TechTalk: Should I Spend More on Facebook or Google?

This is where tools like Google Analytics are essential. Ask your website person or company to list for you the top five or six sources of traffic to your website, in order of how many users each source brings to your site.

The list will look something like this:

• 100,000 users: Direct traffic (mainly people who know your website and type it into their browsers)
• 50,000 users: Organic search traffic (people who come to your site from a Google search)
• 25,000 users: Paid search traffic (people who click on an AdWord that links to your site)
• 20,000 users: Facebook traffic (ask about the split between Facebook mobile and Facebook desktop)
• 15,000 users: Referral traffic (people who arrived at your site from another website)
• 10,000 users: Email traffic (people who clicked on a link in an email you sent)

Based on this list, some may argue that they should spend twice as much time on Facebook as they do on email, since it drives twice as many users.

Now, ask them to sort the list of top sources based on how many online donations were generated by each source. The list may have a significantly different order such as:

• 1,000 donations: Direct traffic
• 500 donations: Organic search
• 250 donations: Email
• 150 donations: Paid Search
• 75 donations: Referral
• 50 donations: Facebook

Based on this view of the information, email should get more time and energy than Facebook.

One of the areas where I commonly find opportunities for clients is in their paid search bucket. They may already have Google Grants (if you don't, go get one), but they are not optimizing them. Further, they are not linking their AdWords to conversion metrics such as online donations. They are reporting their AdWords efforts in terms of how many visitors they drove, not in how many online donations those visitors completed.