What’s the difference between Google Ads and Facebook Ads and which one should you use for your business?
The short answer, it really depends on your business, products, service, niche and who who your customers. Also we think as a PUSH or PULL strategy to get customers.
PULL – You are getting customers to your site as they are already in the market for it. Google works really well if people are going to Google and searching for exactly what you sell and they are interested.
PUSH – You are making customers aware of your product / service as they may not be aware of you. Facebook is great if you want to show off your product visually and you know exactly who would buy your product. Facebook is also great because it’s very scalable and you can target people that aren’t looking for you yet.
Google Ads
A very underrated platform for small to medium sized business as more and more businesses are opting for social media ads in isolation. Google is fantastic because you’re targeting people that have very high buying intent and want something in particular.
Maybe it’s directions to get to the beach, maybe they’re looking for a type of restaurant but also they have problems and they’re looking for a specific product to solve that problem.
For example, you may use Google and search for “Buy computer mouses.” You can then show a campaign and strategy that only shows your ad and your website if they search for this exact keyword, “Buy computer mouse.
Good ad creative is required to get that click and that includes images if you are using display or shopping campaigns. The beauty is here you can test variations of what works and with SMART campaigns, the Google AI does the heavy lifting in terms of matching creatives on what is working.
Facebook Ads
Facebook is a great tool to target specific customers and get granular with your targeting.
This is really useful if you have a niche product or service and there are only a small amount of people that are actually searching on Google it. This means that you would have a limited amount of people to draw from to get that search traffic. But with Facebook, you can target audiences. You can target people that don’t even know about you or know about your products or that this sort of product exists yet.
So basically you can show your products to people that don’t know that they want it yet, but they will once they see it. It’s a very visual platform and you need to make sure that your creatives are engaging.
You have to be mindful that when advertising on Facebook, you’re basically disrupting users that are going through their feed. They’re scrolling through checking out memes and other content that they like.
Therefore you want to show something that’s valuable to them. Something that entices them to stop, click through and purchase. It’s disruptive advertising, a bit like a billboard.
Combing both? Facebook & Google?
This is what we recommend for most business who want to cover the complete customer journey.
Google and Facebook feed into one another really well. For example, starting with just Google / Google Shopping allows you to feed your store with all these customers at a really low cost per click and start getting those initial traffic and conversions.
Customers go through your funnel, purchase your products and end up on your email list. With a Facebook pixel installed on your site, you can then re-target them on that platform. Recent iOS updates has lessened the impact of the pixel but there are work arounds to this and Facebook still had a lot data to work with to drive customer awareness.
This means that you’re using that Google traffic that search intent to get your ideal customer base through your funnel and get all that data. You then turn to Facebook and say find people just like these ideal customers.
Now if you are B2B company, you can also throw into the mix LinkedIn ads for retargeting as your core audience will be on that platform and then it gets super interesting!
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