You're trying to keep up with the latest SEO strategies, but you keep getting conflicting information from different sources.  Why do different SEO strategy guides suggest completely different ways of doing things?  Why are guides looking forward to 2013 suggesting different strategies from articles written just a few years ago?  Keep reading to find out.

Why Old SEO Strategies Stopped Working

Some law firms were very early adopters of web technology and have been quick to jump on some of the web's biggest marketing and advertising bandwagons.  If you started using an SEO strategy in, say, 2004, it's time to realize that there's a whole different world now.  In 2004, Blackberries were the only smart phone, Facebook was in its infancy, and Google's search indexers used very different algorithms to rank pages.

Back during that time, it was critical to get keyword densities just right, and to use the same keyword repeatedly.  Now, Google and other search engines are much more likely to recognize this SEO strategy as “keyword stuffing” and lower your rankings in search results.

Other SEO strategies of years gone by included “article spinning,” also called article marketing.  This involved paying a service to post your copy in many different places online.  Article marketing was never a particularly ethical SEO strategy, and is now considered spamming.

What SEO Strategy Looks Like Today

Now, mobile traffic is expected to soon eclipse desktop web traffic, both in the United States and around the world.  Social media has begun to dominate the web footprint of many users, and “pure” SEO has fallen out of favor, replaced by efforts that integrate SEO, social media, and web advertising.  

This kind of mixed strategy has become very important even for companies that used to do pure SEO, because Google now bases much of your ranking on the quality of your inbound links.  To get the best results from SEO strategies today, you'll also need to promote your site so quality sites know about it.

Combining Your SEO Strategy With Social Media

Because inbound links are so important, your law firm should work on making firm profiles on LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as some social bookmarking websites.  Even just having completed profiles can be a significant boost to SEO strategies.

Social media can be a great way to interact with potential new clients and to project a clear, consistent image of your law firm.  Avoid having paid content creators write your tweets and status updates—your readers will be much more likely to believe what's being said if it's clearly from someone who really works at your firm.

SEO Strategies That Don't Work

In the same way that it's considered bad marketing to have your SEO strategies involve fake “article spinning” services, it's also bad practice to buy followers for your social media websites.  Many companies think that they can augment their SEO strategy with social media quickly by purchasing guaranteed followers on Ebay or elsewhere.

In the end, these SEO strategies are doomed to fail.  You need a social media plus SEO strategy that works by gaining real followers with real influence over their circle of friends and family.  That's a way to build real, quality inbound links—the foundation of all successful SEO strategies today.

Mobile SEO Strategy

A few years ago, SEO strategies didn't need to pay much, if any, attention to traffic from users of mobile phones.  At that time, using the internet on a phone was considered something of a techie novelty.  Today, many people couldn't imagine life without their iPhone or Android phone, and that's starting to have a huge impact on the web.

In 2014, because of the continued expansion of 4G networks throughout the United States and the expansion of 3G even into remote and rural areas, forecasters predict that more bandwidth will be used by mobile users than desktop users.  This is a crucial change for your SEO strategies.  You now need more than ever to have first-page SERPs, because mobile users are even less likely than desktop users to click to a second page of search results.

Local SEO Strategy

Most law firms today would benefit from using local SEO strategies.  Tying in your location with your other keywords can ensure that you're getting seen by the right clients, rather than working hard to build web traffic with highly competitive non-local keywords.  Today, though, you can build a local SEO strategy that goes significantly beyond this kind of basic keyword touch-up.

Building a local web presence now means creating ties to other websites that are local to your community.  Think of other local businesses that you could partner with to trade guest blogging opportunities.  Most attorneys have at least some interaction with another type of business, and having someone talk about where their job intersects with the law can be a very interesting post that can go viral, generating even more links and ensuring the success of your SEO strategy.

If you are located in a city and have the ability to travel to some suburbs, you may also want to consider SEO strategies that incorporate geographic keywords for those suburbs.  This market sometimes goes untapped by attorneys who are competing hard in a struggle for survival with big city keywords for large practice areas.

