Key Takeaways
- Facebook and other social ads can increase the volume of people searching for your brand on Google (via brand awareness), leading to lower advertising costs for branded searches.
- The added search volume from social ads can earn you a Google Places label, which also has a positive impact on your organic rankings
- Google determines local rankings based on three factors: relevance, distance, and prominence, the last of which can also get a boost from social and other top-of-mind ad channels.
- The case study revealed a measurable 28% ranking improvement, demonstrating the wider impact of social ads, beyond lead generation.
Check out our detailed El Dabe case study for more insights.
Complete Transcript
What’s up, everybody? Nick Paul, Director of Advertising here at Nifty. Today we’re going to get into the El Dabe case study that we did showing the connection between running Facebook ads (or social ads) and improving your organic rankings in Google. This is a case study that goes into a lot of depth, so we’ve had questions asking for some foundational knowledge to help understand it.
Really, looking at this case study, we saw a lot of things we expected. When you run Facebook ads, when you run social ads, or any top-of-mind awareness ads, when they’re well-targeted and you have good creatives, you’ll end up seeing an improvement in the volume of people searching for your brand name in Google. This increased search volume for your brand is beneficial because you’ll pay less for a given click if you’re advertising for your name, compared to someone who’s just searching generally, like “car accident attorney near me.” So there’s that given incentive to run Facebook ads. But the El Dabe case study really surprised us because we saw this correlation between starting Facebook ads and an immediate improvement in organic rankings for all keywords.
To understand why Facebook ads impact local rankings, let’s take a look at how Google determines local rankings. It comes down to three factors: relevance, distance, and prominence. Prominence is what you can actually influence with these top-of-funnel ads. Let’s give credit where credit is due–you can impact prominence with a lot of different advertising channels: radio, billboard, the fact that you’ve been around for 20 years. All of these impact your prominence and your potential to earn something called a “Google Places” label. But, ultimately, social ads allow you to be extremely targeted toward your ideal audience and see measurable impact on your prominence and your brand awareness in your local market.
We measured an average of 28% ranking improvement. At the surface level, this may not seem like a connection, but, later on, when we made an adjustment to the budget on Facebook ads, a pretty substantial budget shift to another advertising channel, we saw a corresponding huge decrease in keyword rankings. As we dove into this in more detail with our SEO team and compared notes with our ads team, we started to find some things from Google where they mentioned that Google Places labels actually help improve your overall organic rankings. This is because some of the most reputable and well-known businesses in any given market have these Places labels.
So, how do you earn the Places labels? These Places labels are directly connected to how much search volume there is for your brand. This is where the whole thing comes full-circle and why this case study matters so much–social ads drive more search volume for your brand, and as a result, that added search volume can earn you a Places label, which has an impact on your organic rankings.
So let’s dive into the case study, get into the data, see the differences that we observed, and ask ourselves, “Am I doing enough with my top-of-mind awareness side of my advertising and what can I do more?” There is a lot of secondary benefit than just the leads that are generated from this platform, in the form of improved organic rankings.