Paid advertising is a major part of Digital Marketing.
And when it comes to paid advertising, there are two major players. Facebook
Ads and Google Ads.
Both are great, and yes one can be better than the other depending on your business, your audience, and your goals.
Facebook Ads
People do
not log in to Facebook to find a product or service. They login to consume
content inside the platform. Facebook has lots of information about its users.
Age, gender, demographics, location, and so on.
When you run
an Ad on Facebook, people may or may not be interested in what you have to
offer. But you can reach your target audience who are most likely to like what
you have to offer.
When I run
Facebook Ads, this is what I experience:
- Low
CTR (Click Through Ratio)
- Lots
of impressions
- Low
cost of impressions
The people
who are interested in what you have to offer might be less, but the cost is
also low. That means you can filter out the highly interested people from a
large group of potentially interested people.
Facebook Ads
are really good if you are trying to reach an audience who does not know the
existence of your product. They might not be searching for it proactively.
It is also
good for branding and driving brand recall for your product or service. Facebook
Ads are outbound advertising. You are reaching out to people instead of people
reaching out to you.
Now let us
compare this to Google Ads.
Google Ads
People
search on Google because they want something.
In Google,
you will not have much information about who the audience is, but you will know
what they are searching for.
What they
are searching for. There is a better term for it. Keywords.
Since they
are making their intent very clear with the search keyword, we do not need to
worry about their demographics and interests so much.
You are
going to look at what people are searching for (through keyword research), and
you are going to show ads to them. Anyone of any age looking you specifically
is a potential customer.
(Please note
that I am talking about search engine Ads when I say Google Ads here. I am not
talking about display ads or YouTube ads.)
With Google
Ads I get:
- Higher
CTR – because only the people looking for me are seeing my ads.
- High
CPC – because I am getting targeted high-quality traffic.
- Higher
cost per lead but higher quality
A lot of
people think that Google Ads are costly, and they do not want to use it. But
that is not the way it has to be seen.
You should
not worry about the cost per click or cost per lead. You should think about
your ROI (Return on investment). In Digital Marketing terms we call it ROAS
(Return on Ad Spend). And that is how these two platforms are different.
In terms of
the mechanics of search, SEO and SEM work on the same principles, except SEM
gives you an opportunity to bypass the organic search results and show paid ads
on the search engines itself.
I would not say Facebook Ads are better or Google Ads are better. Both are good in their own ways.