The Future of SEO Strategies

In the same way that a 2008 SEO strategy looks very different from 2012 SEO strategies, it's likely that a 2016 strategy will look even different.  While no one knows for sure what brand-new startup will be worth a billion dollars in a few years and change the face of the web, we do know that users are starting to do the web differently, focusing on apps rather than search.  This may decrease the need for SEO strategies in favor of app advertisements.

Even if search becomes less popular, the idea of searching online is here to stay and has been with the internet since very nearly its beginnings (when “phone book” style paper directories of websites were printed and distributed at computer shows).  As long as you make a commitment to adapt your SEO strategies as times change, every step you make toward good optimization is a step that will pay off in the future.

Everything About SEO Blog

Today, only about 12 percent of lawyers in small firms are using the single best tool for getting your firm's name into search engine results: SEO blogs.  If you're not yet doing blog SEO for your firm, you are missing out on new business and a way to really make your firm stand out from your competition.

How is Blog SEO Changing?

When search engines were first developed, they looked largely at how often a keyword was repeated in a web page to decide where to put a page in search rankings, leading to the rise of SEO blogs.  However, after some time, SEO blog spam—often computer generated—was coming up in search results ahead of genuine, interesting material.  

So the engineers working for Google, Yahoo, and other search engines had to figure out a way to separate legitimate SEO blogs and other websites from the content-less spam sites.

With every move Google made, spammers got cleverer with spam blog SEO.  When Google started lowering the search result rank of articles with excessive keyword density, spammers lowered their density too.  In 2012, Google has released new changes (called Google Penguin) to their search indexer.

With Penguin, blog SEO depends more than ever on the quality of your content and how often other people are linking to it.  This means that SEO blogs today need to focus maintaining quality, original content while also interacting with other websites.  If what used to work for your SEO blog doesn't seem to be bringing in clients any more, you may need to change how you think of your blog SEO.

Can SEO Blogs Help My Practice?

The answer to this question is an unequivocal yes.  If you're not already using an SEO blog to help drive traffic to your website, you need to start as soon as you can.  Over half of small firm attorneys have gotten new business as a direct result of their blog SEO.

SEO blogs can also help any social media initiatives that your firm has begun.  If you're not quite sure what to post on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter to keep your audience interested, an SEO blog is a great place to begin.  You can include a short piece of your blog SEO post, as well as the headline, and wait for your social media connections to start reading.

What Kind of SEO Blog Should I Start?

The answer to this question, of course, depends on what you're good at and what your practice focuses on.  In all likelihood, it's not a good idea for a criminal defense attorney to have blog SEO about divorces or bankruptcy.

Don't make your SEO blog topic too general.  Remember that there are already many other SEO blogs, and you want yours to stand out. You should pick some specific aspect of your practice area you know a great deal about, and keep your blog focused on developments in that area.

Even more important is your audience.  Who do you want reading your SEO blog?  Some lawyers start SEO blogs that are designed to attract clients who are searching for terms related to their legal case online.  Other attorneys prefer to make their blog SEO more attractive to other attorneys, who can then see the content and send referrals on to your law office or link your blog in their blogs.

Considerations about your audience can affect the topic of your SEO blog.  SEO blogs that are about more consumer-friendly topics may get a little traffic from other attorneys, especially if they want to link your content.  On the other hand, blog SEO designed for other lawyers will probably be over the heads of most clients.

How Often Should I Post to My SEO Blog?

There's a tricky line that SEO blogs need to walk when it comes to posting frequency.  If you post too many times, people won't have time to read all of your blog SEO content and may even stop reading.  Even if they don't stop reading, the time and effort you spent making SEO blog entries will have been wasted if people don't have time to read it all.

At the same time, you don't want to post too infrequently.  SEO blogs with no entries written for a month or more can look abandoned, and will have a much harder time bringing in new business.

