and the mechanism and advertising approach changes based upon what your objectives are. So when we talk about lead generation, like going through the business manager or doing the more manual campaign approach, which would be the better option out of the two Joe?

Joseph Chesterton:
Well, with boosted posts, you're just focusing on volunteer metrics like liking, sharing, and commenting. Whereas with the Facebook ads manager, you do have the final control. So you're able to target specifically to certain demographics and certain platforms like Instagram. 

You can boost it on Instagram, but things like Instagram messenger and probably Oculus, which I'm not familiar with, but I'm sure that's only a matter of time before Facebook ads become part of that as well.

But yeah, it just comes down to having more control and being able to target specific industries or specific areas. Whereas like I said, with boosted posting, it's getting your content and pushing it out and hoping that it gets the likes.

James Banks:
Yeah. Well, I think you mentioned vanity metrics there, and let's be clear if your objective for advertising on Facebook is lead generation of sales, likes, and engagement, that might be okay.

Maybe they are a little bit vain and they're not necessarily directly correlated to things such as cost per acquisition cost per sale, lead quality conversion rate, click-through rate. But even then, better metrics qualify the performance of a lead in sales campaigns through Facebook ads. 

If your objective is to build a brand presence, engagement, and reach audiences you weren't reaching before and get them brand aware. It means having these audiences at the very top of your funnel so that they can then progress down into the mid-funnel, the decision-making process, and then go down to more of the pointy end. It is moving into lead generation sales.

Then taking this approach, things such as likes and engagements are metrics to measure its success. So it all depends on your goals and objectives, but the most common mistake we see is businesses using the wrong method to achieve their advertising objective. They then blame the platform or worse, blame their ads. 

If the ads manager is using the wrong platform, then you should blame them. But usually, the business owner doesn't themselves say they're not getting results and the platforms broken, but no, their entire approach is actually what's broken. 

Joseph Chesterton:
Boosting ads can target basic demographics such as likes, interests, age. But when you're wanting to get into the advanced stuff and take that step further into lookalike audiences that's when Facebook Ad Manager comes in.

James Banks:
Let's say you're a brand new business with no presence or following on Facebook. With a boosted post-campaign, you don't have to go through the business manager. However, a boosted campaign can help you look like a reputable business and page by receiving likes and engagement. 

On the flip side though, if you’ve got specific sales and lead generation KPIs, then use Facebook as a mechanism to see and achieve them. This is when you need to have a proper campaign strategy and build out a specific campaign under the business and ads manager and Facebook. So two different objectives, but here are two practical ways of how you could use the two things. 

Joseph Chesterton:
If you want website clicks, page engagement, local business promotions, then boosted ads are probably a good enough thing for you. With Facebook Manager, you dig deeper, generate ads with objectives, like getting more store traffic conversions and opt-ins so they kind of bleed into each other, but they're different.

James Banks:
To summarise it might be beneficial to understand what your objectives are and if they can be met through boosted campaigns. If you want to advertise on Facebook or want to approach it again, you might be better off handling that yourself. 

However, if you have got more specific goals and objectives to manage through a larger marketing campaign, you're better off sending that to an agency. 

Feel free to reach out to us at Web3.com.au, we are here to help. Well, that's another wrap for the Web3 marketing debate show, tune in next time we'll be talking all things chat. 

So with that said, have a great day and we'll talk to you again real soon.

If you’re spending your budget on paid advertising, you want the platform to be the right one. Even if you’re aiming for organic reach, the channel you optimise for is essential to the success of your ad campaign. 

Throughout the debate, we discuss whether LinkedIn or Google Ads are better for your digital advertising strategy. Both are exceptional choices for providing ROI, but they serve opposing purposes. 

What are Google Ads?

Google Ads helps marketers expand their reach within digital campaigns using PPC advertising. Google displays your ads on their platform in front of your target audience. 

What are the advantages of Google Ads?

Google ads are an affordable option for your PPC advertising strategy. It is a viable option for any size business, even though the cost can vary based on the industry. What makes Google Ads an affordable option is a choice to bet on different keywords. 

It comes as no surprise that the competitive keywords cost the most. However, this sometimes can be worth the investment. People turn to search engines to find specific answers to their queries, making Google the best place to display your relevant content pieces to your users. 

Besides being a cheap and classic option, Google also provides an extensive list of tools that can help heighten your ad campaign. For example, the keyword planner allows you to choose the best keywords based on the type of industry, cost, your existing content, average monthly searches, and more. It makes advertising seem as easy as a couple of clicks. 

Once you have produced your ads, you can then easily measure ROI and analyse your results for the success of your future advertising campaigns. Google ads are an investment for the future effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies.

What are the disadvantages of Google Ads?

Although ‘$1 per click’ sounds cheap on paper, it can add up fast. It does not matter if the click converted into a sale. You will still have to open your wallet for that click. After a while, it may begin to be more expensive in the long run. It can lead to another disadvantage for small to medium-sized businesses. As soon as your ad spend runs out, so will your Google ad campaign. 

The price of the keywords is determined based on the competitiveness of that word. So if you want to show up for relevant and frequent queries, you’ll have to prepare a larger budget. 

Monitoring your ads is essential to avoid any mistakes and to ensure your campaign is converting. Put simply, you need to be able to easily tweak it if need be, however, it can be a completely time-consuming process. 

Google is the largest search engine, and the platform people turn to most when they want something. This comes with so much possibility, but also the stress of mismanaging your account.

 

What are LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn allows you to network with other professionals online on a business-orientated social media platform. It offers job opportunities, potential client base and allows you to build brand awareness. This network is an essential space to market products or services through LinkedIn ads. Previously it was an easy win for any other platform over LinkedIn, however, over the recent years, LinkedIn has really upped its game in terms of its advertising. 

Advantages of LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn advertising is extremely efficient for B2B marketers or other business professionals. 

LinkedIn ads let you target users based on specific criteria and data shared by the audience themselves. By narrowing down on who you target, you have a higher chance of capturing quality leads. 

The data you can use to target people includes:

• Age, gender, industry, work history, location, school attended, and everything in between related to their professional history.  

It is safe to assume most people who are active on LinkedIn keep their profiles up to date and therefore give confidence to the accuracy of your advertising efforts. 

Advertising on LinkedIn is much less competitive, especially in comparison to other social networking sites like Facebook. This means your business has the potential to be in front of potential customers more easily, without your competitors stealing the click from you. It’s a pretty great bonus if you ask us. 

These easy targeting options and simple interface provide an instinctive user experience which helps to improve the click rate of your ad.

Disadvantages of LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn's reporting dashboard offers only the bare minimum for tools. Marketers don’t have access to the metrics and insights available on other platforms. It's hard to create insights from the data, as well as reporting to justify ad spend.

It is vital to test out what works with your audience, especially when only just starting. Understanding what type of content is causing traction is what propels your business forward faster. However, this is something that LinkedIn lacks. Marketers have difficulty bulk editing or duplicating content within the platform through its lack of tools. It makes the process of testing slow.  

LinkedIn has a relatively expensive minimum for CPC and CPM. It can sometimes be double what Google offers. They also require a minimum daily budget, which can become hard to commit as a small or startup business. However, due to the high conversion rate of LinkedIn, it makes the high cost-per-click a worthwhile investment. 

Summary 

Overall, when deciding on which platform to advertise on, it all comes down to user intent. Who are your customers and where are they mainly online? By answering these questions, you’ll begin to understand more about where you need your business to show up. Both Google Ads and LinkedIn ads have their pros and cons, however, it's important to understand which is worthwhile for your budget, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. 

Podcast 

Listen in to James and Joseph’s heated debate where there can only be one winner. Who will it be? Let’s find out. Be sure to let us know who you agree with within the comments.

Transcript

James Banks:
Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. I am your host, James Banks.

Joseph Chesterton:
And I'm your host, Joseph Chesterton.

James Banks:
And today we have another awesome debate topic, which is Google ads versus LinkedIn ads. Which one is better for business? So for this debate, I'll be defending LinkedIn ads.

Joseph Chesterton:
And I'll be winning with Google ads.

James Banks:
Those are fighting words, Joseph. Well, let's see what you're made out of. So, all right, let's kick things off. Why would you say Google ads are better than LinkedIn ads for businesses to use?

Joseph Chesterton:
There's a big difference between Google ads and LinkedIn ads. With Google ads, it's not just advertising on Google. It's advertising on almost every single website that has ads or uses the Google ads platform. 

So, it's 90% of the web versus one website, essentially, which makes this debate very difficult for you.

James Banks:
Well, site impressions don't necessarily mean great results, Joseph. Heck, you can still outperform one high-converting site versus a whole bunch of shitty ones that produce a better result at the end of the day. So like again, I think there's more to your argument there.

Joseph Chesterton:
Potentially. So where do people go online? They use social media. What else? Look up things. Recipes. I don't know. Look at pictures of cats. All these different websites have ads on them, more than likely. 

If you're looking at social media, then Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn all have advertising. After that, then pretty much, the rest is Google advertising. So it's very hard to answer Google ads vs. LinkedIn ads.

James Banks:
Oh yeah, I know it's an apple orange comparison. But let's say you had a small marketing budget that you couldn't justify splitting across two different platforms. You need to choose a platform to invest your marketing and advertising budget. 

For example, if you decide to move it into LinkedIn ads, well, I think you answered it yourself. Just because Google has the biggest horizontal spread for an advertising network online, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the best place to put your advertising budget.

LinkedIn, for example, is very narrow in terms of its breadth, but it's very specific. It's very specialised. There are lots of business and business professionals. You could be very granular around targeting individuals within organisations based upon roles. However, you can't do that with Google ads. 

You can go to the keyword on a geographic level. But you can't target these by those profiles and things like that, which puts it as a little bit of a disadvantage for tailoring the ads to the exact person you want to convert, and your dream customer.

Joseph Chesterton:
Not necessarily.

James Banks:
Now, what have you got to say?

Joseph Chesterton:
So, Google uses your demographics from your profile on Google.

James Banks:
Yeah. When logged into a Google account on Chrome, or, no, if you logged into a Google account on the internet, that's right.

Joseph Chesterton:
Hmm. The chances of you having a Google account, Gmail, or Google workspace account versus being on LinkedIn, logged in.

James Banks:
Yeah. But with your Google account, you're not putting in where you work, your exact work position, your work history, where you went to university, heck, what your commercial interests are. 

You don't go to that level of depth that you do with LinkedIn. You have got a lot less to work with when it comes to targeting and personalization.

Joseph Chesterton:
Yes, that is correct. But the thing is, there's a lot more area to play in when targeting geographic location.

James Banks:
Which you can do on LinkedIn.

Joseph Chesterton:
Age.

James Banks:
Which you can do on LinkedIn.

All right. I'm going to throw you a lifeline, Joseph. Let's talk about the cost per click.

Joseph Chesterton:
Yeah. Well, there's no debate there. 

James Banks:
Why? Why is there no debate?

Joseph Chesterton:
LinkedIn ads suck when it comes to cost per click because they haven't quite worked it out. The actual cost per click versus Google's cost per click is considerably higher, most of the time.

James Banks:
Why is it higher?

Joseph Chesterton:
Potentially because it's targeted to professional people.

James Banks:
Maybe. I'm just going to jump ship onto your side of the ship because it's sinking a lot faster than mine. But no, you're right. It doesn't make any sense. 

There's clear reasoning why LinkedIn's cost per click could never replicate the ad set into Facebook and Google. It just costs so much more. And there's no justification as to why. Maybe because they need to amp up the cost to make it, I don't know. I don't know why. 

We've run both platforms before. But often we run multi-channel ad campaigns across LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and many other platforms. But generally, the budget doesn't get the reach. It doesn't hit as many eyeballs because the cost per click is so high.

Although you could say, yes, it's very tailored, specific, unique, and relevant, you could argue the same to any platform. There was an era where algorithmic targeting was a bad thing, was a big no-no on the ad space because they didn't have enough data and they're very stupid. 

But now they're getting more sophisticated. It's now becoming almost as good as human-based targeting. What do you have to say to that?

Joseph Chesterton:
Yeah. That's right, thanks for hitting the nail on the head there.

James Banks:
Alrighty. Alrighty. So, here's the thing. If you want to experiment with LinkedIn ads, we always encourage it. Always encourage experimenting with new advertising platforms to see if it will resonate with your audience and your business and produce a positive ROI. 

Whenever we've tested LinkedIn ads, we generally got more mileage and better returns across the established players. This is very isolated to Australia too. The two big players I'm referencing are Google and Facebook. It doesn't mean LinkedIn ads cannot be effective. We haven't seen it effective in our time. And we don't pretend to have the answer for every advertising network in the world because we don't. No one does. 

But if it makes sense for your audience (particularly if you are in a B2B space) it's worth testing to see if you can achieve your objectives through it versus other mediums.

