Facebook Advertising vs Google AdWords: Where should you spend your advertising dollars?

As the war between the two tech juggernauts intensifies, the ever-persistent question continues to flood marketers’ inboxes: Who deserves my businesses precious advertising dollars – Facebook or Google?

Well, that depends. Each platform can deliver exceptional ROI – subject to your businesses, target market, budget and marketing goals.

In this post I distill the fundamental differences between these two paid advertising channels, and provide actionable advice on when to invest in each.

Paid Advertising Market Snapshot

Let’s start by taking a look at paid advertising trends in Q4 2015. According to the Kensho Digital Marketing Report, social advertising spend increased 50 percent in the last quarter of 2015, whilst global search ad spend increased only 8 percent in the same period. The rise of social advertising can be attributed to Facebook’s improved video platform stealing TV budgets, changes in bidding strategy and the wider adoption of Instagram ads.

Furthermore, E-marketer predicts search spending to grow 39 percent to $40.60 billion in 2019 and social ad spend (as a whole) to grow 33.5 percent, reaching $35.98 billion in 2016, representing 16 percent of all digital ad spend globally.  

Looking at the numbers, the future looks bright for both paid advertising mediums, but which one of the category leaders should your business invest in? Let’s take a closer look.

Facebook Advertising

With more than one-fifth of the world’s population active on Facebook, the platform offers significant scale. Combine this with a goldmine of behavioral data, highly granular targeting capabilities and ever-evolving ad formats, and it’s clear the social giant is a powerful weapon for advertisers.

Some may argue that Facebook advertising skews more towards brand building and top of funnel marketing activities; however, this doesn’t detract from the immense value the channel brings.

Pros

Massive Scale: With over 72 percent of all online adults active on Facebook, in terms of audience attention the site is what the TV was 50 years ago. You can multiply campaign reach in real time for a fraction of the cost you would pay for a TV or radio spot, whilst leveraging a smorgasbord of targeting features to reach the right audience.  

Goldmine of Data and Pinpoint Targeting Capabilities: Facebook mines almost every imaginable action its 1.5 billion active users take, and with an average Facebook session lasting longer than a Google search, the volume and quality of behavioral data Facebook captures supersedes that of its rival. Couple this with the platform’s granular targeting capabilities and marketers can now deliver the perfect message to the right audience at the most opportune time, ultimately minimising ad wastage.

Cost-Effective: Facebook ads, on average, are cheaper than ads on Google. In saying this, the price you pay will vary depending on how much competition there is for your target audience – proponents of AdWords may argue that a Google click is worth more than one on Facebook, given the consumer’s stage in the decision journey.  

Engaging Ad Formats: In comparison to its archrival’s predominately text-based ads, Facebook offers a myriad of engaging ad formats. Through its newsfeed advertising feature, Facebook can deliver compelling visual ads that seamlessly integrate with the user experience. Furthermore, Facebook boasts around 8 billion video views a day and continues to invest heavily in its video platform, capitalising on an increasing number of younger consumers who prefer online video to traditional TV formats. 

Cons

Interruption Marketing: Users on Facebook aren’t actively on the platform to shop. As a result, conversion rates (as an average) are going to be a lot lower than on Google, where consumers are in buying mode.

Difficult to Measure ROI: Subject to campaign objectives, it can be challenging to establish metrics that correlate with clear return on investment.

Demographic Targeting: Targeting via demographics requires much trial and error to pinpoint the right audience, and can prove to be costly over time. Also, by making assumptions around who the target audience is you may cut out a significant portion of the market. Search, on the other hand, circumnavigates this problem through capturing user intent, taking out much of the guesswork around demographics.

Google AdWords (search network)

With over 100 billion global searches being conducted each month, Google is by far the most popular and widely used search engine on the planet. According to Sitwit, businesses make two dollars for every dollar they spend on AdWords, and PPC advertising is 56 percent more profitable than social media advertising, which roughly has 44 percent ROI.

Pros

Vast Reach: Like Facebook, Google offers massive reach. The search giant generates 40,000 queries per second, equating to around 1.2 Trillion searches per year. No matter what industry you’re in, you can guarantee that your target audience is looking for your products or services on Google.

Commercial Intent: The biggest advantage AdWords has over Facebook is user intent. Most consumers using the search engine are actively looking for products or services, giving advertisers the unique opportunity to meet prospects at key points in their decision journey. Google refers to these as micro moments.

Highly Measurable and Comprehensive Analytics: Google houses an in-depth analytics suite, which provides a clear picture of revenue-driving metrics such as cost per conversions. Using this data, you can easily identify weaknesses in your strategy and manipulate campaign variables to achieve desired marketing KPIs.

Granular Targeting and Mobile: Google offers a plethora of granular targeting options such as location, device, time of day and days of the week. This allows for tighter control of campaigns and enables marketers to deploy advanced PPC strategies such as channeling budgets into higher-converting times of the day. It also caters for the mobile-centric buying habits of today’s consumer, allowing marketers to develop custom targeting and bidding strategies for the mobile experience.

Rewards Quality: The most common misconception around AdWords is that the company with the biggest budget wins. This is not the case. Ad rank is computed by quality score x maximum bid price, and thus Google rewards relevancy, creating a level playing field for smaller players.

Cons

Expensive in Some Verticals: Cost can be exuberant in some industries such as Insurance- where cost per clicks hover around the $55 mark. Some marketers may argue that this is counteracted by high transaction and customer lifetime values in these industries.

Takes Expertise to Set Up and Manage: AdWords certainly isn’t a set-and-forget platform. If campaigns aren’t set up correctly or budgets are not tightly managed, advertising dollars can be burnt.

Lacks Engaging Ad Formats: Google shopping ads aside, the AdWords platform lacks the visually engaging ad formats of its social rival. 

Google AdWords v Facebook Advertising: Where to Invest?

 To round things up, Facebook advertising works well for brand-building activities, establishing industry authority, re-activating past customers and dripping prospects through multi-stage sales funnels – like the strategy Ryan Deiss explains here. Google AdWords, on the other hand, is unparalleled in its ability to generate leads in a highly measurable way.

Ultimately, how you apportion your marketing spend across Facebook and Google will boil down to your business model, target market and marketing goals. As a rule of thumb, if there is a significant volume of consumers searching for your products or services on Google, then invest there first. These customers are ready to buy, and in markets with short sales cycles, like emergency plumbing, you’ll see near-instantaneous return on investment.

In saying this, from my experience Facebook and Google work best in synergy, harnessing the unique strengths of each platform. A consumer is more likely to click on your Google ad if they recognise your brand from Facebook. And a consumer who discovers your brand through Google may not convert on the first visit, which gives you the opportunity to leverage Facebook’s re-targeting to re-introduce them into your sales funnel. The combinations are endless and will require trial, error and meticulous optimisation to establish the perfect mix for your business.

In closing, as consumer attention becomes increasingly fragmented, adopting a multi-channel digital strategy is key to your online marketing success. There is no better place to start than with the two digital channels that garner the most consumer attention: Google and Facebook.