You want to drive traffic to your website. You’ve been told that there are two ways to do this: through social media marketing or pay-per-click advertising. Which should you choose?
On the surface, they both seem like good options. Social media marketing is free and easy to do. You can post about your website on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and hope that people will see it and click on it.
Pay-per-click advertising, on the other hand, costs money. But it also guarantees that your ad will be seen by people who are interested in what you’re selling because you’re targeting them specifically.
So which is better? Social media marketing or pay-per-click advertising?
The answer might surprise you. In most cases, pay-per-click advertising is the better option. Here’s why:
1. Pay-Per-Click Ads Are More Effective at Driving Traffic
Let’s start with the most important metric: how effective each method is at driving traffic to your website. And when we look at the data, there’s no contest: pay-per-click ads are more effective than social media marketing.
In fact, paid search ads are responsible for 64% of all website visits from major search engines like Google and Bing. And when people click on a paid ad, they’re 50% more likely to purchase something than if they had found the same product through an organic search (i.e., not an ad).
On the other hand, social media posts only drive 1% of traffic to websites on average. So if you’re only relying on social media to drive traffic to your site, you’re missing out on a lot of potential customers.