But with that said, I think there isn't too much of a debate with this one. Usually, we end up saying it's both, but this one was pretty one-sided. 

We prefer Google ads because of the higher ROI for clients. As opposed to LinkedIn and its high cost per click. And that the actual database, the LinkedIn network for the number of people in there is very small. 

And you could say, well, I only need to work with 12 clients a year or whatever then, okay, maybe that's okay with you. But most businesses need to have thousands of impressions to start building an engagement, and so forth. And if you have such a small database to work with, it can be difficult. It can be really difficult to produce results.

Anyway, that's our position on Google ads versus LinkedIn ads. Do you disagree with us? If so, I'd love to know. If you have a LinkedIn ad campaign that's crushing it, please tell us. Please fill us in, because we'd love to talk to you. And we'd love to see, not copy, of course not, but we'd love to know how you've approached it and the results you've gotten. 

But with that said and done, I think that's a wrap for another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. Any final comments, Joseph?

Joseph Chesterton:
There is one thought that comes to mind, where LinkedIn may be better.

James Banks:
What's that?

Joseph Chesterton:
I don't know why I'm giving this to you. When it comes to hiring, you could potentially find people on LinkedIn and use LinkedIn ads.

James Banks:
Yeah, definitely. And I think that's probably a little bit, slightly of a different product. That's like the recruitment ads platform, which is not business to business, CPC ad platform that we're talking about. 

That's a great example of where it could be very effective. Haven't used that myself, but I know many people that have, and had some pretty good results. But yeah, I think LinkedIn is fantastic and still has a good reach for native content. Non-paid content going straight to your profile tends to tank with companies but tends to go very well in the individual profile. That's what we've seen, at least. 

So, LinkedIn, great platform. Maybe not the best for an advertiser. However, we could be wrong. If we are wrong please tell us. We'd love to know. But that's it. I think we don't have anything else to add to this. 

So thank you for tuning into the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. 

And we'll talk to you again, real soon.

Discover more at https://web3.com.au/google-vs-linkedin-ads/

SEO and social media are two strategies known for attracting new customers to your brand. But there is an ongoing debate outside of Web3 about which strategy should take up the majority of your time and effort. Both strategies work for different businesses and are extremely useful at generating a high return of investment (ROI).

In order to fully scope this question, this article will explore the pros and cons of SEO marketing and social media marketing, what makes them unique and which is better for your business.

 

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation entails optimising content for search engines to rank your website highly. Ranking high in search for certain keywords brings new and existing customers back onto your website and keeps your brand front of mind of your customer when online. 

Benefits of SEO

Most people look for businesses on search engines and predominantly turn to google. Think about your own habits. When you want to look for something in particular, do you go to your social accounts or head straight to search? It’s an inbound marketing strategy, meaning they come to you. SEO targets quality, organic traffic. 

Organic traffic means you don't need to pay a cent. The only investment you will be making is to create valuable and persuasive content for your website that the algorithm will favour and that will keep your customers on your page. 

SEO is a staple marketing strategy as it improves your online presence and moves you ahead of your competition within your industry. If fewer people are on your competitor's site, that means more people are going to be buying your products and services.

The fundamental difference for why people generally opt for one over the other is audience and intent. With SEO, you have the ability to know what your users are thinking, based on their search queries. These people are normally in a comparative mindset or are ready to buy.  

Think about it… Will you remember a post from yesterday as you were scrolling through your newsfeed or will you recall the brand that showed up in search after you looked for help on a specific topic? SEO means you can attract leads that are searching for something that you offer. 

Difficulties of SEO

Content for SEO is designed to be research-based, as people are intentionally looking for a specific thing. These can include long-form texts, blogs, how-tos and other articles. SEO content is designed for topics that don’t necessarily trend and that will be common search queries in the long run. As the majority of SEO is organic, that means a large portion of your marketing efforts will be put into churning out keyword-rich content. After a while, you might begin to dream in keywords, as we do.

SEO is known to take some time being indexing and can be rather uncertain. Ranking well for specific search queries can take days to come into action, this leads to sometimes taking years for the algorithm to regard websites as authoritative and credible sources. This differs completely from social media, which can go viral in minutes.  

 

Social Media Marketing

The term social media marketing refers to social networks connecting with audiences and building your brand. It is a way for brands to engage with existing customers and reach new leads by showcasing their company's culture, values and skills.

Social Media’s limitations 

Social media can be difficult to measure. Although platforms have put in place some on-page analytics, this does not go into as much depth as platforms that analyse your website traffic. Because it is difficult to measure, this means it's hard to know which customers are coming from social media. These time-consuming networks need a lot of engagement while only seeing a small portion of ROI (return of investment). People on social media also might be less likely to act as they were just scrolling through before they found out about you.

Benefits of social media marketing for business

A key aspect of deciding which strategy you should put your efforts into is understanding your target audience. If you are wanting to target a younger demographic, it’s quite likely they’re predominantly hanging out on social media. They often use the social media account to actually make judgments of brands before making a purchase decision. These people have less intent to purchase but are more likely to share, follow and engage with your brand. 

One huge benefit of social media is engagement. Once followers mention your handle, tags your brand, or even likes your page, their connections will then start to see you. Easily infiltrating your target market will get you discovered easily by more people. 

The type of content differs tremendously based on what platform. Social media is used to circulate engaging, visual and emotionally charged content, specifically with trending topics. These trending topics have the ability to go viral within seconds. If you jump on certain bandwagons such as Reels, you can guarantee your brand will be in front of fresh eyes in no time. 

 

Is SEO a part of Social media marketing

This debate isn’t just black and white, Social media and SEO actually help each other. Your social media can have an indirect, positive effect on your SEO and ranking. Most of the top positions in Google search have a strong presence on social media as well. This might be a good reason to invest in both strategies. 

Search engine optimisation doesn’t just occur on-site. Keyword research can also be useful for your social media marketing strategy. Including specific keywords in your social accounts including your bio, name, hashtags and even location will help to direct your account when people engage in similar content on these platforms.

Summary

There is no reason to not be investing in both social media and Search engine marketing. If budget is of concern, there are many different routes to go to obtain organic traffic without spending a cent of advertising. Overall, it’s important to have a brand presence where your target market is hanging out online. It is the best way of increasing your conversion rates, generating leads and turning those leads into loyal customers. 

 

Transcript

James Banks:
Hello, everyone. And welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. I'm your host, James Banks.

Joseph Chesterton:
And I'm your host, Joseph Chesterton.

James Banks:
And today we'll be firing up an all-time classic marketing debate, SEO versus social media marketing, which one is better? So on this side of the debate, I'll be taking the social media side of the ring.

Joseph Chesterton:
And of course, I'll be doing the SEO side.

James Banks:
Alrighty. Without further ado, let's kick things off. So Joseph, why would you say, or why is SEO better than social media marketing for small to medium businesses? Why would you say SEO is better?

Joseph Chesterton:
All right. Need to ask you a question, when people want to find something, where do they go?

James Banks:
Well, I guess they could be searching on Google or they could be searching on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world after Google. They could be searching anywhere.

Joseph Chesterton:
Whose side are you on again?

James Banks:
I'm on the social media marketing side. But when you're saying SEO, you're referring to search engine optimization to help sites rank better in Google search. That's the angle you're coming from, right?

Joseph Chesterton:
Yes.

James Banks:
Okay. Continue on.

Joseph Chesterton:
Okay. So people go to Google to find what they're after. People go to Facebook to chew and post pictures of their cats. All right. Most popular website in the world, Google, second, YouTube, a handful of Chinese websites, and then the seventh spot is Facebook. 

So with SEO, obviously you optimise your website, and then that increases your ranking. And then you get to number one where you can start printing money, because basically when you're at the top, people find you. 

About 30% of all clicks on Google is the first position in Google. So when you are there, people will find you. And it's just a massive snowball that builds and builds and builds.

James Banks:
Yeah, but that's not a guarantee, Joseph. I mean, we've come across many sites, and I've worked with many site owners that have got pages and posts on their website that ranked number one, but there's no clear and immediate ROI from those number one rankings. 

Whereas opposed to say, if you have a large active and engaged following on social media that's relevant to the products and services and solutions that you're providing, you have a great quality target audience following a profile on your social media, you could argue to say that that's also will help results in generating more sales and income, and as you said, printing money.

It can happen on both sides of the fence. Social media requires not only brand presence optimization, but knowing what your audience wants, providing to them across more than, and this is the key I think, more than one single platform. 

If you're putting all the eggs in one basket through SEO and Google, all it takes is Google to change the way that they're thinking and no longer like you anymore. And then you lose all of those results. 

Whereas if you have a great social media presence across multiple relevant channels, if one of the channels decides to change its game, at least you have other channels to back up upon, which ultimately means it's a more defensible strategy than just comparing it to SEO. Whatever you have to say to that.

Joseph Chesterton:
I guess social media marketing requires ongoing maintenance and a commitment to keep social marketing happening. Whereas when you optimise for SEO and you're ranking highly on SEO, then it's just a small, or you don't need to actually maintain that position. 

Then the ROI is better, because when customers are wanting to buy a product, they either go on social media posts pictures of their cats, or they go and search for the product that they're wanting to buy instead of actually stumbling upon it on social media that's paid.

James Banks:
Well, I think I threw you a bone there. So I would argue that it requires less maintenance. It's not like you cannot do any maintenance, but it requires less maintenance when you're dealing with an industry that has low search competition, or there are not many professional SEO marketers trying to optimise the same batch of high-value keywords. 

But in a competitive industry where there are active SEO campaigns in place, you have to be active constantly and evolving and monitoring the changes to the market, i.e. doing it on a recurring basis, just as a good social media marketing strategy. So I would say that the commitment is similar. It's not a set and forget solution here, it requires ongoing effort to be able to achieve long-term success on either side of the fence.

Joseph Chesterton:
Well, when you create content with social media, you post something. It's out there and then it's gone. With SEO, you do the right foundations and the right things, and it lasts years, weeks, months, years, depending on how well you've done it, and how much of a niche your product or service is. 

So what's better for smaller businesses? 

When smaller businesses don't have huge budgets to continually be spending on more and more advertising, then potentially they can see a massive ROI without any ongoing spend.

James Banks:
Yeah, I think that's not a bad comment to make at all. But where's the attention online today? It's not like we're in 2005 anymore where the attention online was only on the search engines. 

The attention of people is across social media and also search to be fair. But any business, regardless of what size can and should have a presence on social media. Yes, you could argue there are a few French cases where 100% of the audience is absolutely not online. But honestly, when businesses think like that, you only have to push them a little bit further to actually ask who their actual audience is and what they're doing. 

Everyone is searching online. Everyone is online. There's no questions about it. But I think ultimately, probably what our listeners want to hear is, when we talk about results, what's going to produce the best results, short long-term and medium-term. 

Why would you say SEO is a better long-term strategy or has better results in social media marketing, Joe? Or if you think it doesn't, then that's fine.

Joseph Chesterton:
Both are going to have a cost associated with it. I think with SEO, there's more chance that when you are at the top, the time that you stay at the top is far greater than with social media where you post something, next minute, it's gone, and then you have to post some other thing. 

So there is an initial cost to get the SEO potentially unless you're doing it yourself. If you get the SEO or your product to number one, then the SEO cost is almost infinite. Take for example Web3's website, our web design Brisbane page we built that eight years ago...

James Banks:
Well, we were optimising for the keyword phrase when we first started the business eight years ago. Yeah, that's right.

Joseph Chesterton:
And for the first, what, three months we were doing SEO on that pretty consistently, which got us to number one in the search results. It pretty much stayed there. Yes, of course, we've adjusted our strategy and changed the pages and things, which has moved the position around. But if you search for web design, we'll be at or near the top.

James Banks:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think how we were able to achieve that was really, really doing extremely well without on-page optimization, which is all the technicalities, the code, the quality, the content, all the stuff that makes a great website great, nailing that. 

We've done a little bit of content marketing like blog writing. Nothing really, I would say a dedicated content marketing strategy. We're changing that now, hence why you're listening to this podcast. 

But the reality is, I think I will say our industry has become much more competitive. And for us to stand out, we need to be able to be firing on all cylinders, such as content marketing. So I think to bring this one home, honestly, we don't see it as a debate here at Web3, SEO versus social media marketing. They are actually similar to our content marketing versus SEO debate. We actually believe they're two in the same things. 

Joseph, why would you say that SEO and social media marketing work together? 

Joseph Chesterton:
They are the same thing, but they are a different thing. In my opinion, it's the context of where they are or what you're trying to achieve. So with SEO, it's website based, whereas, with social media, it's obviously Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, whatever, Twitter, whichever platform you're trying to target. 

So you go to where your customers are. And when your customers are on Facebook, then that makes sense. And if it is a case where customers are searching for your product, then they'll probably go to Google. So you need both.

