Facebook Advertising vs. Google Advertising
Over the last few years business owners have seen Facebook and Google advertising as two competitors of which you choose one or the other. Team Facebook or Team Google! However, the best results have been found by people who’ve harnessed the power of both. Some companies even finding ways for them to work in unison. Obviously in the perfect world with an unlimited budget this would be the way everyone would go, but unfortunately this is not the case for 99% of businesses. With this in mind, this is our attempt at trying to explain the benefits of both to work out which would work best for you and your business.
The Differences
Google Adwords has become huge business and the term “paid search” has almost become a tag line when it comes to search engine users. Everyone understands that the more money you pay, the more chance you have of being on page 1 of a Google search.
Facebook advertising is what the experts call “paid social”, the idea of paying to advertise on social media. As Facebook has the most active users of any social network in the world, this has become the most used and most lucrative form of social advertising.
Strengths of Google Adwords
Google Adwords has some great benefits so we thought we’d list three of our favourites for you below.
- It’s measurable. With Google Adwords you can examine every aspect of your advertising campaigns from click through rates, conversion rates, cost per click and cost per acquisition. If you want to generate reports to really focus in on the specific statistics you need to help your advertising campaign succeed, you can.
- It’s cost effective. You can decide exactly how much you want to spend. You can set your budget at £10 a day or you can set it at £500 a day; it’s completely up to you. What’s more, you pay on a pay-per-click (ppc) basis which means you will not pay until you get a genuine lead to your site.
- You adverts are well targeted. With Google Adwords you can target ads extremely effectively as there are many different ways to create the best opportunities for your audience to see your adverts. These range from Location and language to device and time and can all be set very easily when creating your campaign.
Strengths of Facebook Advertising
Now we will move onto Facebook advertising. There are some great benefits here too. Once again, here are our top 3.
- With Facebook advertising you can spend as little as £1 a day and still see results. There are multiple bidding structures available so as long as you select the correct structure you could still get your ad in front of hundreds of people every day for a tiny budget!
- The targeting options for your adverts on Facebook are unbelievable. Despite what you would like to believe, Facebook knows basically everything about all of its users so you can choose hundreds of different targeting options to make sure your adverts are only being seen by your perfect audience. You can target people via their interests, hobbies, what they post about, who their friends are, if they have children, if they have large families and many, many more options. You can even target if they are friends with lots of other people who are married with children between the ages of 20-24. Amazing! The opportunities on Facebook are mind-blowing and seemingly endless.
- 1/3 of the world is on Facebook. This means you can guarantee your audience are out there. With almost anyone on the globe who can gain access to a computer, tablet or smart phone owning an account you know there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who are looking to find even the most niche of products so you can almost guarantee results.
Conclusion – Facebook or Google
As our research shows, there are clear benefits of both and the best strategies in the top companies come from strategies that run campaigns in both. Each individual business is different with different budgets and objectives so it would take a long time to pin point exactly which is right for you. The information above should give you an idea of how you could use them both for your business and allow you to make a more informed decision on which route to take to start with. Also bear in mind, you do not need to stick with the first decision you make. You can always run some trial and error with both and see which one is more successful for your business.