I had a friend of mine ask me recently if I’d ever use pay per click advertising to drive traffic to a social networking profile. I’ve thought about it a bit and I can’t see any reason why I’d do that. Social networking is not the stopping point, in my mind. It’s an avenue that leads to a boulevard through an alley connection.
Here’s what I mean: Pick any social networking site (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo). How many of them actually allow you to sell your products or services at their sites? Before you answer, consider whether or not you take payment through those sites. If you don’t take payment then your selling through those sites. You are using those sites to drive traffic to the place where you are selling. In that case, if you use pay per click to drive traffic to a site that you are also using to drive traffic with then you are really just “filtering” your traffic and probably losing sales.
Whatever method you use to drive traffic to your sales page should not be filtered by any additional steps. That includes pay per click, social networking sites, e-mail newsletters, blogs, etc. Use your tools to drive traffic directly to your sales page because how ever much traffic you send will ultimately taper off if that traffic has to go through another door or window. If you send 100 visitors, for instance, to your Facebook profile using pay per click, a good portion of them will never go beyond that profile page – most of them, in fact. You could be losing a good 80% of that traffic to thin air. The 20% that does decide to move on to your sales page will then be filtered again as most traffic that lands on your sales page will not convert. Count on losing another 80%-90% of that traffic as well.
Whenever I’m running a pay per click campaign, I send traffic directly to my sales page – that is, the page where I will close the sale, take the order, collect payment, and send my “Thank You” message. Anything else means I’m throwing good money out the window.