James Banks:
Yeah. And the reason why you need to have both and the point I'm trying to make is social, although minor, is still a ranking signal. That is if you want to rank well in Google, having a social media presence is one of the signals, albeit minor, that Google looks at to figure out how authoritative and real a business is. 

So neglecting a social media presence and wanting to rank well on SEO is almost like an idiot in them. And you can't, you need to be able to be playing both fields. From a social media point of view where SEO can help amplify social media, you can use traditional SEO techniques, such as keyword research, to understand the very basics. 

What are the questions my audience is searching for and looking for answers that I could then help educate and answer through my social media content or social media marketing efforts?

And not just assuming what those questions are, actually having quantifiable real data to back up the facts, that we know this is how many people per month are searching for this exact question that we can answer. For example, what is better to build a website, Wix versus WordPress? That's a classic one. And there are many variations. 

So this is how the two actually work very well together. And combined strategies is where we see not only our business but businesses we work with achieve the greatest results. So that said, Joe, is there any other final closing comments?

Joseph Chesterton:
Yeah. What are your goals and objectives? I'd say they need to be both.

James Banks:
Yeah, exactly. It's not 2005. Ladies and gentlemen, newsflash, it has to be playing in both fields. If you need help with your SEO and social media marketing effort, even if you'd like us to do a little bit of a review or rundown, pointing out the gaps, we can show you where you're missing out on opportunities that you could be capitalising on for your business. 

Feel free to drop us a line, web3.com.au. And with that said, we’ll conclude today's episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. Tune in next time, where we'll be talking a heck of a lot more social media. So without further ado, thank you very much for listening. 

We'll talk to you again real soon.

Discover more at: www.web3.com.au

Are you tossing up between Wix and WordPress for building your website? Whether you want a platform that’s easy to use, has exceptional support or has an inbuilt SEO tool, we’ll cover which is best for you for every aspect of your business and website journey.

Wix is a website builder. WordPress is a content management system. Although Wix and WordPress are different, they have a lot of similarities. It can be confusing to know which one to choose and, more importantly, why?

In a head-to-head comparison, we discuss the pros and cons of Wix vs. WordPress and the factors contributing to their successes.

These include:

1. Design & Ease of use
2. Support
3. Plugins, Add ons and Extras
4. SEO
5. Blogging
6. Ecommerce
7. Cost & Hosting

Design & Ease of use

Do you want to create a website that looks effortlessly professional? 

Wix

Wix is known to be the best platform for small businesses or people who are just starting. You don’t need any previous knowledge of HTML, plugins, or any of the daunting technical terms. This beginner-friendly software has features that can turn any idea into a professional and creative-looking website.

They offer over 500 free designer-made templates to effortlessly create a professional site. These are broken into categories of business to help you even more. 

These categories are, for example, blogs, photography, portfolio, restaurants, etc. Their features include a simple drag and drop interface for flexibility of inclusions like buttons, tabs, pictures, paragraphs, and much more. It is so easy to use that you have the freedom to design whatever you want! 

A new feature they’ve released is Wix ADI. It provides simple questions to answer that instantly generate a custom-made design for your business. Just like that!

WordPress

WordPress has a block editor allowing you to easily edit your pages by adding different blocks for images, text, background, and other features. You have access to thousands of different themes and templates to launch your website and customise as you go.

WordPress looks to be the more professional software, but also the more daunting. However, this is not the case. You can preview your live website with one click, which lets you view what your customers will see. As well as Wix, they do offer drag and drop usability, although it's not as user-friendly. However, this hasn't impacted its ease of use in other aspects. 

Despite popular belief, the ability to code in WordPress is not essential. WordPress, however, is incorporating features of HTML5 into the software, although these updates will not affect the ease of use.  

 

Support Wix

Wix provides constant customer support. Their help centre includes features including frequently asked questions, articles, how-tos, free video tutorials, over-the-phone support in a variety of languages, and email. 

WordPress

WordPress offers a variety of resources to help you and your business get the most out of WordPress. These include:

• Community-based support forums
• FAQ Troubleshooting 

However, the support for WordPress is significantly lower than what Wix provides, which proves why Wix is more superior, particularly for beginners.

Plugins and extras

What exactly are plugins and extensions? Plugins, or apps, are third-party extras you can use on your websites to add more features. These are particularly important for your customers and are a crucial part of building your website. 

Wix

With over 250 web apps, Wix allows you to build your website to integrate professional tools to sell your products and services online. 

Some of their apps include:

• Contact forms
• Image gallery
• Social media buttons
• Email marketing 
• Comments 
• Much more!

WordPress

WordPress offers tens of thousands of free plugins from their directory with even more in their premium plans. I will spare you the endless list. But, it’s safe to say that if there is a feature you want to install, WordPress can make that happen. 

Overall, Wix is expanding its inventory of apps. Until then, it is hard to go past WordPress’s endless plugin possibilities.

SEO

Why is SEO important for choosing a website development software? Search engine optimisation is essential for building an online presence for your business, searchability, and visibility. It helps to get clicks and organic traffic to your website. As well as increasing traffic, SEO also improves user experience through its optimisation layout and design. 

WordPress

How does SEO work on WordPress, and how to enable it? 

WordPress has access to tonnes of plugins that help to increase your SEO efforts. There are two main competitors for WordPress’s top SEO plugin, Yoast SEO and All in One SEO (AIOSEO).

WordPress has introduced Categories and Tags that organise your content in said categories, like a table of contents. It helps to manage your content by topic. Users can find what they need, and search engines understand the structure of your website. 

Wix

Over the last couple of years, Wix has begun to catch up to WordPress for their SEO. Some free tools can boost your SEO on Wix, helping to drive organic traffic to your site. They are more of the underdog, as their biggest competition, WordPress, is known for SEO. 

Wix SEO Wiz Features include:

• SEO analytics to improve your Google search ranking
• Visitor analytics for traffic insights
• Email marketing templates for your client base
• And a personalised SEO plan/checklist

  Blogging WordPress
WordPress has a long-held reputation, as it initially started as a blogging platform. This website builder now allows all the blogging features you would need. 

These features include:

•  the ability to add tags, 
• categories and RSS, 
• plugins for comments, 
• related posts and poles. 

In other words, the sky is the limit when it comes to blogging on WordPress. If you want to incorporate blogging into your business, we’d say WordPress is more superior to Wix.

Wix

As we mentioned about the drag and drop capabilities, Wix can easily add blog sections to your site. These contain all the basics you’d need, with few variations for formatting options. 

If you are focussing on blogging for your business, you’re in luck. You can monetize your free Wix blog for your business. Wix allows different ways to generate income from your blog to help your business. 

The only downside to Wix blogging is, unfortunately, the comments section. Wix is slower to use and may impact the usability of your customers. However, you can add apps for commenting such as Facebook to make up for this disadvantage. 

Ecommerce

Using these platforms to build your site is the easiest way to get started, see your ROI increase, and build up your brand. 

WordPress

So we know that WordPress was originally a blogging service, but can WordPress be used for eCommerce? WordPress is an eCommerce machine! 

A big seller for WordPress is its WooCommerce plugin, which is the most used eCommerce platform in the world globally. It makes it super easy to create and maintain an online store as well as digital subscriptions. It offers flexibility and freedom to sell everything your business can create. 

Wix

Wix has multiple payment methods, including credit cards, Paypal, Square, offline payment, and many more, all commission-free. They also offer their Wix Store dashboard to see the transactions as they occur.  

One of the largest standouts for Wix is the ability to use their Tax Calculator, Avalar. It makes calculating your region's tax rates as simple as clicking a button because that's all it takes. These are prepared based on your business's location for up-to-date calculations. 

Cost / hosting WordPress Hosting and Cost

Investing in WordPress means you will have to source your hosting provider, which does mean costs can add up. There are many fast and secure WordPress hosting in Australia. These agencies will do it for you, letting you relax knowing your website is being taken care of. 

What are the best WordPress hosting in Australia? 

There are many hosting providers across Australia that help you connect your business to your user base. At Web3, we use WP Engine to host our Client's WordPress Sites. Our plans are hosted in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne for network connectivity throughout Australia. 

We ensure that your website hosting is as fast and secure as possible, as we know the importance of providing a reputable brand first hand. Hosting your website close to your customer is essential for the best access. If you have any more website hosting questions, we have the answers.  

Other WordPress hosting providers in Australia:

• GoDaddy
• Hostinger
• BlueHost
• Crazy Domains
• SiteGround

How much does it cost to host on WordPress?

The price of hosting providers ranges widely. You can expect to pay between $5-30 a month. It depends on your budget and the needs of your business and its website. 

Wix Hosting and Cost

Wix provides free in-house hosting that delivers globally. It ensures everything is provided for you, completely stress-free. It's perfect for people who have a smaller budget and want to kick-start their business straight away. 

Wix offers free and premium plans, ranging from $13 to 50 per month for all your business and eCommerce needs. Each of these plans provides free hosting, consistent reliability, and security. You will have one less thing to worry about. 

However, the free hosting plan may be costing your business in the long run. Websites built by amateur users may not be getting found, be lacking in functionality, and will overall be costing your business. It is something to be cautious of for using Wix in the long-term.

 

Summary

At Web3, we are a WordPress development agency and have a conscious bias to the software we use. Why? Because we know that it works best for us and has been successful for our clients over the eight years of hosting for them. Overall, there are clear pros and cons for both Wix and WordPress. These depend on what your business needs are. 

Overall, we recommend Wix for beginners to quickly kick start your business with little add ons. However, for upscaling, WordPress is the website software for you. 

By the way, we are offering our Web3 WordPress Website Hosting Services starting at $49 per month to help get one less thing off your shoulders and feel confident your website is safe, fast, and secure 24/7. 

Listen In

James and Joseph go head to head in the debate of Wix Vs. WordPress. This hilarious episode will unveil the secrets no blog will tell you. Stay tuned to find out what software is better for your business and how to get started earning money in less than 15 minutes.

Transcript

James Banks:
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. I'm your co-host, James Banks.

Joseph Chesterton:
And I'm your co-host, Joseph Chesterton.

James Banks:
And today I cannot wait for this debate, WordPress versus Wix. Which one's better? For this one, I'll be defending Wix.

Joseph Chesterton:
And I'll be destroying Wix.

James Banks:
We'll see about that. Well, without further ado, let's start the debate. So Joseph, why would you say WordPress is better than Wix for small and medium business?

Joseph Chesterton:
Well, I say it every time, it's very similar to our debate on Squarespace versus WordPress. WordPress, it's the most used content management system in the world. About one-third of websites are powered by WordPress, which means people are familiar with it, and they know the platform. 

There is a quarter of the number of people employed by Automattic, the company that makes WordPress than Wix. The beauty of WordPress is it's open-source, meaning that millions of people contribute to make it the better platform to build your website on.

With the power of WordPress, it's infinitely scalable, which means that whether you have a one-man business or you have a medium or large enterprise, your website will work very well on WordPress. It caters to most use cases. You can build things like static websites, e-commerce websites, forums, and the list goes on.

With Wix, however, it's very, "This is what you can do. You can customise it a fair bit, but you can't go outside the bounds of what we say you can and can't do." 

I think a big thing is if you're a small or medium business and you have an online store, which I would say most people now do because of COVID, you shouldn't have to pay extra just to sell on your website. It should be included as part of the free offering that you can get with WordPress. 

I know you're going to come back and say it is included, but the thing is not everyone wants to sell products on their website, which is why plugins were created, so that they can install any sort of functionality, and get the website that they exactly need without having to have a bloated mess that Wix provides out the box.

With WordPress, let's say you use WooCommerce, which is the number one e-commerce platform on WordPress and built by the people that make WordPress, it's free. 

You don't have to pay any extra. 

Yeah, sure, you have to host, but if you were to host a WordPress website and host a Wix website, I'm sure the cost would be relatively the same. Then if you want to host a Wix eCommerce website, then you have to pay extra. 

On top of that, when you do become a larger business, you don't have to pay extra just because you've hit the storage capacity or... I have to be really careful because I know you're going to... You'll bite me back. What's the right way to say this?

You don't reach the limitations of Wix. You can scale infinitely with WordPress. 

Although Wix has improved a lot, it was notorious for being atrocious when it comes to code, and because I'm a developer, I know what makes a good website. When you have a website that's thrown together with a bajillion scripts that are loaded whether you use them or not, then that's where Wix greatly falls down. 

Whereas with WordPress, a Web3 website built on WordPress, you have something built dedicated to your website, to your business's needs, without any bloat and it can be the best website for your business and return the greatest ROI than what you could with a hack job Wix website.

I've pretty much summarised it, but if you want to throw in anything else…

James Banks:
Oh, I'd love to throw my hat in the ring, Joseph. You mentioned the phrase "bloated mess" in your spiel there. Isn't every single WordPress website ever created a bloated mess in comparison to-

Joseph Chesterton:
That's why I said that's why you should have a Web3 WordPress website because we don't make bloated websites.

