Today’s content is especially for those who are interested in advertising on the Internet, as we are going to analyze the differences between Google Ads and Facebook Ads, the two biggest and most important platforms to advertise on the web.
If you have done some research on your own, maybe you already know a little about both platforms and you are wondering which of the two can help you more or with which one you get better results, so in this post we are going to explain what are the strengths, disadvantages and advantages of Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
What is Facebook ads?
Facebook Ads is the best way to have advertising through social networks, specifically in the most used social network in the world, we refer to Facebook. Although there is the possibility of hiring advertising on other social networks such as Twitter or LinkedIn, Facebook is still the social network par excellence, so hiring the ad service on it gives you a reach that you can hardly achieve in another social network.
These are some of the figures with which you can better measure the power that Facebook has to give visibility to your ads:
- It has 1.28 billion active users per month.
- It has one trillion views per month.
- 8% of the people connected to the Internet do it through Facebook.
What is Google Ads?
Google Adwords or Google Ads is the advertising service offered by Google and has been active since its launch in 2000, with only 350 advertisers. With this service the idea of “pay per search” became popular, although other search engines also offer this type of service, the truth is that Google’s reach is incomparable.
- It is estimated that 40,000 searches are performed every second.
- 180 billion people enter the search engine every month.
- 6 billion searches present ads
- Reaches 90% of Internet users around the world
If you are here you probably already know what is the scope of Google and just want to assess whether it is better than what Facebook Ads offers, so here are the most significant differences.
1.- How do your ads work and distribute?
About the way their ads work, we can say that there are great similarities, because in both, each ad takes you to the advertiser’s website or social network, so there are no major differences, however the way and the places where they distribute them is very different.
Google Ads
When someone performs a search related to your product Google will show your ad, the customer can select it and go to your website, so without much complication. The question now is how does Google decide to show your ad and not your competitor’s? One of the main factors is the budget, but this does not mean that it is always the one who pays the most, because another important factor is the relevance of the ad and the quality of it, remember that for Google the user experience is always the most important.
With Google you can have the following advertising scheme and appear in:
- Search results
- YouTube
- Gmail
- Google Maps
- Display or affiliate network
Facebook Ads
With Facebook you can create ads with text and image, when the user clicks on the ad the user will be directed to your social network or to an external page. Thanks to the very detailed information about each user Facebook can segment in great detail to whom to direct your ad, showing it to “similar audiences”.
There are two types of ads: sponsored story and promoted advertising. With the first one you can pay to promote a story that will be shown to your fan page friends and you can measure the interaction they have with the story. While the option to promote advertising puts your ad at the top of the news feed of your followers.
With Facebook you can have the following advertising scheme and appear on:
- Market Place
- Facebook Messenger
- Fan pages
2.- Price
As for the price both have a point in common, because with both you can quote your ads according to the cost per click, so in both Facebook Ads and Google Ads you do not pay for the number of times your ad appears, but only for the number of times someone clicks on it, ie cost per click.
The only difference can be found in Facebook, where you can choose the Cost per thousand views fee, that is to say you pay a certain fee every thousand views of your ad, the prices depend on the category of your product.
3.- Ad format
As for the format of the ads, there is a big difference between these two services. Surely you will have noticed that all ads on the social network are especially striking, because they contain images, that is, they go through a post on the network. You can accompany the images with text in the description or within the description, but the main thing in these ads is that they contain an image.
Whereas, in Google ads mostly contain only text, this is especially true when it comes to ads that appear in search results.
Of course, you can have eye-catching ads with images in Google Ads, but these will be distributed exclusively through the display network.
4.- Distribution targeting
This is one of the big differences between the two services, as each platform has a very different objective. On the one hand Facebook has very complete data about its users, such as age, gender, preferences, among many others, so it is easier for Facebook to show your ads to your buyer.
On the other hand, Google Ads shows your ads to another type of audience, not to all those who meet the profile of your buyer persona, as it prefers to show ads according to search intentions, i.e. when a user types a keyword related to your products Google shows your ads.
On the other hand, Google can also place your ad on its display network, its affiliated sites including YouTube. Decide in which sites to place them according to the sector to which your ad belongs, thanks to this we can have more visibility.
This way with Facebook you will surely reach your buyer persona even if they do not have the intention to buy, while placing ads on Google means that you will reach people with purchase intentions, this means a higher conversion on your ads, while on Facebook you only get more visibility.
In this aspect we cannot tell you which one is better, because you will determine it according to your marketing strategies and objectives.
5.- Users and user intent
This is closely related to the previous point, because at the end of the day Facebook users and Google users have very different intentions and therefore can consume content with different intentions.
Let’s take an example: a mother enters the social network only to distract herself, she will hardly do it to solve a problem or to buy a product; but this same woman when she enters Google does it because she needs to know something, solve a problem or definitely buy, so she can search for cooking recipes, school uniforms, the nearest supermarkets.
Continuing with the example of this woman, when she is browsing Facebook she will see several ads about things that go according to her personality, age and consumption habits, but that surely she has no interest in buying. While when she enters Google she will receive ads that help her solve that need.
This big difference can put Google Ads at an advantage over Facebook Ads, however if you think about it, although the ad in the browser can turn into a purchase, if the woman had never searched, then she would have no idea of the existence of your product.
In summary Google Ads and Facebook Ads have different objectives, so we can not say that one is better than the other, the ideal is to take advantage of both tools, but if the budget is not enough in this post you have the characteristics of each one for you to choose the one that is more in line with your business. But tell us which of these platforms do you use for your business?