Your SEO blog should shoot for a happy medium—which will also give you enough time to make sure that you can produce quality blog SEO content.  Try posting once or twice a week to start, and then see whether you feel comfortable with producing a third (possibly short) article per week.

Before you start any SEO blogs, it's a good idea to have a reserve stockpile of articles.  That way, if you get busy, your SEO blog doesn't suffer from a lack of content: just take an article out of the stockpile and post whenever you need to.

What Should My SEO Blog Entries Look Like?

The key to great blog SEO is having great titles that capture the attention of your audience.  When SEO blogs have confusing titles—or titles that don't really capture what the article is about—they are often indexed incorrectly or ranked much lower.

If you still want to have clever or cute headlines instead of descriptive ones, include them as sub-headlines within your article.  This will allow your voice to shine through but won't result in your blog SEO being misread by search spiders.

Don't flood your blog entries with too many repetitive keywords.  You should be making sure your keywords appear several times in your entries, but in the best case scenario, they should flow seamlessly as part of your prose.  Usually, just 2 or 3 repetitions of keywords will be plenty for a 400 word article.

You should also make sure that your blog entries link back to landing pages on your own website at least once or twice.  Don't just link to a firm homepage, but instead make sure that you're using targeted landing pages designed to generate conversions.

Everything About SEM Blog

Lawyers make up just one percent of the population of the United States, but they maintain a full six percent of the blogs.  Having a search engine marketing/SEM blog has brought in new business for over half of solo practitioners and small firms that try it.  So how can you get on board?  Search engine marketing with blogs means more than just making sure you have the right keyword count in your articles.  If you want to get the most out of SEM blogs for lawyers, you'll need the right tips.  Here are five to get you started.

SEM Blog Tip #1: Make Your Headlines Count

While making your law blog entries creative is a great idea, you may be surprised to find that it's usually in your best interest to make your headlines more straightforward.  When SEM blogs are indexed by Google and other search engines, the headline is what they take the most notice of.  A headline that doesn't include the keyword phrases you're search engine optimizing for won't lead nearly as many people to your SEM blog.

Try coming up with punchy but descriptive headlines for SEM blogs that give a great idea of what's to come.  Numbered lists are sometimes a great way to come up with a good headline.  “7 Ideas For Keeping Your Divorce Amicable” could be a workable headline for a divorce attorney, and “What's Next in Mobile Marketing for Lawyers?  6 Possibilities” would be a great headline for an SEM blog focusing on marketing topics.

SEM Blog Tip #2: Don't Ignore Social Media

Most web users today share content of some type or another with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  While LinkedIn has gotten the most attention from lawyers with SEM blogs, you can no longer afford to leave Facebook and Twitter out of your web marketing strategy.

Facebook, the single most popular social media platform in the United States and the world, is a great place to share SEM blog entries or video blogging.  You don't have to stop there, though.  Ask your Facebook fans some open-ended questions.  If you're already maintaining SEM blogs, ask your Facebook friends or fans to give you more blogging ideas or ask questions about the law for you to answer in blog form.

Twitter is a little harder for some attorneys to learn to use for their SEM blogs, but its number of users has doubled for two years in a row and may double once again this year.  That means you're going to need to get used to Twitter's 140 character limit, and link your most mobile-friendly SEM blog entries with a short headline as “tweets.”  Why mobile friendly?  Twitter users are notoriously early adopters of technology, and more of them access the web with mobile devices than users of other mainstream social media sites. 

SEM Blog Tip #3: Open the Floor For Comments

Most SEM blogs have a comments section by default, but some attorneys decide to close comments in order to maintain more control over their blog.  This is a huge mistake: comments are one of the places where you can really set your SEM blog apart from the competition.  An active comments section will generate more links back to your blog entries and will engage your readers more.

If someone asks a question in your comments section, you may want to answer it with another comment, or you may want to shake it up by making a whole new blog entry about the question.  Making a new blog entry is an especially good idea if you've heard the same question repeated by several different people over the last few weeks, months or years.