James Banks:
Well, we'll discuss that in the conclusion. Where do I start? Open-source. Yay. Open source, that’s great. Well actually, not really. Not if you don't know what you're doing, if you're not technical, not a developer. Not if you run a web agency or are a small business and you just want a site that works.

Open source means that you have a big massive red target painted on your back for hackers to come along, compromise your site and generally make your life misery and hell. 

On top of it, go on the comments of bloated and messy code, my God, the number of sites, well, WordPress sites on the internet that look more confused than a bowl of alphabet soup and spaghetti with cheese running through it, is pretty much almost every example. 

There's so many of them that are terrible. It's the reason why WordPress can have a negative rap, is that there's a lot of bad examples out there of sites that have been poorly coded, poorly secured, get compromised, get destroyed, get hacked, get sensitive data stolen, get password credit cards leaked, and the list goes on and on and on.

When you have a closed source platform such as Wix, where hosting and maintenance and security, platform integrity, coding and updates are taken care of for you. It allows you to just kick back, relax and get on with running your business, not running around in circles, trying to fix your website or throw in a thousand plugins to fix a problem. 

You can do this only to realise you're making the problem worse, having one of your plugins conflicting with the other, destroying your entire website. You never have to deal with that with a closed source platform such as Wix.

But I guess with that said, if we look at it from an SEO point of view, and SEO is a core component of what both of these platforms sell themselves as, why would you say is WordPress better than Wix at SEO?

Joseph Chesterton:
I know you tried to stab at the fact that open source is open source, but because it is open-source, there are literally thousands of people improving the code. 

WordPress out of the box is good with SEO. It follows a number of best practices. Yes, there are specific things that can be enhanced with a WordPress plugin, such as the most popular one, Yoast SEO. But the beauty of it is that because WordPress is so flexible, you're able to use whichever plugins you need. 

They are most likely built by thousands of other people that have continuously improved it until it can't be improved anymore. Yoast SEO has 260 people that are actively working on that single plugin, and there are more than five million installs of that plugin. It's no small beast, it's a large operation that allows you to stay at the forefront of SEO and make sure it changes... You’re rolling your eyes at me. A lot of the thinking is done for you. 

James Banks:
No, it's not. You have to figure out which SEO plugin to put in, and then you have to figure out how to optimise the damn thing. Then on top of that, you've got to actually know if the right theme you've just selected is actually compliant from a search point of view and doesn't have show-stopping issues and bugs that could affect your site and the search performance.

You don't have to deal with that with Wix. It's all out of the box. 

You just need to set your meta titles, descriptions and keyword to optimise your site, and off you go. You're off to the races, although it's a lot more complicated than that, you don't have to deal with any of the runarounds.  

It's all there, and you can know that through having a centralised source managed by a centralised source of developers, that all the themes and templates and inside Wix have been created with SEO compliance in mind. You don't have to worry about trying to make a non-compliant website compliant, because it's already compliant, to begin with.

Joseph Chesterton:
What happens if you want to make a specific change, like putting schema into your website and Wix doesn't support it? They probably do support schema, but let's say there's a specific meta tag that you want to put in that's specific to your use case. What do you do?

James Banks:
Well, I think if that is how you're approaching your site, then it sounds like you're pretty serious about, or you probably would have a dedicated search marketing agency helping you or a dedicated SEO person on your team doing this for you. 

If you're a business that had that sort of capacity, you probably wouldn't be like a small micro-ish business. You'd probably be a little bit larger in scale and you probably would need a more serious and robust platform perhaps. Not to say that Wix isn't a serious and robust platform, but different strokes for different folks, right? 

Joseph Chesterton:
Yeah, there's a lot to SEO and I don't know whether you could say one is better than the other, because there is a whole lot of things that are external to just the platform, but something that is part of the platform is e-commerce and being able to sell online, so why is Wix the better e-commerce platform?

James Banks:
Well, it's a combination of all of the above. If you're going to be selling online, you going to want to make sure your site's damn secure and all of your customer records, details, are all secure, and you get that, because the platform's closed, it's taken care of.

WordPress, again, if you do not know what you're doing, you're not properly maintaining and taking care of your site, and you're selling online, then you have then an even bigger target on your back, as hackers will want to go after you because of the chance of potentially being able to pick up sensitive information that they could use to exploit for monetary purposes. 

It's the safer and secure alternative, and if you're going to be building a business on e-commerce, then you want to make sure that your site is as safe and secure as possible because your website is your business. Why would you say WordPress is better than Wix at e-commerce, Joe?

Joseph Chesterton:
I think a big one is scalability. When you are building a business, you're wanting to scale the business. Being able to choose a platform that allows you to scale a lot bigger than just selling a couple of widgets online. 

I was trying to see if there are any big businesses on Wix that are e-commerce, and all I could see was the Hyatt company, but then when I clicked on it and inspected it, I think they've moved platforms. 

Whereas with WooCommerce, there's lots of big companies, people like the All Blacks, Singer sewing machines, Weber barbecues and many, many more. There are tens of thousands of small businesses that rely on WooCommerce and WordPress.

If you want to see the showcase, then all you need to do is Google WooCommerce Showcase and you'll be able to see there are hundreds of sites listed there that all use WordPress and WooCommerce to sell online. The biggest thing is scalability, and they both can handle e-commerce just fine. I think when it comes to customising it, you are confined to what Wix can do, whereas with WordPress, because it's open source, again, you can do whatever your mind can create.

James Banks:
Well, at the end of the day, I think it really depends on where you are at with your business journey. If you're just getting started or you're a micro-business or you've just started but you've got no online presence, then I think Wix is a fine solution. It's easy and simple. 

You don't need to bring in a developer. You don't need to bring a web agency in for you to be able to, if you're willing to spend the time, that is, put together a simple website that simply displays your website, or enables your business to have an online presence.

However, if you're looking to really scale up and go to the next step, professionalise your online presence, increase market share reach, run sophisticated campaigns, you need advanced feature sets. Even things that, as you mentioned with things and companies that you would consider them to be enterprise level companies, are relying on WordPress and WordPress e-commerce to deliver them. 

If you're looking for that level of scale, then typically your best use of time as a business person or a marketer wouldn't be trying to cobble together your own website. It makes way more sense from a cost efficiency and results point of view to outsource it to a professional web agency that knows what they're doing and has the case studies and track record to back it up.

In that case, and this is why, again, we specialise in the WordPress platform, it's a Swiss Army knife. We can do almost anything with it. All the issues that are commonly plagued with WordPress, such as security vulnerabilities, maintenance issues, breaches, hacks and performance. 

All of that stuff can be fixed and removed. In fact, it doesn't even become a problem as long as the company that is building your site on WordPress knows what they're doing and has a track record of producing high performance, secure websites, which is exactly what we do here at Web3. You can check out our site, web3.com.au/casestudies to see where we have deployed WordPress sites for all types of businesses, small, large multinational, governments and beyond.

At the end of the day, it boils down to where you're at with your business journey. If you are interested in upgrading your website and you are wanting to take it to the next level, then feel free to reach out to us, web3.com.au to find out more, but other than that, really not much else I have to say on this one. Anything else you want to add, Joe?

Joseph Chesterton:
Just that it's case dash studies if you want to get to our case studies page.

James Banks:
Yes. Case dash studies, that's right, thank you.

Joseph Chesterton:
Put in a redirect so that whether you go to one or the other, it'll still take you down.

James Banks:
There you go, some homework. Alright everyone, that's a wrap on another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. 

Hope you enjoyed that one and we'll be back at you real soon for another one on SEO versus social media marketing. We'll talk to you again real soon. 

 

LinkedIn and Facebook are two of the most popular social networking platforms globally. If this topic doesn’t scream ‘important’, then I don’t know what will. 

 

Throughout this debate, we uncover several factors that will influence your decision when deciding between Facebook and LinkedIn for advertising. These factors to consider include:

• Who is your target audience?
• How do they behave online?
• The different ways to target your audience
• Your previous business experiences
• Your budget 

 

Both networks promote different functionalities and reach different audiences. Follow along to learn more about LinkedIn and Facebook advertising and which network you should use for your advertising strategy. These factors will help to decipher your best path to advertise your business directly to your audience, LinkedIn or Facebook. Let’s make this decision as easy as a step-by-step checklist for you. 

LinkedIn Advertising 

Having an understanding of your audience can help to inform your advertising strategy. LinkedIn has a specific target audience of professionals and people in the workforce. Do you want to target business owners, B2B markets, industry leaders, or people who work in a specific industry or enterprise? Then LinkedIn might be the perfect advertising strategy for you. 

 

Let’s see your options...

 

Ways to target your audience

 

Advertising on LinkedIn is not that highly targeted. However, it specifically targets the workplace and other professional information. You can refine your users based on:

• Job title
• Current employer
• Industry
• Company size
• LinkedIn groups they’re apart of
• Education history
• Demographics

Budget

LinkedIn charges marginally more for CPC (cost per click) for each advertisement, averaging approximately five dollars per click. It may be more expensive than Facebook, but ultimately, it depends on who to target and what will receive better traction. It is not always about quantity or the number of leads, but rather the quality. Targeting a refined audience will help to translate leads with a higher conversion rate, potentially saving you money in the long run.

 

LinkedIn Ad formats

LinkedIn offers a range of display options for advertising. Although LinkedIn is a more professional network, these formats have not expanded past the traditional online displays. These ad types include: 

• Links
• Images
• Video
• PDF and carousel images
• Mail 

 

Facebook Advertising

Facebook has over 2.8 billion active users as of the end of 2020. It doesn’t necessarily mean it is the superior option, but the mass audience certainly helps. If you are an e-commerce business seeking to sell your product to specific consumers, Facebook is your way to go.

 

Ways to target your audience

 

Advertising on Facebook allows you to target your audience based on more factors. These include:

• Online behaviour
• Demographics
• Geographic location
• Education and employment history
• Industry
• Buying history
• General interest 
• Liked pages
• Their friends and peers

Budget

Facebook is a more affordable option in terms of cost-per-click. On average, Facebook receives approximately one dollar per click. It equals out to be quite worthwhile, considering the extent of advertising options Facebook offers. However, even though a lead from an email sign-up may in the future translate to a sale. Initially, you may be spending that money on clicks that are not converting because of the more broad reach. 

 

Facebook Ad formats

Facebook has recently extended their ad display options to include more engaging, immersive, and fullscreen experiences that entice the audience. These ad types allow customers to subscribe directly through Facebook with ease. These include:

• Link, image, video
• Slideshow
• Playables
• Instant Experience 
• Collection 
• Stories

 

Summary 

Both social network platforms allow you to deliver tailored advertisements to your customers to increase your conversion rate. In general, Facebook is superior for B2C marketing, while LinkedIn is best for B2B. There are some exceptions to this however this is the first step. LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networking platforms have some downsides to advertising. One potential issue is that you cannot create personalised post-click landing pages to follow. 

Transcript

 

James Banks:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate show. I'm your cohost, James Banks.

 

Joseph Chesterton:

And I am your cohost, Joseph Chesterton.

 

James Banks:

Today, we'll be debating LinkedIn ads versus Facebook ads. Which one is better? So I'll be taking the LinkedIn ads side of the debate.

 

Joseph Chesterton:

And I'm on the other side with Facebook ads.

 

James Banks:

So without further ado, let's start the debate.

 

So Joseph, why would you say Facebook ads are better than LinkedIn ads when it comes to producing results for businesses?

 

Joseph Chesterton:

Well, at the end of the day, it all comes down to numbers, and you can't beat the two biggest social network platforms in the world. 

 

Facebook has 2 billion users. Instagram has 1 billion users. LinkedIn, something like 700 million, maybe 800 million users. 

 

When you combine Facebook and Instagram, let's say they're all unique, which I'm assuming most of them would double up, that's 3 billion versus 800 million, let's say. That's a lot of people to market to that you miss out on with LinkedIn.

 

And also, it comes down to context. Facebook has a broad range of people. LinkedIn, typically, is more suited towards businesses and professional connections where the form of marketing is slightly different. 

 

But the reason Facebook is better than LinkedIn is to do with business-to-business marketing. For example, LinkedIn marketing has to start with a person. And where are those people? 

 

These people are on Facebook. 

 

Nine times out of 10, they'll be on Facebook or Instagram over LinkedIn.

 

And when you compare the time spent on each platform, Facebook and Instagram are light years ahead of LinkedIn. I believe the number of active users on Instagram is double LinkedIn. Facebook is almost quadruple. I haven't said too much about the best results, but when you look purely at numbers and the reach, then Facebook ads are far greater than LinkedIn. 

