Now, in terms of the channels that you can go through, and I will acknowledge I’m paid. So a lot of this is paid-specific, but there is some organic pieces here too.
Google does cover both search and visual content. Whether we’re thinking about Performance Max, whether we’re thinking about videos and visuals coming into the search result page, whether we’re thinking about YouTube, the second largest search engine, there is a visual component there. But the startup costs and time are pretty high on Google. So if you need to go quickly, you may need to look at some other channels. On the other hand, you may want to say, “You know what? I’m gonna build in those two to four weeks to get my creative set up, to get my account going, to invest, so that I can take advantage of that really big market share.”
Microsoft
Microsoft is kind of the best at being second place, but it’s the cheapest of the lot. And Microsoft’s audience network actually has some really beautiful hidden gems that if you use it correctly, can really serve you well. Microsoft is on average, 30% cheaper than Google, and from a search result page standpoint, actually does do really meaningful things for high-income users and those that maybe are more educated. Don’t sleep on the fact that Microsoft now powers DuckDuckGo and Baidu as search engines.
Amazon
Amazon is one of my favorites that no one thinks about, at least from our world because let’s face it, Google and Microsoft tend to be pretty siloed from Amazon, which historically has been seller-only. However, Amazon is now launching a new solution to empower customers that don’t sell on Amazon to use Amazon audiences. So if you’ve been really struggling with your privacy-first world and you’re targeting, Amazon could provide a really meaningful way for you to speak to your customers if you know who they are and what kind of content they really wanna consume.
Social
Finally, when we think about social. And I’m gonna move just so that we can have our social. One of the things that’s actually very interesting about social is that Meta, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, all of these get lumped into social, but they all have different rules of engagement, different mechanics. And so at the end of the day, from a pricing standpoint, and how much you need to invest from testing and creative is really dependent on the channel.
That said, and I’m gonna move back over so that we can look at good old Google, nothing is gonna compare to Google when it comes to the cost for setting up creative and time because at the end of the day, Google does need conversions to run on the paid side. And on the organic side there’s just a pretty big ramp-up period as opposed to social.
So at the end of the day, when we’re thinking about what channels we want to use to reach our people to help them understand needs and wants, we need to also be mindful about our budget constraints.
