Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads: Which is the Advertising Platform For You?

When it comes to deciding which platform is best for you it is important to understand what makes each platform unique. Facebook ads and Google ads differ in many different ways and recognizing each component will make choosing a platform that much easier. Both platforms offer a wide range of perspectives which allows you to target wide or specific audiences.

There are both positives and negatives to each platform which should help you in your final decision. It is important to note that when choosing a platform one of the main variables that come into play are client personas. To build a successful campaign, we first need to understand the business and its audience. This helps ensure that ad messaging and targeting is purposeful. Personas provide us with that insight and give us answers who we think will be interested in the product/service.

In advertising, before any research or work is put into creating a campaign, there should be a set of goals you wish to accomplish. Being goal-oriented in your marketing and advertising approach saves you time and money, which can be either put back into the campaign or into your business.

This is the best way to determine what platform will perform the highest and get you the results you desire.

Let’s start with Google Ads…

As the most prominent search engine powerhouse in technology today, Google plays an integral role in a large majority of our society. It has become part of our everyday language and actions which means it has a lot of power to do a lot of good things.

When starting a Google campaign there are a couple of key questions you should ask yourself in order to get the campaign going. Ask yourself:

1. Is my industry big enough that people might be searching for products I offer?
2. Do I want to develop brand awareness or gain new customers?
3. How much am I willing to spend?

The reason to ask yourself these questions is to get a better understanding of how to achieve your goals. Google’s platform has the opportunity to gain the attention of very wide audiences and very peculiar audiences; this is what makes it easily accessible for all users. Whether you are trying to sell something simple like jewelry or clothes to something more complex and pricey like cars and homes, Google has the ability to narrow down your audience to gain that attention. They do this through two key aspects; keywords and audience targeting.

Keyword research is conducted in the starting stages of a campaign’s creation. It allows you to understand what users are searching for and how they are interacting after they have searched. Keywords that are more expensive tend to be either generic keywords that are very popular or they have the opportunity to have high conversion rates. 

Audience targeting can be extremely helpful within Google ads as it allows you to delegate your impressions to a certain type of person. Google can help with defining your audiences to a certain point based on past search history, interaction on websites and overall web experience. The one downfall with audience targeting on Google is that it is not always accurate and does not get as distinctive and specific like Facebook ads do.

Budgeting for a Google campaign tends to be more expensive than Facebook (this, of course, varies between product/service, industry and a couple of other variables) In order to get your money’s worth in a Google campaign, the minimum budget you should be going in with is roughly $600/month, again depending on the industry. For things like budget and overall questions about setting up a campaign, it would be beneficial to speak with a search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC) or digital marketing specialist who can help answer your questions with your business goals in mind.

At the end of the day Google is a great platform if the statements below are applicable to you:

1. Budget is flexible in the upper range
2. You are looking to either expand your customer base or increase awareness of your company
3. Have an idea of your audience and it is not too specific.

Let’s Switch Over to Facebook Ads…

Facebook ads is another great advertising platform that helps you utilize the billions of daily users that scroll through the home page every day. Unlike Google, audience targeting on Facebook is more complex and gives you more freedom to really narrow down your ad impressions and clicks. If you know exactly who your audience is and their interests and behaviours Facebook is a great platform for you. Facebook also would be your ideal platform if you have previously made customer lists, phone numbers and website/app interactions to which you can also target.

The reason why knowing your audience/having a very specific audience works well with Facebook is that you can create your audience targeting to capture people who have those interests, behaviours and interactions on and offline.

Facebook gathers the data that users implement onto their profile, amalgamates them into a specific “bucket” and then create multiple different categories for Facebook ad users to target.

The main difference between Google ads and Facebook ads is on Google users search for your product/service; Facebook you show your product/service to a distinctive audience that you think will convert.

Understanding the basics of digital marketing can definitely help when it comes to online advertising. The risk with online advertising is that it will either convert or it won’t and there is an opportunity to lose a lot of money if not done properly.  If having a bit of guidance at the beginning of a campaign is in your budget we would highly recommend it. This way the campaign will be set up properly and you can understand the results before running it on your own.