This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School. And in today's episode, a caller from Nevada is using pay-per-click advertising to bring traffic to her e-commerce site. Now, what does that mean, pay-per-click advertising? It is a common and often successful model.
Whenever you're searching on Google or Facebook, or even if you're just using Instagram, you're quite familiar with seeing lots of ads. Those ads can be sold in lots of different ways. One of the most common is pay-per-click, all right? So you're paying for people to click on those ads, hopefully go to your website, purchase something, make it all worthwhile. And naturally, it is quite worthwhile for the companies like Facebook and Google because that's how they make almost all their money.
Now, I mentioned Facebook and Google. Those are by far the largest in the industry by a huge margin, but you can also run pay-per-click ads on Reddit, on YouTube, streaming platforms like Hulu, and even Pinterest, which is what our caller today is wondering about. She has discovered, in fact, that pay-per-click ads can be cheaper on Pinterest. So what's that all about? Is it a big secret?
Is this where everybody can go and save lots of money? Or is there, in fact, more to the story? Well, I'll tell you right now, there is more to the story, but the details do matter. So stay tuned, stick around. Her question's coming up, along with my detailed answer, in just 30 seconds.
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Hi, this is Hunter from Reno, Nevada. I read your books and have been side hustling off and on for most of my life. Recently, I've tried using pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to an e-commerce site. I used fulfillment by Amazon to handle most orders, and it seems like the business could really take off. But back to the ads, though.
I started running them on Facebook, but recently I've discovered that I can do the same thing on Pinterest for much less money, like 30 to 40% less, which of course is huge. If it's so much cheaper, why don't more people do it? Have I just stumbled on a big secret? I look forward to hearing your response. [Music]
All right, Hunter.
Well, here is the situation. You have in fact discovered something. You have made a discovery, but I wouldn't call it a big secret. Okay, so there's some good news and bad news. Bad news is maybe the full story, let's say, not every platform will have the same conversion rate.
So yes, in fact, it is generally cheaper to run ads on Pinterest and a bunch of other sites as well, but Pinterest specifically. The thing is that you're not going to convert the same number of them to sales, and the ones you do convert are probably gonna buy less. So it's not an apples to apples comparison, in other words. That's the part of what you're paying for with Facebook and Google, is that they are the largest in the industry because it works the best, at least for a lot of businesses. Okay, so this is where the good news comes in.
Hunter may discover, in fact, that for what she's selling, the conversion drop isn't nearly as much as it might be for another business, which would of course be amazing. Maybe in some cases it's even higher, although that's not likely, but in some cases it's possible. So there, she really would be paying less for the same thing. So that's the kind of thing that you have to figure out through your experimentation. Most of the time, the quality traffic is not gonna be on the lesser pay-per-click sites.
And this has to do with a couple of factors. First of all, the audience, people who are older tend to use Facebook much more, and they are less resistant to ads, for better or worse. Second, you're not always in a shopping mood when you're on Reddit or when you're watching Hulu. Like you're in a mood of just consuming content where these ads might be intrusive. But if you type something specific into Google, especially like an e-commerce item, you're like winter mittens, you just type that into Google, like there's a good chance that you're actually looking to buy that thing.
So that's another reason why Google and Facebook together have overall much better conversion. But again, the most important is to experiment in hopes of finding the perfect match for your ad spend, should you choose to spend it all. Many businesses don't do any ad spend and are still profitable. So you gotta find what works for you. But in general, that's why Pinterest is so much cheaper, because the quality of traffic is going to be lower, at least in terms of conversion to e-commerce, conversion to whatever it is that you're hoping to get out of that paid traffic.
Hunter, I wish you well, listeners, I wish you well as well. If you've got a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions, let me know what you're working on, what you're thinking about. We'll continue to feature them every week. We have a new episode every day. It's completely free.
You can subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