 

James Banks:

But as we know, it's not about the quantity. It's all about the quality. So I think, specifically, for LinkedIn and LinkedIn ads, you would ideally be having some type of business-to-business product and/or service. 

 

It's not really that consumer product friendly, although there's a couple of examples of businesses that have consumer products marketed successfully on LinkedIn, it's predominantly business-to-business as it is a business-to-business social media network.

 

That's not to say that it is the best place for business-to-business advertising. However, placing an ad on LinkedIn for a business-to-business product or service is going to have higher relevancy than Facebook. Imagine if you aren’t experienced, and letting the algorithm shout out to everyone (even your mother) on those Facebook ads. That is due to the specificity of the network and its site. 

 

When we talk about business-to-business, it’s around lead generation and what is better for business-to-business lead generation. In your opinion, Joseph, why would you say Facebook ads are better than LinkedIn at business-to-business lead generation?

 

Joseph Chesterton:

With Facebook ads, there are multiple platforms. It’s not just one website. You're able to target people on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and even have a gaming platform, Oculus. I'm yet to see Facebook ads on the Oculus, but it's only a matter of time.

 

James Banks:

I think they announced it already because they're forcing people to log in to Facebook to use the Oculus, which, if using their Facebook account, they can plug it into the ad network. They're yet to do that but no doubt that will be the next step.

 

Joseph Chesterton:

It's just like that episode of Silicon Valley, have you seen it, where they've got the video game and all these ads in the video game?

 

James Banks:

Yep.

 

Joseph Chesterton:

It's only a matter of time before Facebook does that if they take the Oculus platform any further than what it got first acquired. 

 

Facebook has a billion users. There's not even a billion on LinkedIn. The benefit of having more than one platform is you can sell across multiple platforms, a larger user base. I think that's where the lead generation is best because you can target, specifically, the people that you need to target where they are hanging out.

 

And yes, there would be a lot of cross-pollination, is that the word, across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. But the majority are on Facebook, Instagram, or both.

 

James Banks:

LinkedIn’s advertising manager is similar to Facebook. They've sort of cloned it but made it look like their own. It’s easier to target by occupation title on LinkedIn. You can safely assume that the person's employment history and occupation title is more accurate than on Facebook. 

 

A lot of people can sometimes just put fake ones into Facebook, with little implications. 

 

But, really what we find is it's usually not so much the platform that's the problem when it comes to lead generation through advertising or having just advertising that work. Typically, the biggest problem is the structure of the ad copy, the targeting settings. Does it have a compelling hook? Is creative compelling? Is the call to action and the offer on the landing page optimised for conversion? 

 

It's not necessarily the platform, that's the problem, it's all of these components. They're the ones that need to be improved for the results to be gained from.

 

LinkedIn generally targets placement and cost-per-click placement more than Facebook. It is because, again, going from the B2B phrases versus general phrases on Facebook, can upswing the cost-per-click. 

 

But as we have seen time and time again, cost-per-click isn't that much of an important metric depending on your campaign. It's the returns netted from your advertising effort, and cost-per-click is just one small component of being able to create a positive ROI.

 

LinkedIn can, however, be somewhat limited with ad placement and ad creative compared to Facebook. Generally, what do we recommend for small to medium businesses that are wanting to advertise their service? So, noting that your product and service and audience context makes sense to, do it on LinkedIn. 

 

We actually tend to prefer to swing to Google and Facebook over LinkedIn simply because of the size of the network, and generally speaking, the returns, what we've seen generally are better.

 

That's not to say that LinkedIn ads aren’t worth experimenting with or trialing or even doing with your business. Anything is worth trialing, and if it works, of course, you want to stick with it, but we tend to swing to Facebook and Google over LinkedIn for those reasons as you mentioned, Joseph. Things like audience reach, size, and even to a degree, targeting ad creative placements, selection, options, and different formats as well.

 

I kind of basically committed hara-kiri on my side there, but anyway, that's what my opinion is between the two. Joseph, there's any more you want to add to this episode?

 

Joseph Chesterton:

I've got a couple of stats for you, James. 

 

• Just over 95% of all businesses in Australia are small businesses (one that employs less than 19 people).
• There are over 2 million small businesses in Australia, and there are about 25 million people in Australia. 
• About 80% of the population use or have a smartphone. 
• The current top free apps in the app store are:
• • Instagram - 4th 
  • Messenger - 6th 
  • Facebook - 7th 
  • WhatsApp 12th 
• LinkedIn is 85th position in the app store, next to Sticker Emojis and Plant Identifier. 

 

It is safe to say that we know what platforms are the most successful or most popular among people.

 

James Banks:

It is from a mobile device point of view, though. And the majority of LinkedIn usage happens on a desktop. It is why the LinkedIn app is pretty much dead and buried because no one uses it on mobile. I mean, it's a good point. 

 

If you know that the mobile ad landscape is where you need to be for your advertising campaign, then LinkedIn can almost be crossed off that list. 

People simply do not use it on mobile, it’s a desktop-driven social media network. On the flip side, you can create some interesting advertising opportunities. If you know that from a conversions performance point of view, your desktop advertising efforts dramatically outstrip mobile.

 

Again, these are just semantics, so you have to test it to know if it works, but some interesting insights nonetheless.

 

Joseph Chesterton:

Essentially, Facebook is an app company. They make apps. And if their mobile apps were to be wiped out, then they'd be left with a website which... you can hardly use Instagram on desktop. It's a mobile app.

 

But that's all I've got to say, just a few zinger stats just to nail the coffin that Facebook is astronomically larger, and it seems like it's only getting bigger.

 

So that's it for me. That's a wrap, I'd say.

 

James Banks:

Thanks again, everyone, for listening and tune in next time where we'll be debating WordPress versus Wix, which one's better?

 

That's another episode of the Marketing Debate show, and we'll talk to you again real soon.

Both Google and Facebook generate over 80% of their revenue from advertising, clearly because of their extensive reach. That’s why Facebook remarketing and Google Display Network comes in handy with generating personalised and targeted ads to users. These tools help to increase brand loyalty, awareness, and click-through-rate. 

On one hand, Google is the world’s largest search engine. But on the other hand, Facebook is the largest social network. Both mediums are the perfect place to advertise, but for different reasons. 

After marketing for a long time, at Web3 we know that it is never one size fits all. 

Does this sound like something you want for your business? We discuss which advertising network is best for you and has the best ROI: Facebook remarketing or Google Display Network. 

Within each network, we break down:

• How it works
• How it can help
• Their display features
• Other factors to consider

 

Google Display Network

Google display ads help to promote and advertise your business on Google web properties, including YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, and more. Google Display Network embeds ads into websites that use Google advertising. GDN can often be confused with Google Search Ads, which display the ads as text-based search results above the organic results. Overall, GDN is an opportunity to build brand awareness and increase the click-through-rate of your site.

When your website receives clicks, a portion of your money goes to the service. However, this percentage of money does not come without its pros. Google display ads offer an impressionable global reach. It also allows you to connect with users of over a million websites, such as news articles or blogs.

Important Features

Google display network offers a variety of display formats. They include text, image, flash image ads, in-video ads, mobile web, and mobile games. They are all designed to capture the attention of potential customers. You are bound to find your desired target marketing through at least one of the available formats. Although, these aspects need to have approved specifications based on their display ad requirements. 

How does Google Display Network work?

GDN offers a variety of targeting options to ensure your advertisement is targeting your desired and relevant audiences. 

I bet you’ve noticed certain ads appearing on the webpages you visit in your spare time and wonder, how did they know I’m interested in that? Well, Google notes its users’ previous site visits and clicks, using cookies to link your interests and demographic categories, showing you these highly targeted sites.

 

Facebook Remarketing

Facebook remarketing includes displaying target ads to audiences who have not progressed on your website or have abandoned their cart. Cart abandonment has recently increased. It can be immensely frustrating pinning down why your audience is clicking through and bouncing around your site or adding items to their cart but not progressing. Facebook tracking pixels will identify these users and deliver them with highly targeted ads to lure them back into where they left off. Cool, right?

People spend more time on Google, yet Facebook receives higher pageviews. It is because it can target them more times. Frequency is key to most marketing strategies. Facebook remarketing is the perfect way to win back lost traffic, as it allows you to target specific demographics showing your ads up front and center.

Facebook Newest features

When it comes to ad creative, Facebook has gone above and beyond over the past couple of years. They introduced their ‘instant experience’ which showcases a product or service from the user’s screen. With the inclusion of a 360 video, mobile devices are now interactive and engaging. This new inclusion makes for a fun, sophisticated and professional experience for your customer to reconnect with your business. 

How does Facebook Remarketing work?

To target these customers, you must first create a custom audience. These could be existing customers or people who have interacted with you on other platforms. Then add and test your pixels manually or via tools like Shopify. It is a valuable platform that can target your lost leads, increase conversion rate, and cart abandonment issues. 

Reasons for Consideration

People are, on average, spending about one hour on Facebook, which is significantly lower compared to the combination of Google’s web properties. Facebook remarketing also has a lower click-through-rate, potentially being affected by the minor ad formats and options for display compared to Google Display. The placement of these ads includes newsfeed, sidebar and mobile. 

Summary

Facebook remarketing and Google Display Network can increase your ROI and rapidly grow your business in conjunction with organic advertising. Overall, it comes down to what your business needs and the behaviour of your audience. 

Transcript

James Banks:
Hello everyone. And, welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate show. I'm your host, James Banks.

Joseph Chesterton:
And, I'm your cohost, Joseph Chesterton.

James Banks:
Today we will be debating remarketing. Specifically about the two gorillas in the room, Facebook versus Google Display Network remarketing, and which one is best? I'll be debating for Facebook remarketing.

Joseph Chesterton:
And obviously, I'll be talking about the Google Display Network.

James Banks:
So, Joseph for why is the Google Display Network better at remarketing, or better for remarketing compared to Facebook?

Joseph Chesterton:
Well, firstly what is Google Display Network and Facebook marketing? Google Display Network is often confused for Google search ads, but it shouldn’t. It's a completely different part of the Google advertising suite. 

Display ads can help to promote your business. When browsing online, people see ads on other websites. Those ads are put/injected into those websites via the Google Display Network. These ads can be placed on any website that uses Google advertising, YouTube, Gmail or mobile apps that use Google Display Network advertising. 

Websites hosting the Google Display Network script, get a portion of the money once the ad gets clicks. As a result, Google gets to display the ad on their website. The Google Display Network reaches most users worldwide and has millions of websites using it. 

What's Facebook remarketing, James?

James Banks:
Facebook remarketing, is quite similar to how you describe Google Display Network. However, rather than your remarketing ad displayed on any one of the thousand websites in the Google Display Network, it only shows up on one website, Facebook.

This will appear if you have the Facebook pixel on your website, and active Facebook ads remarketing campaign. You can configure your settings, controls and marketing scripts via our previous episode on a Google display versus direct integration through Tag Manager.

But essentially, with Facebook remarketing, your ad can show up to these users’ Facebook. 

When they enter your website, they get ‘cookied’, and once they’re on Facebook, depending on your settings, they will see your ad. That's essentially how it works in a nutshell. 

You can also choose your remarketing ads to show up on other Facebook properties, such as Instagram and Messenger. You also can select and choose which platform you wish your ad to show up in.

Joseph Chesterton:
So, which one produces the best results? The answer to that is like how long is a piece of string. It comes down to what you need. 

So, where are your customers hanging out? 

Google Display Network, covers 95% of web traffic, so that’s all your news outlets, blogs, and random cat video websites. If they’re using advertising on their website, it’ll most likely be through Google Display Network. 

If your customers are on those websites, you can target them using Google Display Network. Whereas, with Facebook remarketing, you're just limited to Facebook’s platforms. So, if that's what you're targeting, then Facebook may be the solution for that.

But chances are, your customers won't be just on Facebook, they'll be going across any number of websites. Google Display Network, will cookie the user and display your ads across multiple websites, then you can essentially have a billboard right in front of the user's face, across their entire online journey. 

However, with Facebook remarketing, they use the Facebook pixel to track you so they can see where you're going around the web, but it's not until you returned to Facebook when you get remarketed to. Overall, Facebook is essentially just a couple of apps. Whereas with Google Display Network, you're targeting the entire internet. Done deal.

James Banks:
Well, not quite Joseph. Yes, Facebook might not have the actual width or breadth of individual site placement. However, the activity within its platforms is dramatically higher with higher dwell time. 

For example, people spend a lot more time per day on Facebook, as opposed to any one of the thousands of sites in the display network. As the saying goes in advertising, the business that is the most recent and frequent and front of mind is the one that ultimately earns customer loyalty and the sale.

So, if your audience is spending a fair bit of time on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger, and your remarketing messages are showing up in front of them everywhere, you don't want them to get burnt out. 

There is a high chance that they could click through and potentially make the sale because they spend most of their time there. But, as you said, it's very situationally dependent on the business, and how they're marketing and advertising. It’s one component of a big piece of the wheel. 