When comments are particularly interesting, or if a good discussion has started in your comment section, you may want to link the comments instead of your entry using social media sites.  SEM blogs that can show an active, intelligent comments section are more likely to be seen as authoritative.

SEM Blog Tip #4: Moderate Your Comment Section

Not all comments on SEM blogs are helpful to discussion.  You should set up notifications about new blog comments, and make sure that any comments made on your SEM blog appear to be relevant.  Too often, otherwise good SEM blogs end up littered with spam comments from other websites trying to piggyback on your hard work and get an extra inbound link.

Delete right away any comments that appear to be littering your SEM blog with keyword spam.  SEM blogs with a great deal of this comment spam may be caught by Google's spam filters and find their search engine results pages declining fast.

The same can be said for any comments on SEM blogs that are clearly “trolling”: made just to get a rise out of you.  Comments that involve extensive name-calling or clearly deliberate misinterpretations of the law (especially very strange ones) are likely to be made by people who just want to make trouble for your SEM blog.  It's usually best to ignore and delete these comments rather than giving the commenters the satisfaction of your angry reply.

Please note: this doesn't mean that you should immediately delete a comment if it disagrees with your article.  Disagreement and discussion can actually be good for your SEM blog, as long as you keep it civil and try to inform and educate.  Deleting any comment that you think isn't positive enough will make other people much less likely to comment or discuss your articles.

SEM Blog Tip #6: Check Your ROI

The point of SEM blogs is to generate buzz and get more clients working with your law firm.  Even if you're having a blast writing SEM blog entries, you need to verify that what you're doing has actually been effective.

Using analytics tools is important so that you can see exactly where your web traffic is coming from and how much of it is attributable to your SEM blog.  If you're seeing certain topics or keywords that keep bringing clients in and generating conversions, you may want to keep your blog focused on those topics or keywords.  If something isn't working, analytics lets you know so that you don't keep making the same mistakes over and over.

Everything About Local SEO Blog

According to Google, over 20 percent of searches today are for local services.  This number is even higher when it comes to attorneys.  Most clients want a lawyer who is local, so when you start your blog, you should make sure it's a local search engine optimization blog.

Local search results act a little bit differently from other types of search results, and your blogging strategies for a local SEO blog should change accordingly.  Keep reading to find out ways that you can make sure you're creating a true local search engine optimization blog.

How Local SEO Is Different

Let's face it: results for a fantastic law firm in New York City aren't going to be all that useful for most people who just need basic legal services in Albany.  To combat the problem of non-local search results appearing in people's search queries, a number of search engines have now made it possible to search by location.  The most popular of these is Google Places.

Google Places results now appear as the top page of results when you make a local search.  Since most search users pick a link from the first page, it's very important to have your firm represented on Google Places.  It's very easy to set up your Google Places page, and to buy additional tags for your website if you want for more searches to be directed to your firm.

How does Google Places tie in with a local search engine optimization blog?  Well, your local SEO blog should at least sometimes link back to your Google Places page.  This kind of inbound linking from your local search engine optimization blog can elevate your Google Places results in searches.

Picking a Topic for Your Local SEO Blog

Once you've decided to specialize your blog as a local search engine optimization blog, you can start to think about the specific topic areas you're interested in writing about.  The topics for your local SEO blog should always play to your firm's greatest strengths.  If your firm handles several very different types of cases, you may consider developing a different local search engine optimization blog for each of the main categories you practice in.

When you've decided on your topic, start to think of some real questions you've gotten, or common misconceptions you'd like to clear up, about that area of law.  If it's something that is interesting to clients you've had in the past, odds are it will be interesting to others as well when you include it on your local SEO blog.

Because you're trying to maintain a local search engine optimization blog, you'll want to keep your topics locally focused.  If a national issue is critical, your local SEO blog can still talk about it, but try to confine the vast majority of your discussions to issues with local and state laws or notable figures in law.

