Google Adword and fb advertisement

I have been planing to use Google ads to help me land more inquiries and increase inward traffic.
Anyone doing that? Any good tips or do and don't?

just started with optimizing my SEO,

Can't speak about Google.

I did however run a Facebook ad and it was pretty decent for getting your page likes up, as well as targeting the correct customers. For example, I covered a race for a specific club, that club had about 3500 fans on their facebook page. I targeted only people that liked that club's facebook page to see my ad. Set my daily limit at $10, ran it for 3 days, got about 20 new fans and made my money back on one sale driven in by the ad.

I'm in a very rural area. I've had the adwords for almost 2 months now. I get maybe 20 views a day at the most. Usually less than 15. And about 5 clicks a week average. I do like how I can see the views and clicks though. Could be very nice if there were more people around here.

I tried google adwords for free. Nothing. I tried the free facebook ad trial. Nothing booked, but a couple of inquiries.

All the while I've been learning about SEO and I have seriously gotten to a point at which I can do SEO better than whatever 95% of my competitors are doing (some do nothing, some hire out). Doing this takes a lot of time investment, but the way I look at it, I've not only picked up a useful business skill that can generalize, I've also pushed my site to a place where I basically get advertising for free: by being on page 1.

Christopher

Seo is where I have been lagging probably because in last three months we have had major changes and as a result we have a new new name and are busy building a new brand and getting clients.

I have just started with doing seo, advertising through a various channels.

So I have been looking at it as an interim stage to advertise while we bring ourselves up on seo to atlast surface on searches.

Now my perception is that majority of people are doing fb adverts, though it does get likes, however I am trying to focus on people who are searching for a photog e.g. Wedding and that's where google comes in as it's more likely in my opinion for a bride to do a google search than fb, unless she is following one on fb already.

On my old page both fb and site fb adverts did help in bringing new business, however now I am trying to weigh which one to focus more

I opened my first for profit website in 1997 and dabbled in all sorts of ways of getting traffic, whether it was free or paid. First time I used PPC was with Overture in around 00 and used Google Adwords later on with my highest daily budget for single campaign being $500. Facebook PPC I used briefly a few years ago but did not like it too much. I advertised for non photography keywords and the niches I targeted were a lot more competitive and a lot more expensive per click. Here are my views / strategies on each one:

Google - Create a good landing page (dont send them to your main page, create a separate page that you can track) and depending on competition bid higher to get one of the top spots. Create multiple variations of your ads and run them to test which one gets the best CTR (click thru ratio). Being one of the top results you should get more views & clicks. If you will have good CTR you can start lowering your bids slowly, while maintaining your top results position. I once went from paying ~$1.25 per click to ~$0.40 per click, in part due to high QS and insane CTR of 25% (1/4 views resulted in a click). If your keywords dont have any or have low competition you should start with the suggested minimum bid, land yourself in top 3 and start lowering your bid by 1 cent per day as you maintain decent CTR.

By bidding high you force Google to send you the lion share of the traffic (top 3 results get most CTR) and you lower your bids to drive the cost down. Google cares about CTR, if a lot of people are clicking on your ad Google sees it as quality ad and lets you bring cost down, while at the same time making more clicks available to you. Google sees QS of your pages content, your good CTR and sees you as a quality website.

Facebook - They manually approve all ads. Some of my ads got rejected and had to be resubmitted. In my limited experience (used FB least out of all major players) I found that I had to bid up instead of bid down. CTR on FB is extremely low, if you get 2% its amazing in my experience. You target traffic more based on demographics rather than on keywords. If you find the right demographic group for your photography business you can strike gold but its a matter of breaking down your ads into different demographic groups - 18-25 male, 18-25 female, 26-35 male, 26-35 female, etc. I would not use FB to advertise my FB page, instead I would send people to my own website where I have more control over what they see and what I can do with them. What do you think is better - getting a like on FB you get a new subscriber to the mailing list of your website?

FB is different from Google and you are delivering your ads to a demographic group, rather than people directly interested in your keywords. You could target a male 50-55, making $100k+ / year in your city and get different kinds of people. You could get an accountant, unionized school janitor, with 20 years of experience or someone else. All will fit your demographic but not all will necessarily be interested in what you have to offer. You have to do a lot more fine tuning.

Before you become a customer you should get Adwords or FB voucher and use free credit upto $50. Its a great way to play around and to see what it all about. My recommendation is to go with Google and to target your city keywords + neighboring cities.

PS. Tip of the day - Google Adwords in addition to Google Search, has Google Content pay per click. Read up on it, it is cheaper than Google Search pay per click.

Thanks dKizzle, really appreciate your feedback.
will check out google content as well.

Can't speak on neither(by my own experience)
But as far as google...
When you search for something on google, the 2/3/4 top results are paid ads. How many times do you just scroll past them? I do, EVERY time I do a google search.