So, why would you say Google Display Network is better for lead generation or sale generation, as opposed to Facebook remarketing, Joseph?

Joseph Chesterton:
It comes back to where your customers are hanging out. They may spend a lot of time on Facebook, but their entire online journey (if you consider every single website that a user visits) will take up the majority of the time. 

So, with that said, if you're able to put banner ads or billboards, essentially, in front of people and target them across every single website, then it kind of can feel more natural. Whereas, with remarketing, you have to wait until they return to Facebook. 

It just feels like they're stalking you. 

The great thing about a display network is if you go to one site you can set triggers, so that if they go to another site, then a different or a similar ad can be displayed. 

You can get crafty with your advertising so that it's easier to sell. Customers will then more likely be able to see your ads and buy from you.

There's a really good story I heard, it's about a small toothbrush or toothpaste company... This smaller company were trying to get into Walmart or one of the big department stores. They worked out where the head office of Walmart was and their geolocation. 

They set the display network to target only people in that specific area. The ad was something along the lines of ‘Walmart staff have stinky breath - that's why they should stock this toothpaste and, all their problems will be gone.’. Something along those lines. They targeted the head office of Walmart who was in charge of the stocking and became visible to the people at Walmart.

After seeing it all over the internet, they ended up contacting the toothpaste saying, stop this, you're ruining our reputation, we don't have stinky breath. This then opened up the conversation to stock the toothpaste brand in Walmart. 

The amazing thing was that they only spent tens of dollars on their advertising, and were able to target the people in Walmart. 

If they had done that on Facebook, then perhaps they wouldn't have been able to have the same effect because that ad was everywhere. And it made the people at Walmart think that this toothpaste company was spending millions of dollars to advertise it.

This toothpaste that they stocked was inferior to the one that they already stocked. So, it's a pretty interesting story that they used the Google Display Network to do that. And, they did that with pennies, versus targeting millions of people. 

It was a very interesting thing, if you're smart about it, you can target people and cause a big impact. It just depends on your ability as a marketer, I guess, because yes, you can do lead generation on Facebook, but can you target specific people across the entirety of the internet?

James Banks:
I love that story. But I'd argue, you could probably have gotten a better result by doing it through Facebook. I don't think Facebook ads were in play when that story happened. 

But, here's the thing, they could have remarketed to anyone that works at Walmart as an example, or has visited the site and works at Walmart. And then, they show them an ad set of, a Walmart person with stinky breath, or whatever it might be. Which is arguably more targeted than just using a geolocation filter. 

This is the thing where I think Facebook wins... when you do the good old Google versus Facebook debate, it still is a tried and tested method. It allows you to target friends of friends.

So, you have someone that has entered your site, and their friends meet your targeting criteria. You could then have that remarketing ad show up to the friends of the friends, through custom audiences, things like that. So, it can give you different options of targeting, a little bit more personalised targeting as opposed to the display network. 

However, as we have said earlier before, it does depend on how you're marketing your business. For example, if you are using Facebook ads, non remarketing, like straight-up Facebook ads, brand Allegiant campaigns, someone enters your site and it makes sense to remarket to them. 

They abandon your site. 

You go to e-commerce, they don't check out. It makes sense to remarket to them with a cart abandonment ad through the Facebook platform, cause that's how they originally discovered you.

However, ultimately if you're remarketing on Facebook, then why not also include remarketing across the Google Display Network? 

As we mentioned earlier in the piece, recency and frequency is a core component to being able to have the brand that wins the brand loyalty of the uneducated customer, at the end of the day. So, being able to combine both of them is typically how we approach things, and then being able to tailor the targeting and the platforms accordingly, depending on the context of the business, the products and services being offered. 

So, with that said, Joseph, is there anything else you wanted to add to this debate?

Joseph Chesterton:
No, I think I'll just echo what you said. It depends on where your audience is and what you're selling. Chances are your clients are going to be in multiple places. They will be on Facebook because it's the largest social network in the world. 

But, they also will access dozens of other sites where the Google Display Network will work. So, what better way to sell to them then every single place they go online. 

So, I would say both are just as good as each other. You just need to know who to target.

James Banks:
Well, I think that's a wrap. So, again, thank you so much for shooting into another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate show. Hope you enjoyed that and learned something new. We will be in your earbuds, hopefully again, real soon. 

So, with that said and done, have a lovely day. We'll talk to you again real soon.

Want to know the best ways to understand your target market to inform your digital marketing strategy? 

There are two ways to extract data from your website to turn it into valuable insights about your users. These script tags come from Integrated Direct Marketing and Google Tag Manager.

What do you get when you seat a developer and a marketer in a room to debate marketing tags? Well, stay tuned to this marketing debate episode. It is going to be blazing.

We outline the best tool so you can understand your audience and increase your ROI. 

Direct integration

Tags, otherwise known as pixels, are pieces of code in Javascript that perform specific tasks on your website. These tags collect data to define your target audience on your website and how they behave. This data can form insights into your web development efforts. It is useful for developing deep insights into your target market and create a seamless experience for consumers to interact with your brand. 

Direct integration uses various ways and features to communicate with your target audience. It allows you to add these script tags directly to your website. This method has the scripts in specific locations on your website, for example, the header or footer. By doing this, your website will inherently load quicker due to the lack of an additional tag manager doing the work. 

Developers tend to lean more towards the Integrated Direct Marketing approach. This method is free from configuring issues and slow load times. Implementing this method yourself is quick, easy, and has no unnecessary complexity. 

“I can just code something to say, ‘If it needs to be done, do it.’ -That’s the beauty of integrated direct marketing” - Joseph.

Google Tag Manager

Do you struggle with tracking your audiences scrolling, form and cart abandonment, video views, exit links, and more? Google Tag Manager can do that all in one place.

Google Tag Manager is a free Tag management system. This tool allows you to manage, store and update snippets of code on your website without modifying the code. It includes features such as conversion tracking, site analytics, and remarketing tags. These tags include Google Analytics, Adwords, Heatmap tracking, and Facebook Pixels. It eliminates the complexity of knowing how to code or programming language for web development. 

Google Tag Manager is simple, secure, and speedy. It involves implementing a simple Javascript tag into your website. It allows your many other marketing tags to be used in conjunction and stored in one place. 

For aspects of advertising and remarketing, Google Tag Manager is the perfect solution. It helps streamline the process for marketers without having to harass developers to do the integration. It is a win-win. 

How to implement Google Tag manager

You will require the snippet to install Google Tag Manager to your website. Paste the javascript code into your pages. This tool helps to obtain insights into short links on your website. Google Analytics can then further analyse this data. 

Caution

It may sound great to handle your tags without understanding a line of code. We found it appealing too. However, it is essential to understand the technical implications of tagging as certain elements can hinder the performance, load time, and page structure. 

For example, using Facebook pixels is a great start, but you need to know what they are before chucking them in there. 

 

Transcript

James Banks:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. I'm your host, James Banks.

Joseph Chesterton:
And I'm your host, Joseph Chesterton.

James Banks:
Today we'll be debating all things Google Tag Manager versus direct integration of marketing tags on a website, which one is the best way for businesses to do? So for this one, I'll be taking the, you guessed it, Google Tag Manager side of the debate.

Joseph Chesterton:
I'll be going straight in with the direct integration.

James Banks:
Alrighty. Well, before we get started, let's start with some definitions of terms. What do we mean by Direct integration, Joseph?

Joseph Chesterton:
When we're talking about Google Tag Manager versus direct integration, we're talking about analytics or script tags, which-

James Banks:
Such as the Facebook pixel, the LinkedIn insights tag, the search console snippet thing, overall Marketing tags.

Joseph Chesterton:
They need to be integrated into your website to be able to track the data on your website. So without them, you won't have the data. So there are two ways to do it. 

You can put it into Google Tag Manager and use the Google Tag Manager script. That is essentially Direct integration, but only the one tag or you can put all your scripts in the header or wherever they need to be on your website manually. 

So with that said, the one that's better for performance’s direct integration because I chose that topic. No, but seriously direct integration. When we say performance, there are two different performances that you could be asking. One is the ease of use. The other one is I guess, speed of integration and speed of website after scripts have been integrated.

With Google Tag Manager, because you're relying on essentially a bucket to hold all the other scripts. You first have to put the bucket in the website, then all the scripts sit inside the bucket, which is one extra step for your website. 

Direct integration has the scripts all in the exact spots that they need to be on your website, whether they're in the header or the footer, deferred or whatnot, you can do that directly into your website and the speed of your website will load quicker because there's no need for an additional tag manager to handle any of the loadings.

As a developer and with what? With a decade of experience in building websites and online marketing, I want a solution that when I put it in, does the job and then gets out of the way. 

There's no additional configuring and things like that that need to be done. You could say that one needs to be configured more than the other. But as a developer, I can do that myself. 

I don't need an additional layer of complexity and I don't need little dials to be switched on and off when I need things done. I can just code something to say, "If it needs to be done, do it." I think that's where the performance of direct integration is the winner. You, as a marketer, James, have a different opinion.

James Banks:
Well, as a developer, Joseph, doesn't anything drive you more up the wall than hotheaded marketers telling you that they need to put in all of these whizzbang marketing scripts into the website you've made and they need it done yesterday and to get on with the job? Doesn't that give you a headache?

Joseph Chesterton:
No. I love it.

James Banks:
Sarcasm duly noted. But seriously, this is the reason why Google Tag Manager was invented. It was so marketers can get on the job with doing online advertising and marketing without getting in the way of a developer or trying to do it themselves and making a mess of the situation.

Messing around with JavaScript, directly integrating JavaScript into a site, you need to know what you're doing. You have to, at least at the very minimum, understand how to code or the code behind the website to do this right.

Google Tag Manager fixes that problem. All that you need to do is put in one clean, asynchronous JavaScript tag into your website. Then, all other marketing tags can then be entered into tag manager without touching the code. Or without disrupting Joseph on his lovely zen coding session with things that have to be done by yesterday.  

Even on the point of cleanliness and ease of use, wouldn't you much rather have one single script integration versus say multiple different incisions across the side? I mean, isn't it a lot cleaner just to have the one. Wouldn't you say that that is the truth?

Joseph Chesterton:
From a visual code perspective? Yes, but if you look at the mess that marketers put into Google Tag Manager, versus the perfection that we web developers create, it's night and day difference and we won't slow the website down because we know how to build it so there's no impact on that or minimal impact. 

Whereas if you're throwing in tens of thousands of scripts and there's no control on that, then potentially it would be even worse seeing the results in like Google Lighthouse or whatever tracking tools you're using to see how your website's performing.

James Banks:
But most modern marketing scripts are handled asynchronously so it doesn't matter the number of them per se. That's not going to leave a noticeable impact on performance if they're all being loaded asynchronously.

Joseph Chesterton:
Potentially, but there are still scripts slowing the site down. If you're using Google Analytics to track visitors on your website, you should care about the demographics. But if you aren't and you've got all the little dials switched to on, you are making a script be downloaded on your website that's far greater than needed. 

If you’re integrating it manually through direct integration, then you know the best way to do it, that will be the least performance impactful.

James Banks:
But when it comes to, what's going to save you the most time in the long run and arguably be the most reliable solution in the long run. You go to say, Google Tag Manager has it over direct integration.

Not only it makes it much faster to correctly set up marketing scripts and then get them to point at the right place at the right time at the right point in your website, as opposed to trying to do that manually, which is just code upon code upon code. 

It's a lot more time-efficient to do it. The built-in tools, the tag manager, allow you to do it a lot faster and time is money in business so what saves you more time and things such as trying to get your scripts working, let's face it, it's a necessary evil as part of advertising. 

It's not necessarily the fun stuff or the stuff that's going to get the ROI at the end of the day. It allows you to get on with the job so I really can't see how you could say that doing it the old fashioned way, Joseph, could be the most time-efficient or headache efficient way of doing this.

Joseph Chesterton:
If it means that you don't have to pester me with adding another script into the head, then I'm all for it but if we do it the most performant way for the website, then I guess it's a time versus performance versus cost equation that you have to juggle.

James Banks:
Well with that said, which one would you say is the better solution overall?

Joseph Chesterton:
I’m biased towards direct integration. I can't pinpoint exactly why I dislike it. I think it's because it's a layer on top. I don't know if that's anything that we can debate on, but I think it's just because it's lazy or it's too simple that you don't need to think and do things potentially the better way manually. 

I don't know if that answers, which one's better overall, but at the same time, I do agree with Google Tag Manager. If you can do something or just flick a switch and not have to bother a developer, then that's potentially time and money-saving.

James Banks:
So what you're saying is you enjoy getting harassed by hotshot marketers to put scripts into the site yesterday, right?

Joseph Chesterton:
No.