Linking and Comments

If you're talking about something in your local search engine optimization blog that you'd already referenced in an earlier post, you should link to the old post in your new one.  The more links and connections that are in your blog, the more likely it will be to appear early in search results.

Don't just link to yourself, though.  Who wants to be the person at the party who can only talk about himself?  Open up the conversation by linking to other blogs or websites with your local SEO blog.  A good local search engine optimization blog will link to local resources and help for people who are having legal issues.  

For instance, if you're a divorce lawyer, you may want to include a blog entry on your local SEO blog about domestic violence shelters and resources for abuse victims.  Someone who works a lot with landlord and tenant law can link to the state's Uniform Landlord and Tenant Act or similar law on their local search engine optimization blog.

Headlines: First Impressions Mean Everything

When you write your local SEO blog, it may be tempting to give some of your articles a headline that makes your readers scratch their heads and keep reading.  That kind of headline, though, won't play well with Google's search algorithms, which look at headlines to figure out what your article is about.

If you want your local search engine optimization blog to show up early in search results, you'll need to make your headlines crystal clear and very direct.  A subtitle or later section titles can be more creative, but your title needs to include an exact phrase match for the keywords you want to search engine optimize for.

Link Building For Lawyers

Making your local search engine optimization blog appear relevant to search indexers requires building inbound links on other websites.  You can start by posting some of the best articles from your local SEO blog to an online article submission site, including links to several of your blog entries.  Press release websites can also be a great way to get more inbound links.

What If It Doesn't Work?

There's always the chance that even if you work very hard on your local search engine optimization blog, you won't get the visitors you want.  Or you'll get visitors, but you won't see an uptick in your actual new business.  These are two different problems, and they need two different solutions.

If your local SEO blog just isn't getting any web traffic, you need to work harder on your search engine optimization skills.  Figure out better keywords and link to your blog from social media websites in order to get more eyes on your content.

When plenty of people are seeing what you have to say, but they're not responding the way you had hoped, you need to change your content.  This can often be an indicator that people find your local SEO blog to be too generic or not relevant enough to the keywords they were searching for.  With a few conversion-friendly modifications, you should be able to increase your conversion rate.

Everything About Facebook Advertising Revenue

Facebook advertising revenues have been steadily increasing ever since the website began implementing ads in 2006.  Today Facebook has over 845 million users, and those users have created an advertising behemoth: currently, Facebook advertising revenue figures are around $3.15 billion per year.  Keep reading to find out more staggering figures about Facebook advertising revenues and how you can make your ads work for you without costing an arm and a leg.

Recent Controversies and Their Effect on Facebook Advertising Revenue

Earlier in 2012, Facebook advertising revenues suffered something of a setback when the company settled a class action civil suit.  The suit pertained to “sponsored stories” appearing in people's news feeds and using photographs of people who had not given explicit permission for their photo to be commercialized in this way.

In spite of having to pay millions of dollars because of the class action suit, overall Facebook advertising revenues are up.  The site currently takes in about $10 of Facebook advertising revenue per user in the United States and Canada, and slightly less than that in other regions globally.

Although some big players have withdrawn their support for Facebook advertising after seeing less than ideal results, this has had little impact on overall Facebook advertising revenues.  Overall, Facebook advertising revenue has actually gone up even as click through rates (CTRs) have declined by about 8 percent over the last year.

Is Facebook Advertising Revenue Really Worth the Time?

Since you now have to pay more to get less, are the Facebook advertising revenues your firm could get really worth it?  You have to ask yourself these questions more and more, particularly if you're not able to see a direct stream of Facebook advertising revenue for your company in the current economy.

Remember that your Facebook advertising revenues may not all be obvious.  Not every client who researches your firm using your Facebook page or by looking at who “likes” you will let you know during their consultation visit.  

The effects of Facebook can be very subtle, and it's best to try to track Facebook advertising revenue from all sources, even if some of that revenue comes from clients who didn't click your direct ads.  Visibility and reach are key to expanding your practice, and you can't necessarily put an easy price tag on building an engaging web presence.

