Google vs Facebook Advertising – What Works Best for You?

digital advertising

When it comes to advertising your business online, it can be difficult to decide what the best option is for you. The digital advertising is an increasingly competitive place, so it’s no surprise that paid traffic is one of the fastest ways to get new visitors to your website, as well as gain leads and generate sales. Two platforms dominate the digital advertising sphere and those are Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising. But deciding the perfect option for your business can be difficult – which will give you the best ROI? Join us as we discuss the pros and cons of both advertising giants and how each offers a variety of different purposes.

digital advertising

Facebook Advertising

How it Works

Using Facebook advertising you can carefully target your ads so they appear to a target audience based on demographics, age, location, behaviour, gender and interests. Your digital advertising will appear in the Facebook feeds of your targeted audience. You set the duration you want your ads to appear for and your maximum spend. Facebook will then give you the general size of the audience you will reach.

What is it Best for?

Facebook advertising is fantastic for creating brand awareness. It allows you to reach your audience at the start of their “buying journey” and makes your digital advertising easy for users to share with friends and family, broadening your reach. It also allows users to directly engage with your campaign.

Goals?

The best goals for Facebook advertising is email list building, lead generation and attracting new business prospects. This also includes increasing your brand awareness and raising your social media profile.

Advertising Reachdigital advertising

With Facebook’s amazing sharing ability, your possible reach is, quite literally, everyone using Facebook. While you may target a specific demographic with your digital advertising, those who interact with your campaign are able to freely share and link the campaign to their own Facebook communities. Further, this also means your campaign can be shared on other social media platforms, further increasing your reach.

Cost?digital advertising

Facebook advertising is relatively inexpensive compared to other options. Depending on your goals and audience, as well as the duration of your campaign, the cost can range from $1 to $40 per day. Savvy use of demographic targeting can lower costs.

What Content Can You Use?

The best content for Facebook Advertising is visual – videos and images. Written content is also well received, but images and video are far more shareable and tend to have a greater impact. However, you will need to make sure your digital advertising matches the required community guidelines.

How Do You Measure Success?

Success in Facebook Advertising is measured by the engagement level of users. This includes likes, shares, comments and the number of leads you accrue.

How Much Effort is Needed?

Facebook Advertising needs a little more daily, hands-on work than Google Adwords. You will need to check in daily with your campaign to make audience adjustments as necessity requires, as well as the initial setup and ongoing optimisation.

Google Adwords

How it Works

Google Adwords uses keywords that trigger your digital advertising based on what users search for. This is also called PPC or Pay-Per-Click. This requires research into the best keywords for your business, the best landing pages on your website to link your advertising and the most cost effective keywords to target.

What is it Best for?

Google Adwords is an amazing platform for targeting users who are ready to buy and are actively looking for the product you are providing. It is best targeted at those who are actively searching, not those at the beginning of the buying process.digital advertising

Goals?

Your main goal with Google Adwords is generating sales. The Pay-Per-Click system makes it simple for advertisers to monitor their return on investment (ROI). This means you can adjust your campaigns based on sales scores.

Advertising Reach

Google Adwords focuses on people searching for specific keywords and phrases. This means you reach those wanting to buy and actively looking to buy, rather than targeting a wider, largely disinterested group. Once again, this results in a higher ROI.

Costdigital advertising

Cost varies depending on your objectives, budget and the competitiveness of your chosen keywords or phrases. A campaign can be started with as little as $100 as a budget. Savvy keyword researchers can target high quality keywords and phrases with lower competitiveness, to capitalise on ROI.

What Content Can You Use?

Text is preferred for Google Adwords, though more complex, image-based campaigns are available. Further, text advertising is very easy to create though you will need to keep in mind Google’s Advertising guidelines regarding phrasing and punctuation, as well as quality guidelines.

How Do You Measure Success?

Google Adwords provides powerful analytics to monitor the success of campaigns, completely with graphs and tables outlining engagement impressions, click through rates, and the like. You can measure the success of your campaign – and any adjustments needed – based on clicks, click through rates and sales.

How Much Effort is Needed?

There is some work needed in the initial creation of your campaign – or campaigns – which involve keyword research, secondary keyword research, location and demographic targeting, bid adjustments, and the creation of your digital advertising. From that point, your campaigns need weekly monitoring and optimisation based on ROI.

Interested in starting up your first digital advertising campaign? Need to revise and revitalise an old one? Contact us today for all your digital marketing needs!