Google Ads or Facebook Ads: which advertising platform is right for your business?
When it comes to paid digital advertising, both Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the biggest players in the market. But how can a business know which of the two platforms is best for its needs? According to the ad experts at Astrolabs, the right way is a combination approach because this allows a business to take advantage of the strengths of each platform while still being able to rotate its advertising budget and strategy depending on its current needs.
At Astrolabs we understand that all businesses have a certain marketing budget available and deciding which part of this to use for online advertising can be extremely difficult. Another contributing factor is the inability to fully understand the differences between Google Ads and Facebook Ads. This is why at Astrolabs we have taken it upon ourselves to solve all your questions, as a comparison between the two can yield important insights into how each platform works.
What are Google Ads?
Advances in technology are giving us both as marketeers and consumers more choice than we could have imagined. As a result, the way we find, transmit and receive information has changed, and the way we make our purchases has changed.
Google – founded in 1998 – is a search engine used by 92% of internet users for every search, which literally returns thousands of results on products, tips, videos, local businesses and more in a split second. Google currently processes more than 40,000 search queries every second and more than 3 billion a day.
Google Ads has become one of the largest and most popular pay per click advertising platforms in the world. This means that advertisers only pay when a user clicks on their ad. Of course there are other search engines that use similar techniques, however, Google is used so often by consumers and advertisers that the term “paid search” is more associated with Google Ads.
But in addition to Google Search Ads, which is the most common form of advertising on Google, the company provides a variety of additional types of advertising. Thus a business can advertise its products and services to potential customers through the Google Display Network, where it is possible to reach people outside of Google’s search engine results through text, images and banner video displays that appear as users browse the web, use mobile apps or watch videos. Equally useful to a business are Retargeting Ads as increasing traffic is the first step in converting visitors into customers yet most are unlikely to make a purchase or provide any information immediately. So this type of advertising allows a business to retarget users who have already visited its website and remind them of the products and services it provides.
Another form of advertising that shows increased use, especially when there is an eshop, is Google Shopping Ads. These campaigns provide an excellent experience for the user who is specifically searching for a product and Google displays images, prices and reviews for items that they believe are relevant. If shoppers click on the ad, they go directly to the specific product page on the business’s eshop.
What are Facebook Ads?
So while Google Ads are widely referred to as “paid search”, Facebook Ads have the title of “paid social”. Changing consumer behaviors and patterns have undoubtedly enhanced social media that allow consumers to connect with friends, rate their experiences, and interact with products and businesses that interest them.
A key component of Facebook ‘s popularity with marketers as an advertising platform is the number of active users it maintains, 1.69 billion and growing. It is therefore no surprise that in 2019 alone, Facebook Ads accounted for 22% of all online ad spend and 83% of all social media ads.
Perhaps Facebook ‘s biggest advantage over Google is the fact that it knows our social behaviour better. We may not be fully aware of it, but we subconsciously reveal information on Facebook about ourselves more than we intend to.
Yes, Facebook collects a lot of data. Perhaps more than we realize. The pages we like, the topics we’re involved in, our friends, our date of birth, our current location, our 2019 holiday and so on. Imagine the value of such a database for advertisers who want to target specific users as behaviour has a huge impact on making a purchase decision.
For this reason, Facebook Ads remain popular with many business owners as they offer the ability to identify their target customer and only advertise to people who are actually likely to buy their product or service. Something that not many advertising platforms can offer, at least not in as much detail.
Google Ads vs Facebook Ads – How they work
Google Ads allow business owners to target users based on the search query they enter into Google, also known as keywords.
From the user’s perspective, when they search Google for a particular keyword, at the top of each search results page, the initial listings are the promoted ads that each business has paid for.
On the advertiser’s side, Google Ads allows it to create campaigns that only appear when users search for a keyword it wants to advertise for. For an even more targeted approach, local businesses can target people searching for keywords in a specific geographic area. This way they don’t waste advertising budget on a customer in Athens who will probably never visit their car repair garage in Alexandroupolis.
Once these campaigns are created, the business’s ads are put into a bidding process with other advertisers that have chosen similar keywords. Google will then display the ad with the best bid and with the most relevant content.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that whichever business has the largest advertising budget automatically “wins” exposure for their ads. But this is not the case as Google focuses primarily on the quality and relevance of ads, not the amount advertisers spend.
Of course there is a plethora of tools provided by Google to create these campaigns, which the PPC experts at Astrolabs know how to use for the benefit of your business.
Facebook Ads on the other hand, allow a business to target its ads to individuals based on the behaviors and patterns it chooses to target. Unlike Google Ads, it is not based on the user’s search query. Not only does it provide a wide range of targeting options based on demographics, but it allows an advertiser to target users based on behaviors, what they like and don’t like.
One of the most powerful features of Facebook is the ability of the advertiser to create what is known as a “lookalike audience”. That is, to upload customer information from its own databases to Facebook, which then filters it based on its own qualitative characteristics to create the “lookalike” audience. This allows the advertiser to increase the effectiveness and potential reach of its ads by targeting new potential customers who share the same interests and consumer behaviour as its existing customers.
For these reasons, a business needs to make sure that it really knows its potential customer. This in itself is a time-consuming and detailed process in which one of Astrolabs ‘ ad experts can help you by creating a digital profile of your business’s customer.
In this day and age, where everyone turns to the internet and social media to do their research and make decisions, the way Google Ads and Facebook Ads exchange information and complement each other is incredible.
A typical example is a special implementation carried out by the digital marketing department of Astrolabs for a corporate client and it concerns the creation of a cycle of renewal and audience recall from Google Ads to Facebook Ads and vice versa. Its operation is very simple:
The common lists:
• We create an audience list where we collect all users who visit our website either organically or through Google Ads.
• We create through the Facebook pixel a list of those who have visited our website and Facebook through its algorithm matches as many as it can with active profiles on its platform.
• We use the above list to create a new “lookalike” list with an audience similar to those who visit the company’s website.
Advertisements:
• We create a Traffic ad where the goal is for the user to visit the company’s website. Here we use the audience “lookalike” we created above. This allows new potential customers, with whom the business has not yet interacted, to discover the business. The benefit here is that it fills up the first list we opened and collects website visitors, who we target at the same time with a Display Ads campaign on Google, and so the business appears in front of potential customers without them having actively searched for it.
• We create an Engagement ad using the second audience we created above using the Facebook pixel. As this is an audience that has already visited the company’s website at least once, the goal here is to appear in front of them in a different medium than the one in which they searched for us and thus increase the company’s awareness and authority in the sector it operates in.
So summarizing all the above information , at Astrolabs we believe that a business should have a presence on both digital advertising platforms. Quite simply it should not be Google Ads or Facebook Ads but Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