What Law Firms Will See the Biggest Facebook Advertising Revenues?

Before you decide on an advertising budget for your new campaign, you need to ask yourself how much Facebook is really worth to your law firm.  For some types of firms that market primarily to other professionals, Facebook advertising revenues may be minimal compared to what you could bring in using LinkedIn for more professional networking.

If, on the other hand, your law firm's advertising strategies usually rely on B2C marketing, you'll be much more at home on Facebook.  Firms that fulfill the needs of very specific demographics and know what their niche markets look like can do better on Facebook than general practitioners.  If you think that you do most of your business with a particular age group or people with some shared interest, you can make that work for effective, targeted ads that will deliver the best value per click and make your Facebook advertising revenues grow steadily.

How Can I Increase My Facebook Advertising Revenue?

Facebook advertising revenue is likely to be highest for firms that can leverage sponsored stories to their advantage and use landing pages.  Just making these two changes can vastly increase your conversions and overall Facebook advertising revenues.

Landing pages work for any kind of direct pay per click ad, but if you want to have real Facebook advertising revenue with your campaigns, you'll definitely need them to grab social media traffic.  People today want to be able to get through websites and find the information they want quickly.  

If you don't direct visitors to a relevant landing page, you'll be losing out on a lot of traffic and it won't matter what you bid for your clicks—people won't stay long enough to find out that you're a great law firm with great things to offer.  People decide whether they want to talk to you within the first ten seconds of reading the first page they're directed to on your website.  Without landing pages, that first ten seconds will be confusing and potentially frustrating.

The Future of Facebook Advertising Revenues: Mobile Advertising

As of summer 2012, only about half of advertisers are adding to their Facebook advertising revenue by running sponsored stories.  These stories appear in a person's news feed, in the same place where a status update from a friend or a link shared by a colleague might be.  This high-visibility placement is especially effective for generating higher Facebook advertising revenues when you're posting frequently to a blog and can turn those entries into a constant stream of fresh sponsored stories.

If you're not currently optimizing your Facebook ads for mobile marketing, you're missing out on the most lucrative source of Facebook advertising revenue.  Studies have shown that these ads can be up to 11 times more likely to generate click throughs than ads in a desktop browser.

How Can I Tell If I'm Getting a Good Return on Investment?

One of the best ways to tell if your Facebook marketing efforts have really been turning into Facebook advertising revenues is to ask clients to fill out comment cards.  On these comment cards, you can ask where someone researched your firm before deciding to use you as a lawyer.  This way, you'll find out about clients who saw your professional presence on Facebook and used it in their decision-making process.

You may want to ask an outside analytics company to analyze your results if you want to maximize your return on investment and have already tried all of these strategies to increase your Facebook advertising revenues.  The problem with your Facebook advertising revenue stream may be something unusual, and a professional web traffic analyst can help you get your revenues back where you want them from your Facebook pages.

Everything About Facebook Advertising Rates

The most recent Facebook advertising statistics are astonishing: over $5 billion is projected to be spent by businesses on Facebook advertising this year alone.  Perhaps more exciting than this figure is the change from Facebook advertising rates just a few years ago: today's revenues are six times greater than in 2009.  Keep reading this guide to find out more Facebook advertising statistics that can help you evaluate Facebook advertising effectiveness for your firm.

Why Would I Want to Advertise on Facebook?

According to Facebook advertising statistics, the reason that 61 percent of companies buy Facebook advertising is to increase awareness of their brand.  53 percent of companies pay Facebook advertising rates because they want to grow their audience, while just under half—44 percent—use it for direct conversions.

What these Facebook advertising statistics mean is that you don't necessarily need to get direct client referrals from social media in order to measure your Facebook advertising effectiveness.  Even if your Facebook presence is just great for increasing your number of inbound links and helping your search engine optimization, it's doing something great for your firm and you may still want to pay Facebook advertising rates.

