What is More Effective: Google Ads or Facebook Ads?
Published on November 06, 2018
Google Ads or Facebook Ads can do a lot of great things for your company or business! They can both be beneficial for driving sales and increasing brand awareness. However, we all know that money doesn’t grow on trees and you may only be able to afford one of these marketing strategies. That being said, which one is best for your company? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? After reading this article, we hope that you will develop a much stronger outlook on both and be able to make an informed decision on which one you’d like to use to reach your marketing goals!
First of all, why are Google Ads or Facebook Ads even necessary?
Again, advertising on either is still a big decision due to costs. But, advertising online in general, as opposed to traditional sales, will help you out a lot for a number of reasons.
It builds brand awareness
How else are consumers going to know about your business, goal, service, or product? Sure, word of mouth and cold calling can spread awareness. Though, both take much longer and reach much less people. Instead, when you advertise on Google Ads or Facebook Ads, thousands of people will be able to see your company and what you are selling, sometimes, even, within a day!
The amount of online consumers
People these days are all about being online. They wake up to the smell of social media instead of coffee. They live and breathe being connected online. They even use the phrase, “Google It” continuously. This alone tells you that you’re best off having an online presence. According to researchers, 5 years of an average person’s life will be spent online! In sum, when you choose to advertise with either Google Ads or Facebook Ads, a large amount of people will notice you.
It increases website traffic
Whenever someone clicks on your ad, they will be sent to your website, where they can either complete a purchase or learn more about your company. Increasing web traffic not only gives you more buyers, but improves SEO(increases your position on Google’s search rankings).
Everything is measurable
All sales, engagement, clicks, traffic, and analytics can be measured online using either Google Ads or Facebook Ads. You won’t need to struggle with how many closings you make in the traditional world. You will gain insights on how your company is doing, why, when, and how consumers are interacting with your ad. Best of all, you will be able to measure ROI and user behaviour with ease.
What is Google Ads?
Google Ads is run by Google’s Search Engine, where there are over five billion of these searches each day. In general, Google Ads is an effective way to advertise to increase website traffic, leading to an increase of visitors and ultimately, sales.
There are a couple ways to use this strategy to fit your preferred results. First of all, depending on what you’re selling (a product or a service), you need to find the most effective keywords for your ad (which will show at the top of the search results). For instance, if you’re selling a coffee machine, you want to use keywords such as, “coffee machine” and “coffee maker” - so that people who are searching for coffee machines will see your ad.
Major Benefits
The best thing about using Google Ads is that you can pay as much as you want per day for searchers to see your ad. Once it gets enough clicks to fit your budget, the ad will stop showing. This way, you can really test if consumers are responding to your ad.
Another thing is that you can choose how you pay. You can choose to use CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition), and even CPI (cost per impression). That being said, depending on your company, brand, product, it may be best to pick one of these over the other. For example, If you care most about brand awareness, CPI would be best for you.
The Google Display Network (unlike the search results) allows you to show your image or video ads on websites that are apart of Google’s network (ex. Youtube). As a result, you can even reach people who aren’t searching for your product or service - they could be just surfing the net. “Remarketing” can also be used here - where your ad shows up to people who have previously viewed your website! They can be “remarketed” back at them. Sounds cool, right?
What are Facebook Ads?
Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with more than two billion users. To effectively advertise on the platform, you can pick from a number of different goals (ex. traffic, engagement, lead generation) and then create a target audience. Once you’ve created your ad, it will start appearing in the newsfeeds of users.
Major Benefits
Facebook Ads can be used to promote businesses on a wider scale. With the amount of users signing onto Facebook and browsing their newsfeeds on a daily basis, you are given the chance to reach a vast audience.
Another benefit of Facebook is that it's more effective at remarketing ads than Google is. Users who land on websites all over the internet will be more susceptible to ads being remarketed on Facebook!
In addition, you can create custom audiences based on user profiles. The beauty of Facebook is that its users often list everything about themselves - their profession, relationship status, age, religion, location, and even their interests! This makes it easy to target these people directly. For instance, if your company is a wedding cake bakery, you can target users who have recently changed their relationship status to “engaged”. How cool is that?
With Facebook, you can advertise with carousel ads. This is incredibly beneficial if you’re advertising a product such as, clothing, as users can look through your collection and get connected to an ecommerce store or your website.
You can boost/promote posts that are performing well. Facebook actually lets you know if one of your posts on your page is getting a lot of engagement and asks you if you want to ‘boost’ it. With this boost, you can enjoy even more engagement and traffic to your website.
The Burning Question: Which one should you go with?
To sum up, when you pick either Google Ads or Facebook Ads to achieve your marketing goals, you are on the right track. You can’t go completely wrong with either, but, depending on your company or industry, one or the other may be more beneficial. If you are looking for more website traffic, both are equally effective. If you have a clothing company or a product you want to show off, Facebook may be perfect. You can’t really tell without an in depth analysis that a digital agency can provide.
Overall, If you want the best of all possible worlds including the most lead generation, engagement, brand awareness, and sales, the best thing to do would be to hire an expert - a digital agency that can guide you through picking the best marketing strategy for your company.
At Xi Digital, we take the time to carefully analyze your company for you so you don’t have to be the one to choose between Google or Facebook. Ultimately, we can determine the most effective marketing plan that will lead to optimal results. Please send us a message or fill out a free business assessment form to see how we can help you hit your marketing goals!