James Banks:
Yeah well, I’m biased towards Google Tag Manager. Okay. Let me break that down. If you only need to put Google Analytics into your website, Google Tag Manager is kind of overkill. You don't need a marketing script management solution if you're only ever going to need to put Google analytics as a marketing script into your site. 

However, if you're doing things like search advertising, Facebook advertising, LinkedIn, or whatever form of advertising, remarketing in particular, then you ultimately should be using a tag management solution, i.e. Google Tag Manager. 

This is what it was invented to do, to make it 10 times easier for marketers to get on the job, get on and do the job well without having to harass and wait for developers to do all of the integration for them.

So depending on the actual needs of your site, either which can be the best way, there are many good approaches to direct integration. Firstly, if you have a developer on staff that's fast and efficient and knows what they're doing, such as Joseph. 

Secondly, you don't need many marketing scripts integrated into your site at all. Ultimately it depends on what your current needs, wants are, and future needs and wants are with your overall digital marketing efforts. 

If you're interested in finding more about Google Tag Manager, I've created an entire YouTube series about it. We will add the link to it in the show notes, or you can jump onto YouTube and just type in Web3 Google Tag Manager, you should see the playlist and enjoy finding more about this quite amazing tool.

So with that said and done, that is another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show concluded. Tune in next time where we will be discussing all things remarketing. Thank you, and have a nice day.

Are you tired of spending hours creating engaging content and doing everything right on paper, but still not seeing results? This Marketing Debate highlights some SEO secrets on how to bring a steady stream of organic traffic to your website. Choosing the right tool means getting accurate data and having a fool-proof plan. And obviously, a fool-proof plan will boost your business.

Search Console and SEMrush collect and report data differently from each other. Here’s what every digital marketer should know about managing and running SEO Campaigns. 

Let us compare the two SEO tools for you. 

What is Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free web service for webmasters that optimises visibility, indexing status, monitors, and troubleshoots for your website. Yes, you heard that right, it’s free - one of the largest digital turn-ons this year. 

Google Search Console Features

We all know that Google doesn’t share its SEO algorithm or give any hints to how you can improve it. After all, that will defeat its purpose. However, Google presents all the data and ideas to let you put the puzzle pieces together to form your analysis.

As well as highlighting the technical errors, it has all the necessary features that can improve your website, including: 

- Search appearance
- performance
- Search traffic
- Technical status updates
- Data crawlability and more

The rule maker

Google Search Console is, well, a part of Google, surprise surprise. It has laid out the framework, making the data 100% reliable. SEMrush has to play by Google's rules and has a minor lag in scraping the data.

Traditionally backlinks, both internally and externally, were a big part of SEO and still are. However, as Google sets the framework, they are now focussing on user experience.

New age SEO is about making your website the best it can be for the user. I mean, it is the whole reason for your business. With Google search console, the data you get comes directly from Google, not third party sources. It specifically reports on how you can optimise for that exact feature. Data from their reports can inform you how to improve the user experience of your website.

Google has three Core Web Vitals that outline what is essential to your website and its user experience. You can find these in the reports they provide, which are significant factors for ranking well in Google Search. These include:

- Loading performance (How fast does it appear on the screen?)
- Responsiveness (How fast does the page react to user input?)
- Visual stability (Are things moving around on the screen while it is loading?)

These are all aspects of mobile visibility issues, which are a significant part of SEO. It is integral to incorporate these elements into strategies for the future success of your rankings.

Key Takeaways

Google Search Console is focused on the data and improving the user experience of your website. It ensures your website holds the most suited solution for your audience. Overall, we all have to abide by Google's rules. 

Google search console, however, can be tricky to navigate initially. It can be destructive if not done well. But, will also do wonders when you get the hang of it. With its limited features, using Google Search Console alongside Google analytics can provide you with all the features you need to track your search engine ranking efforts. 

What is SEMrush?

Google often makes things completely obscure or hard to interpret on purpose to throw people off mastering their algorithms. It keeps it interesting! But this is where SEMrush comes into play. It specifically tries to fill in the blanks that Google doesn't. 

SEMrush Features

SEMrush has all the optimisation tools and features you need. It has hundreds of features that will all help you to optimise your website. Some of the stand out features include:

- Site audit tool
Prioritises SEO issues and highlights the ones that need your utmost attention affecting you currently. 

- Keyword magic tool
Duplicate pages impact your search rankings. This feature helps to find semantically related keywords and long-tail keywords with high traffic potential. It can help you make your pages more concise.

- Competitive analysis
It is a time-consuming task that often costs a lot. SEMrush can easily track competitors at the click of a button.

- Backlinks
Build a list of spam backlinks or find ways to get new, relevant links to your site.

Much more!

SEMrush is extremely good at everything that has to do with analysing backlinks, which is what traditional SEO was all about. It's well-engineered for web agencies, which is why we use it here at Web3. 

The ‘Leatherman’ of SEO toolkits

In other words, it is not just a one-trick pony. SEMrush is a whole suite of tools. It is easily readable, as opposed to just giving you the data, like Google Search Console.

SEMrush has the means to tell you that your meta title tag is not long enough or highlight new and emerging competitors that are threatening to outrank you. 

It suggests actionable ways to improve your website, fix issues, and track those changes in search. It joins the dots for you and makes the process of your SEO, digital marketing, and business requirements streamlined. 

All in all, it specifically tells you what you are doing right and wrong. It provides you with ideas for future optimisation and ways to mitigate issues. How good is that?

Is it worth your money?

SEMrush is, unfortunately, a paid tool. The different pricing options can help cover most budgets. However, it is still an ongoing expense. 

If you're starting with no prior experience or limited content pieces, we recommend starting with Google Search Console. Then build up to SEMrush when your budget allows for it. 

The features can be overwhelming with knowing how to begin. Step-by-step guides that show you how to use SEMrush easily are useful. However, there is free training included in your subscription that helps you to improve your performance. 

Transcript

James Banks:
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. I'm your host, James Banks.

Joseph Chesterton:
And I'm your host, Joseph Chesterton.

James Banks:
And today we'll be discussing all things SEO related, well SEO software and tracking related. So for this debate, we'll be discussing Google Search Console versus SEMrush. Which one's better? Which one is best for managing and running SEO campaigns? 

So for this debate, I'll be taking the SEMrush side of the debate.

Joseph Chesterton:
And obviously, I'll be on the Search Console side.

James Banks:
Alrighty, well without further ado, let's kick things off. So Joseph, why is Google Search Console better than SEMrush when it comes to SEO and using the software to help get better the results of your SEO performance?

Joseph Chesterton:
Google Search Console is a web service that allows webmasters to optimise visibility and indexing status. 

So an annoying thing with Google is that they don't share their SEO algorithm. They don't say, this is how you improve your SEO. But, they give you all the data and ideas on what you need to do, and you put the puzzle pieces together to come up and form your analysis. 

Google Search Console is Google's tool that has all the necessary tools to improve your SEO. It is focused on the data and improving the user experience of your website.  It is essentially what modern SEO is. It's making sure that your website is the best solution for getting answers, interactivity, or whatever they've come to your site to find. 

They won't say things like, ‘your meta title tag is not long enough’, SEMrush will. They will track things like performance and how your website pages are tracking in search results. 

You can pull this from SEMrush, but it's not straight from the horse's mouth like Google provides. Of course, they will offer things that will enhance your website if there are any issues like indexing and mobile issues. 

Mobile is a massive factor for SEO. As well as that, if your website has a security issue or an issue that you manually need to tell Google to prevent or to stop, then you can do that in the search console. It gives you a summary of links that are traditionally a large part of SEO, backlinks (both external and internal) to your website. 

One big thing with Search Console versus SEMrush is that Google sets the standard, and then SEMrush has to catch up and play by Google's rules. 

For example, core web vitals is a metric that Google created. They are quality signals of your website that state whether you're delivering a great user experience. You can get that data in SEMrush. But because Google made it, and that's what their new SEO ranking factors are, they have data linked to your website because you've got tracking built into your website.

Core web vitals are three different things that Google thinks are core to a good user experience. 

The three pillars are loading performance, responsiveness, and visual stability. They call it the largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift. 

It is all techno jumble, but basically, it means how fast does stuff appear on the screen, how quickly the page reacts to user input and if it moves around on the screen while it's loading. Those three things are what you can see inside the reports in Google Search Console, and Google considers those to be significant SEO factors. 

So if you can track those things in Google Search Console, and you're able to action those things and improve them, then your website should be SEO performant. 

So in saying that, James, why is SEMrush better than Search Console?

James Banks:
Well, for those who don't know what SEMrush is, it’s a professional SEO, and search engine marketing tool (SEM for short). It also has a pretty significant content marketing and social media marketing component to its toolset that we use, but anyway, we'll stay focused on the SEO/ SEM side of things for this episode. 

Search Console is actually progressively getting worse. It refreshed its UI back in 2018, and has actually gotten rid of all the useful stuff. You alluded to the reason a bit earlier in your piece, Joseph. 

Google is trying to make things as obscure as it possibly can, whilst throwing out a couple of breadcrumbs to suggest how to make a site better in search. It does this on purpose because it doesn't want people scheming the algorithm, which led to all of these spam sites, and that was very much the 2000s of the internet, so it's kind of a good thing.

But at the same time, from my point of view, the tools are becoming increasingly obscure with actually providing meaningful, useful, and relevant data that you can then use to actually better improve the experience of your website, and therefore the experience of the web itself, that's Google's mission. 

SEMrush basically has all of the tools and features that someone looking to optimise and improve their website from a search point of view, really needs. 

There are two things in Google Search Console that I would say are useful. Firstly, submitting your site map, which isn't really that useful in the grand scheme of things. Secondly, its performance report, which is actually becoming less useful. It used to be way better before they reskinned it back in 2018.

Whereas SEMrush offers hundreds of different features that are actually useful for an SEO and search marketer. Okay, so in defence, SEMrush is a paid tool and Google Search Console is free. 

If you are serious about SEO and search engine marketing, you really should be investing in a professional SEO SEM tool, such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and a whole other bunch out there. SEMrush is our preferred tool. We like it, it's not necessarily saying it's the best, but it's our favourite. It's particularly well optimising and engineered for search agencies like Web3. 

That's why we choose it above the rest, but in all honesty, I cannot see how you could say Google Search Console is better than a fully-fledged professional marketing suite for SEO such as SEMrush unless you have something to retort on that one, Joseph.

Joseph Chesterton:
Search Console is all about the data, it's not about creating a profile and seeing results, and things like what SEMrush provides.

James Banks:
So, the things that are actually useful.

Joseph Chesterton:
Well, you can get that data, you just have to look at what the reports are telling you. SEMrush is more than just a tool for webmasters to allow for indexing status checking and to optimise visibility, it's a whole suite of tools, hence why we use it in conjunction with Search Console. But I guess the thing is, what one would provide better results, or allow you to improve your website better?

James Banks:
Well, obviously SEMrush will. That's what it's designed to do. It's designed to not only tell you what the problems are, but also then how to fix them, and then also to be able to track those fixes against your impact and search. 

Search Console does it a bit, but it doesn't join the dots between fixing the problems and seeing an impact in search as clearly and as well as SEMrush does. So in my opinion it is superior when it comes to making improvements to a website. 

Tools like its content analysis tool, keyword density reports, and technical site audit, are probably the best thing that it does out of everything. Yes search Console can sort of do it, but it's nowhere near as in depth and as useful and as actionable as SEMrush's technical side auditing features are. 

Not sure how you're going to be able to beat this one, Joe.

Joseph Chesterton:
Well, I think SEMrush has a really good feature where it suggests actionable things to do to improve your website. At the end of the day, old school SEO was about links and keywords and things, which is what SEM does really well, obviously. 

But the new age SEO, which is what Google is trying to position Search Console around, is about user experience and making sure that your website is the best it can be for the user. So the data that you get in Search Console comes directly from Google, it's not from third-party sources. And so the data that you get, you're able to improve your user experience on, which is essentially the new age SEO.

And putting the other useful features of SEMrush aside, when it comes to index status and optimising the visibility of your website, all the features are there for Search Console, you just have to know how to use them and how you will interpret the results. So overall, which one would you say is better?

James Banks:
Well, honestly it surprises me that the majority of businesses we come across don't even know what Google Search Console is. I think that's a big fail on Google's front. Most people know what Google Analytics is, and most people have Google Analytics installed on their website. However, the mass majority of people have got no idea what the Google Search Console is, and do not have an account or have it set up and integrated into their site. 

It's free, it's a no brainer. Even if you don't care about SEO, at the very least Search Console will tell you if you're making any show-stopping issues, mobile usability issues, that is just affecting the overall user-friendliness of your website. So at the very very least, even if you don't care about SEO or SEM, or anything like that, get Google Search Console installed and set up and integrated into your website.