One reason to advertise on Facebook, in particular, is that it gives you great tools for targeting your ads.  It's easy to increase Facebook advertising effectiveness by changing the hyper focused demographics that can see your ad copy.

Unlike Google AdWords, you won't have to pay different Facebook advertising rates depending on which keywords you want to advertise.  Instead, you can choose to increase your Facebook advertising effectiveness by picking the exact groups of people most likely to need your legal services.  

Facebook advertising statistics show that the most common criteria for targeting ads are age, location, interests, and connections.  It may surprise you to learn that for most advertisers, Facebook advertising effectiveness is not impacted by gender targeting.  Some attorneys may want to target a specific gender (for instance, child custody attorneys who specialize in father's rights issues), but most have better luck talking to men and women equally.

Some Facebook Advertising Statistics You Need to Know

You can improve your Facebook advertising effectiveness by doing things your competition hasn't yet picked up on.  For example, Facebook advertising rates for targeting specific zip codes can sometimes be significantly cheaper than targeting a broader geographic area, according to recent Facebook advertising statistics.  If your firm works primarily with people from just a few local zip codes, this level of hyper local targeting is statistically likely to be more effective for your advertising.

One place that many advertisers are now falling short is targeting based on connections.  Facebook advertising effectiveness actually increases when you target it toward your fans or the friends of your fans.  It's much more likely that paying Facebook advertising rates will be worth your firm's budget if you are targeting this group—but Facebook advertising statistics show that only about a third of advertisers are even bothering.  Get ahead of the competition by being the first in your area to use this kind of marketing.

Getting Help: Software That Can Make Targeting Easier

According to 2012 Facebook advertising statistics, today only about 15 percent of professionals paying Facebook advertising rates are actually using outside software to help them improve their Facebook advertising effectiveness.  You can install several different tools that will let you take a closer look at how you can generate more narrow audiences based on locations, connections, and demographic features.

Because it's unlikely that your competition is also using this kind of software, you can improve your chances of Facebook advertising effectiveness really simply this way.  You'll usually find that it takes much less time to set up a new split test or otherwise measure the performance of your ads when you're able to use automated targeting to take some of the guesswork out.

Agencies can also help you design split tests and figure out the answers to targeting dilemmas.  While 2/3 of advertisers currently report looking at split tests to decide which ads to run, most are only analyzing their targeting or their ad copy.  Few are even looking at their landing pages to determine whether a particular landing page is impacting how people interact with their website.

A Word About Facebook Advertising Effectiveness

If it isn't new, it's not trending on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.  Facebook advertising statistics show that Facebook advertising effectiveness is highest during the first 72 hours you're running a new ad.  That means that you should be constantly cycling through new images and text, and targeting your advertisements at different demographics.

If you're waiting for a week or longer to change your ad copy, you're paying Facebook advertising rates for nothing.  Changing your copy can have a near-immediate impact on your Facebook advertising effectiveness, and because ad headlines on Facebook are so short it doesn't need to take a long time to make new effective copy.   

Because the life cycle of a Facebook ad can be a matter of just days, you should also feel free to pull underperforming ads quickly rather than seeing if they'll pick up speed—Facebook advertising statistics show that you're better off just using something new.

Should I Be Afraid of Rising Facebook Advertising Rates?

Facebook advertising statistics definitely show that as of now, Facebook advertising rates are increasing.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, because new types of targeted ads are actually making Facebook advertising effectiveness increase too.

Today's Facebook advertising statistics indicate that while it may cost about 50 percent more on a per-impression basis to use mobile sponsored stories than to get an ad into someone's sidebar, they're over 11 times more likely to be clicked on.  11 times—that's a huge increase in Facebook advertising effectiveness, and all for making a relatively small change.

To capitalize on these trends, you'll need to make your landing pages mobile friendly.  If you make your telephone number easily accessible, the easiest way to see your Facebook ads paying off may be watching your lines light up as new clients start calling your office based on mobile advertising.