When you choose to advertise your business, you need to determine which platform you want to advertise your business on. You need to consider multiple factors, including what type of business you’re in? What kind of audience do you want to reach?
This article outlines how Google Ads and Facebook Ads operate and the strengths of both advertising platforms to help you make an informed decision about where you want to advertise your business.
What is Google Ads Management?
Google Ads is the most popular pay-per-click advertising platform. When using Google Ads Management, you can target specific keywords that your business is related to, hoping that users will click on ads and convert. You will then be charged each time a user clicks on your ad.
When targeting keywords, you will bid on each one in an attempt to be at the top of Google’s paid search results. The top of the first-page bid will vary depending on the industry.
You can also target locations, audience segments and when your ads run within Google Ads. Once you have collected enough data, you can make bid adjustments based on your selected targeting options. For example, if most of your conversions happen between 10 am-12 pm on Mondays, you can bid more aggressively on this timeframe to increase your conversion rate.
When creating a campaign in Google Ads, you can choose from multiple different campaign objectives. You can then select what type of campaign best suits your business, such as a shopping campaign.
One of the main things that stand out with Google Ads is that you already have searcher intent by targeting specific keywords related to your business. This means that most users that come across your business are likely to have the intent to buy as they are actively searching for a business like yours.
What are the strengths of Google Ads Management?
The main strength of utilising Google Ads Management is the audience that comes with it. It is the most popular search engine, with over 3.5 billion searches per day, meaning your business can reach a massive audience with the right Google Ads strategy.
Another benefit of using Google Ads is that advertisers can target specific keywords to avoid wasting their budget on users who aren’t interested in their service. Using the keyword planner tool in Google Ads also allows advertisers to see the most popular search terms for their business to help them target the right keywords.
Furthermore, you don’t need the biggest budget to succeed with Google Ads, a common misconception. Although some industries will be far more competitive than others and naturally require a bigger budget, you don’t need to spend over £100 a day to see results.
When showing ads to users, Google takes a lot of factors into account, including the keyword, ad and landing page relevance, to show the right ads to the right users. As long as your ads and keywords are relevant to the searchers’ query, you can generate conversions at a low price.
What is Facebook Ads Management?
Facebook Ads is a paid social advertising platform. With Facebook Ads Management, you target users based on their interests and demographics rather than keywords. You can also target specific locations, much like Google Ads. Facebook will tell you if your audience is too narrow, too broad or the correct size. It will also predict the number of conversions based on your audience size.
Facebook will then show the ads to the right people based on the audience you have selected and the information they have collected from users to get the right ad in front of the right audience.
With Facebook Ads, you utilize images/videos and text to create suitable ads. You can also include multiple lines of text to test; Facebook will deliver the text they think will produce the most results depending on the user. You can also use various images for users to scroll through – this is known as a carousel ad.
When creating a campaign, you have to choose a campaign objective like Google Ads. However, in Facebook Ads, you choose the campaign objective that best aligns with where your target audience is in the sales funnel.
What are the strengths of Facebook Ads Management?
Much like Google Ads, Facebook Ads allows you to reach a broad audience. When creating your audience within Facebook Ads, you can stack multiple interests and demographics to reach a specific audience your business aligns with.
Another great benefit of Facebook Ads is the use of visual aspects. The use of images and videos can help to bring your brand to life and increase engagement. This is particularly good for businesses like holiday agencies that want to showcase certain holidays.
Furthermore, you can create different audiences within Facebook, such as lookalike or retargeting audiences. Lookalike audiences help you target new people similar to those who have completed a specific action, such as converting. Whereas retargeting audiences allows you to retarget particular audiences such as cart abandoners in the hope of converting them.
What platform should you use?
Both advertising platforms are extremely powerful tools for advertising, and each of them has many strengths. When deciding which platform to use, it’s important to note that although they have some similarities, they are different in the way they deliver ads, and it mostly comes down to what your business needs.
The main difference between the two is that with Google Ads, you can target keywords and audiences, whereas Facebook Ads only allows you to target audiences. This is a crucial factor to consider when choosing what platform you want to advertise on.
For example, if you are in a particular niche industry, you may be better off with Google Ads as the searcher intent is already there.