As well, if you are brand new to SEO, then Search Console is actually not a bad place to start. It's very, very basic, and that's actually a good thing. The only negative I would say that SEMrush has is unless you're a search professional, the full paid version can be overwhelming and you might not know where to begin. You won't even understand what it's doing. 

There's definitely a learning curve to it to be able to fully utilise its feature set. Fortunately, it's got some very in-depth and free training on how to actually use it to better your search performance, but just getting started with SEO Search Console is a good place to start. 

However, if you want to take your search marketing seriously, or more seriously, and you're looking to drive and track and measure your results over time, using a professional tool such as SEMrush is definitely the way to go. Do you have any other words on that Joe?

Joseph Chesterton:
I think the two biggest things that Google Search Console beats over SEMrush is one, it's straight from the horse's mouth. The data comes from Google and your website, so you know that it's 100% accurate. 

And two, on your daily ritual of Googling yourself and you type James Banks into search result, if you're tracking the keyword in Search Console on your website, it will show up in the search results as a little widget saying how you're currently tracking on your website. So that's a useful feature rather than having to dig through massive reports in SEMrush.

James Banks:
But you do realise SEMrush's data is just simply scraping Google's data that is shown in Search Console. It's not its own data set, it's data set, and yes it does populate it with a couple of other publicly known or reputable data sets, but the majority of it is the same data you're seeing in Google. It's not the data is the problem.

Joseph Chesterton:
Yeah, that's right, but they still have to scrape it, whereas Google it's Google.

James Banks:
Yeah, that's true, that's a fair point. It does have a little bit of a lag time between what Google tells you and what is shown in SEMrush, but honestly, does it make a difference? Okay, not to sound like we're summarising it best is both, but it kind of actually is. 

You can use both together, you can use search console to crosscheck SEMrush to make sure there are no discrepancies there. Joseph is right, Search Console is closer to the single point of truth, and it's more fresh and relevant from a data point of view, but we use Google Search Console to cross-reference the SEMrush data, and vice versa, to make sure we're not getting any false positives between the two platforms.

But anyway, I think we have said enough about these two pieces of software. If you're interested in signing up for a free trial to SEMrush and putting your site through a tactical audit to see how it could be improved, we'll put a little link in the episode show notes. So I highly encourage you to jump on, create an account, run an audit, and see where you can improve your website so you can hopefully improve its position in search, get more people to your business, and hopefully turn them into new clients and customers. 

So without further ado that's another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show done. Tune in next time for where we will be discussing all things Google Tag manager and analytics integration. Thank you and have a nice day.

Discover more at https://web3.com.au/search-console-vs-SEMrush

You’ve heard the saying quality over quantity, right? We are sure it has come about when talking about food at restaurants, television shows, and now even what type of hosting to choose as a business. It’s essential to know when to make the right call for what business expenses need priority. 

Is choosing premium hosting worth the higher cost? Or can you get everything you need without spending more than you need to? 

In the debate; Premium Vs. Affordable hosting, we uncover the hidden truths behind choosing the right option for your website.

Affordable hosting

Affordable hosting is often a server with generic software where you can build whatever you want. Thousands of websites opt for this option because of the price. If you are willing to spare one coffee per month, it may be worthwhile. It is perfect for smaller businesses with limited traffic, files, and storage on their pages. They are stored and hosted on a single, shared server. These perks do not always have to mean they lack functionality. But, they're built for any platform which can lead to performance and security issues.

Cons

The term shared hosting is an interchangeable word for cheap hosting as it does just that. By opting for cheap hostings, you will be sharing the features with others. It may result in a slower load speed. You will also be limited to other features such as security and resources like a personalised domain name. 

Your audience may question the authority of your website when it ends with wordpress.com. A clean and on-brand URL will help put the metaphoric cherry on top of your website.

Cheaper plans have storage caps and data limits that will restrict your capabilities on your website. Storage caps directly affect your page's performance and can even extend to your search engine ranking efforts. 

Nobody likes a slow website. Sharing the same hosting server with other sites will increase your load speed and decrease your click-through-rate.

Pros

Do you love to hear the bad news before the good, or is it just us? 

Shared or Standard websites are more affordable, less complicated, and quicker to finish up. You still get all the necessary features to keep your website up and running in a cheap and obtainable way, letting you focus on other areas of your business in more detail. 

The main feature which stands out is the price. You will be saving up to ten times more by relying on shared hostings. The extra money in your pocket can make the difference for other significant business aspects that may not have cheaper options. You can always upgrade at a later stage. 

You can look at it like you are renting an apartment - you share the space. It means you cannot use up a lot of space on your pages. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I mean, minimalism is trending after all. Because you are renting this space, that means the landlord will look after any maintenance or updates along the way. 

Premium Hosting

If you flinch at the words: painfully slow, hacked or crash, you’ve probably experienced this from a cheap hosting service. You are not alone. After receiving increased traffic or running out of bandwidth, your site can often come to a halt. These are some of the reasons why premium hosting may be for you. 

The Pros

Your website is your most valuable asset. Security is an important feature that drove James and Joseph to invest in premium hosting to grow Web3. Premium hosting servers have reliable measures to ensure your website is safe and secure. They send data through a secure SSL network for monitoring that enhances their reliability.

These protocols also mean reduced load time, even while being inundated with traffic. Your website will have 100% allocated for optimal performance, which will aid your Search Engine rankings. You can feel rest assured that your site is in safe hands. 

The Cons 

Premium hosted websites often cost more and take more time to finalise. At web3, we use WP Engine, which offers several different hosting solutions for WordPress, from around $38 / month. They allow for a generous amount of websites, domains, visitors, storage, and bandwidth.

WordPress and other hosting companies tend to charge more. They host on better infrastructure designed for WordPress. They also build for that platform and can offer better support, security, and admin work. 

With a new website or business, you don't need all those extra features. You can suffice with a more affordable hosting option. One that will get you up and running without making you break that piggy bank. Now, this is where cheap hosting comes into play. 

Conclusion 

It is necessary to know what exactly you want from your website. It will allow you to look beyond the price, which is often the feature that stands out the most. If you're after a run of the mill site with no upkeep, the affordable option will suit you nicely. However, to save you future headaches, we recommend investing in a premium hosting service.

Transcript

James:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Web3 marketing debate show. I'm your host, James Banks. 

Joseph:

And I'm your host, Joseph Chesterton.

James:

And today, we will be debating everything and everything about hosting. So premium hosting versus affordable hosting. Unfortunately, I'll be taking the affordable hosting corner of this debate.

Joseph:

Sounds like you are preparing to lose already, James.

James:

We'll see about that, Joseph.

Joseph:

And I'm obviously on the premium hosting side.

James:

Well, without further ado, let's start the show. So Joseph, why is premium hosting better than affordable hosting?

Joseph:

Well, James, websites are one of your business's most valuable assets. If your website isn't working for you like it's crashed or it's down, then you potentially could be losing millions or even billions of dollars. You need to invest in really good hosting. 

With affordable hosting, you run the risk of having your website hacked, crash, or run out of bandwidth. So as a result, you would lose business and lose reputation for your company. 

Good hosting is everything. Yes, of course, it may cost more, but that comes with support, it comes with better infrastructure and it's easier to build your website on. 

So that's about all that we need to cover. Thanks for listening in and we'll speak to you next time. No, I'm kidding. James, why is affordable hosting better than premium?

James:

Probably should have clarified this before we started, but I guess we need to define what is premium hosting and what is affordable hosting. So in your words, Joseph, what would you define a premium web host? What are some examples? How much do they cost? What's the difference?

Joseph:

A premium host usually is dedicated to the platform you're building for. 

So for example, WordPress, you'll find managed WordPress hosting companies, generally have a higher price tag because they are hosting on better infrastructure that's built specifically for WordPress. On top of that, they build specifically for the platform and can then offer better support, security and administrative work. They do that on the server. 

Whereas affordable hosting is often just a server with generic software that enables you to build whatever you want. But this isn't specifically built for WordPress or any type of platform. It means that you may run into performance issues, security issues, and the list goes on.

James:

Okay. And how much would a premium WordPress website hosting server costs per month, approximately? Where do they start at and what's the range?

Joseph:

Premium hosting depends on your usage requirements. We use a company called WP engine and they offer several different hosting solutions for WordPress, and they start at AUD$38 a month and scale from there. 

They allow for many sites and a generous amount of visitors, storage and bandwidth. That is something you probably won’t see on shared hosting or affordable hosting, which is what we're calling it today. 

Affordable hosting can cost anywhere from a dollar a month to... I guess it could cost hundreds of dollars, but generally, you would see it priced around $5-20. That's generally the affordable hosting range.

James:

So what I'm hearing is that for a managed specialised service, such as a managed WordPress hosting environment, it's going to run you the cost of maybe about $40 per month. But you'll have the added benefit of better performance, more security, specialised hosting environments, so on and so forth. But I can get exactly that for $5 a month. So why would I pay four or five times the price for the same thing, Joseph?

Joseph:

Arguably, if the server was the same as the affordable hosting as far as hardware goes, yes, you probably could get that. But the thing is, you won't get 24/7 support. You won't get prebuilt themes in WordPress. 

You won't get automated backups that... Well, you may get automated backups but you can’t guarantee that they will work if your server crashes. With premium and managed hostings, you don't usually see them crash. Whereas with affordable, you run the risk of it crashing. 

You get a team of people that manage the server so that if things like security issues become an issue, then they'll fix it for you, and you can rest easy knowing that your business is well looked after online.

James:

So basically what you're saying is, although you have to pay more, what that added cost means is, added supporting service. But what if I want to take care of it myself and pocket the change? What would be the value in that case?

Joseph:

I mean, you could do that when you're trying to run a business, you run the risk of your website going down and then having no one to bring it back up, except for yourself. 

It might be limited support, but you'll have to wait 24 hours or even pay for support or get shipped to another company. We found this out the other day when we were helping a website recover from being crashed on their own affordable hosting. 

When we contacted the provider, they said, "Yeah. We can help you, but it's going to cost X amount, and it's going to go through a third-party provider. We're not going to do the help for you."

We had to recover the hacked website that was down for the client on our own, which we could easily do. But if you're on a managed hosting platform, then they will take care of that for you. 

They'll be able to restore the website in seconds, rather than a couple of hours that it took to recover. 

On top of saving money, the reason why you pay the extra amount for premium hosting is that the platforms that they post on, the software that they provide is fine-tuned. It will run your software better than just the generic software you'll get from the affordable hosting.

James:

Well, that's a pretty convincing argument, Joseph, but what about my emails? These whizzbang high-performance servers that you're talking about don't allow me to put my emails on it. And I've got emails coming out of the wazoo. 

If I were to not have a server without emails, it's going to cost me so much more. Why would I even consider having to go to the server that doesn't allow me to put my email accounts on it?

Joseph:

It's funny you say that because that was another issue that a client came to us about. They had three websites hosted on their affordable hosting, and they had email accounts on top of that and a dozen accounts that were filling up. 

Each account had a couple of gigabytes of emails hosted on it, and when your hosting server only has, in this instance, 20 gigabytes of storage, when your email accounts are on the same platform and each account has a couple of gigabytes, there was no room left for the hosting, which crashed the website and meant that the website wasn't able to be used.

And then on top of that, all the emails were bouncing because there wasn't enough space available for the emails to come through. 

The better option is you should use a platform like Microsoft or Google or any other email provider. Let them take care of the emails for you. 

There might be a cost per account, but if your server goes down, then you will lose not only your website, but you will also lose your emails on top of that. 

That's a pretty huge loss to your business if both your emails and your websites go down, especially if you rely on them to make money day today.

James:

Well, you're probably thinking by now, "Well, geez, there wasn't much of a debate with this show," and why? It's because it's the truth. 

Over the past 10 years, Joseph and I have been in the web game, we've dealt with over a hundred different website hosting companies. All of the major ones you can think of having the same rule: you get what you pay for. 

You pay for peanuts and you expect diamonds, that's just not how it works. 

Particularly in the case of web hosting, you get what you pay for. Hosting for your website is in proportion to all other business, marketing and advertising expenses. It’s one of the last things you'll ever have to worry about. It shouldn't even be a cost consideration. 

Of course, if your actual website is working for your business, keep things safe and secure.

Rest easy at night and invest in high quality, premium hosting infrastructure. You won’t regret it. 

Take it from us, out of dealing with how many retrieved hosting horror stories we've had to help people fix over the years. I can't even think of how many that has been. 

So with that said, if you need help with your website, whether that be cheap hosting, poor quality, unreliability, spam issues or you're getting hacked, drop us a line at web3.com.au. 

We can help you get set up with an infrastructure that will not let you down. 

So with that said and done, we will wrap up another episode of the Web3 marketing debate show. For the next episode, we'll be talking about all things SEM and SEO-related software. 

Stay tuned and we will talk to you again real soon.

 

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