What’s Better: Advertising in Facebook or Google

Decade long debate rages still continue, Google Ads or Facebook Ads? Which platform should opt for my business? While both platforms have some similarities, they each have benefits that change depending upon business objective, goal, budget and whom business want to target.
Seriously speaking Facebook and Google Ads both bleed out the money from the company, bleed rate depends up on your goals and the marketing objective. If you want to know which one is best for your firm when you are developing the paid media strategy by targeting the full funnel, will depend on the objective you are looking to achieve.

Let’s see the Major Differences Between Google AdWords and Facebook Ads
Before we get into features and strength of Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, it’s necessary to understand the primary pivot point between the two ad platforms.

Google Adwords

Google AdWords is the world’s largest and most popular PPC advertising platform with more than 90% online user of the world. AdWords is so widely used, it has become synonymous with the term “PPC marketing.”In Google AdWords major focus is on the targeting of keywords and the ad copy used for advertisements. In PPC marketing user bid on keywords or specific phrases usually, search Google users to know or buy the product and services. Google Adword ads will be displayed alongside the search results of the user queries. Every time when a google search user clicks on an ad, the advertiser has to pay a certain amount of money to the google, hence the name “pay-per-click advertising evolved.” How PPC bidding works and how to optimization bid is a complicated subject as easy it looks through the surface.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads is a classic example of “paid social media”. With the largest number of monthly active users (or MAUs) compare to any of the social networks in the world, With the 54% of online user reach globally makes Facebook highly competitive and potentially lucrative digital asset of many businesses.
Although how to advertise your business on Facebook can be anticipated to be as similar as AdWords, but in reality, the commonality between platforms is only there promoting technique which is via the Internet, this is where the similarities end. Both the platform work differently Adwords helps businesses to find new customers majorly through keywords and through Topic and Interest basis, on the other hand, paid social media helps users to find businesses based there Demography, interested and behavioral data captured by social media platform.If you want to understand primary difference between Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, you can understand the concept this way: AdWords helps you to sales product, while Facebook helps you to develop your brand equity.

We have touched base the fundamental difference between Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, let’s go deep down to know the strengths of each platform and how we can leverage the platform utilization effectively for our business.

Strength and Weakness of the Platform

As a digital marketer, many people asked about the disparity between social media and Google AdWords ads regularly. They ask specifically about the benefits, the costs and the likely ROI of each platform. As per experience so far and analyzing the results, social media advertising is far more cost effective than Google AdWords but on the other hand, social media advertising won’t give you that reach which you will able to get from Google Adwords.
If you are operating or managing a start-up, Facebook advertising could be a cost effective option you have. While Google AdWords also has many benefits which make him best advertising platform in the current era. Let’s start with the pros and cons.

Google AdWords Pros

1. Real Time tracking and performance measuring tool makes your campaign easy to optimize and track
   90% of the online population give us the Largest potential audience to target with the platform. On an average, 180 billion searches happen every month on google search engine through 2.6 billion users.
2. The immediate impact you can expect in terms of instant influx of traffic and sales.
3. High level of control over your daily spends Adgroup and campaign level.
4. Have good option available for Ads development formats like Jpeg, HTML5, GIF images and Mp4 and Avi video formats.
5. There is more control over bid option on keyword level through bid strategies provided by the Google AdWords which are CPC( cost per click), CPM( cost per impression), CPA ( Cost per acquisition) ROSA( Return on sales Ads), maximize conversions( Set bid automatically to give you highest conversion) ,target search page location ( Automatically bid set to maintain or reach to define PageRank location),target outranking share( Bid Automatically setup to outrank your competition).
6. You have different campaign levels advertising options like Display ads, search ads, shopping Ads, video, App ads, Gmail Ads and Remarketing Ads.
7. They have a wide range of Targeting options which includes region targeting with pin code level accessibility, Day and Time based targeting, you can also target specific websites, device, platform and OS using the audience.
8. Adword does not have only keyword Targeting option but also have Affinity, In-Market audience, demography, topic and Website Placement wise targeting.
9. Google Adwords allows us to do automation in the campaign through running coded scripts if you are working on large project or multi client handling agency this feature will help you in time management.
10. The Clear objective has to be defined before you are starting any campaign like Conversion, Downloads, traffic influx on the website etc.

Google AdWords Cons

1. Setup and managing need little bit technical understanding if done inappropriately then, it might become costly medium to opt for.
2. Developing and managing the campaign is very time consuming and need the patience to create it.
3. Limited space within your ad (Three lines of text when you are using Search only).
4. Unless traffic comes on the website through mobile apps majority of times and exhausts your daily budget, need to be very careful during campaign setup to block and unselected the mobile app targeting.
5. Depending on your industry, the cost per click (CPC) can be substantial high for the search ads which will be in between $9.90 to $22.84 per click and for display Ads, it will be $0.20 to $1.50.
6. In shopping ads you need to create merchant account first and need to add feeds which take at least 24hr to get approved and if your product Images are not crawled then it takes another 3 days to index your image till that your ads will be under review and top of the all you can’t do a keyword targeting to these shopping ads, so you are depended on product title and description.

You may also like: Top Reasons to Hire a PPC Management Expert

Facebook Advertising Pros

1. Facebook account is easy to setup and needs no technical knowledge in creating an account and designing ad campaigns.
2. A Higher level of engagement with the customer can be achieved through personalized custom campaigns.
3. Facebook has similar targeting options, including, towns, regions, age, likes/interests, and demographics wise targeting apart this Facebook allows job title wise, the specific date of events like birthday & anniversary, a field of study and much more attribute based on your internet usage behaviors.
4. There is no limitation on interest based targeting which means somebody is interested in any product, service, topic, community or any other attribute you can target them which is not the case of google where you have to define sets to topic, affinity and in the market segment.
5. You have predefined template for ads developments like carousel, slideshow, canvas, photo album and image /video uploads, which are really more convenient to develop as compare to google ads.
   CPC is relatively cheap, depending on your industry product and services, On average, the cost is not more than $0.6 per click on ads.
6. Facebook gives us unique feature know as “lookalike audience”, which will be accessible after implementing Pixel tracking code on your website, the same facility has been also provided by Google called as “similar visitors” but the accuracy of making similar audience cluster is more appropriate in Facebook compare to google and the only reason for the same is internet usage tracking mechanism of Facebook, which is more on individual usage partner as compared to keyword and search queries done on google search engine.
7. In Facebook, you can create a post calendar for the month and schedule as per the audience reach.

Facebook Advertising Cons

1. Facebook platform is good for B2C products and services not for the B2B products.
2. You always have unrelated audience traffic on your website which is not in your target geography this is happening due to a large audience of facebook are on mobile application.
3. There is no option to target your ads at certain times within the day or on certain days of the week unless you choose a lifetime budget (Most of our clients request daily budgets).
4. Your reach is depended on the audience came to Facebook.
5. You can’t promote too many products for the platform due to the limitation of predefined templates currently it is 6 product at a time in carousel ads, but you can definitely tag 10 products in your post, they have also started collection ads but somehow they didn’t find it appropriate and removed from the template formats.

Conclusion

As per the above-shown numbers, it’s quite hard to differentiate among the two. But there’s a principal difference between them. Google is very efficient for already existing businesses to boost their sales or customer reach. Whereas, Facebook Ads do miracles for new businesses due to its incredible Brand Awareness capabilities.

Hence, an intelligent strategy will include combining both Google Adwords and Facebook Ads together to provide the business with the best reach of potential customers and nurture them to become the paying customers. The key to increasing the conversion rate is remarketing across multiple channels making them always in front of your brand, resulting in making your business big and profitable.

Leveraging the power of both Adwords and paid social media is considered the effective advertising strategy. However, it required to understand and develop an advertising strategy that aligns with the strengths of each respective platform. Although developing marketing plan by yourself is not an good idea until unless you have the background in digital marketing it’s always recommendable to have agency or in-house team to execute your digital marketing campaign and business always confused between in-house vs outsourced but the argument has to be about how best to use each platform for maximum ROI and greater business growth. We always recommend going for global outsourcing so that you can give them your target and made accountable for the outcomes, secondly they are experts in their field and we should harness their expertise for our business growth. In industry, many agencies work on target basis like PSDCenter, WEBITMD, RevLocal, Litmusbranding. It’s not the question about whether to go with Adwords or Facebook in a real way it is all about how to maximize the impact of your Google AdWords and Facebook Ads campaigns.