Facebook vs Google Ads: Which is Best?

0:00two massive online advertising platforms Facebook ads versus Google ads which is best and which should you use for your business in this video I'm going to discuss the pros and cons of each and answer that exact question so if you ever take a look at a graph showing the total online advertising spend and how much Facebook ads and Google ads take of that is enormous they have a huge share of the total online advertising pie and when people talk about advertising online often they're referring to meta ads Google ads remember that we've got Facebook Instagram included with meta we've got all of Google Plus YouTube included within Google ads so these are

0:34really places where people spend an enormous amount of time online covered by these two on an advertising platforms now most people know me as the Facebook ads guy but I actually started my sort of digital advertising journey in Google ads and we offer Google ads as a service and I even have a separate YouTube channel for Google ads specifically where I cover Google ads tutorials similar to this Channel all about Facebook ads if you're interested there'll be a link in the video description so I feel like I'm well placed to talk about the pros and cons of each and discuss their merits and where they have weaknesses and which one

1:03you want to use depending on the products and services that you offer so let's start with Google ads now there are many different elements to Google ads a lot of people think about it as just search it's not there are many other elements but if we just focus on search for a minute because that is one of the big differentiating factors between Google ads and Facebook ads there's no real search option when it comes to advertising on Facebook and Instagram that is not correct and with search that is a really big deal it's a much different buyer experience than Interruption advertising because people have intent they're

1:34actively searching for the product or services that you offer or something similar and this can be massive for certain businesses particularly if what you offer is quite Niche and particularly if what you offer is quite expensive to have someone actively looking for what you offer has obvious advantages now there are also some drawbacks to search now firstly it's more expensive you're going to pay more cost per click it's more expensive to get traffic to your website than it is with other forms of Google advertising or what you would do on Facebook and Instagram and that's simply because advertisers see people that have that intent as more valuable more likely to

2:04convert therefore they're willing to pay more they bidded up the price and you have to compete with them so that's an obvious drawback if you have a nice high average customer value it's less of a concern you can you can manage that but for those businesses with small average order values Google search can be difficult because of that also there might be limited search volume for your keywords only a small percentage of your overall target market and actively going to be looking for a new product a new service to have a problem fixed whereas there may be many other people that you could reach with other forms of

2:34advertising that would allow you to scale a campaign a lot greater different sources say different numbers the usual estimate is about 10 of your total target market are actively searching and there's the other 90 that you're just not going to reach through Google search and if you've operating in something that's quite Niche if there's not that many search on a monthly basis you might max out your budget at a thousand bucks a month a couple thousand bucks a month you can't scale as you can with other areas of Google or with Facebook Instagram now you can of course expand to other networks within Google ads like

3:02display which is Interruption advertising just like Facebook and Instagram but those businesses that do rely on interaction advertising are more that way focused tend to see better results with Facebook and Instagram ads and focus there more there are of course exceptions but that's just one of the major differences between the two platforms YouTube advertising is an interesting case now obviously it falls within the umbrella of Google ads and it kind of operates as a hybrid somewhere between search and sort of display Interruption advertising there are elements of it that are going to function quite similar to Facebook and Instagram ads you know you've got ads within content that's designed to

3:35interrupt people away from what they're originally intending to do which is watch something that's quite similar but there are options to advertise on YouTube based on what people are searching for because people do search in YouTube not as much as they do sort of within Google search of course but a lot more than they do within Facebook and Instagram so it's a bit of a hybrid there and that's something to consider depending on where your business fall was on the average or the value Spectrum how Niche it is all that sort of stuff the Google ads platform is certainly more sophisticated there's more options there's more different ways of

4:03advertising and that can make it more complicated for beginners what you find is that when you run ads on Google you run ads on search in a very different way to run them on YouTube in a different way to run them on the Display Network whereas if you're trying to learn Facebook and Instagram ads as a beginner the way you advertise on Facebook is very very similar to the way you advertise on Instagram often just taking a box right so I think that for beginners they often find Facebook and Instagram ads a lot easier to understand and probably get better results because of that than Google ads Google ads have

4:31recently bought in performance Max campaigns to try and address that where you can just set up one campaign that is then pushed out everywhere but I do think that if you took the average person who didn't have any experience with with Google ads or Facebook ads and they jumped into both ads managers both ad accounts and they take a look at the Google ad account and go this looks really complicated it is there's more going on that's fantastic for more advanced advertisers for beginners It's tricky in my experience Google ads tends to have better customer support better Advertiser support at this point as well now it's by no means perfect you can

5:01still get your own account disabled band for no reason and find it really difficult to get it back up and running but I don't think it's as bad as where meta ads is and I think that's just because of the maturity of the platform Google ads was around quite a bit um before Facebook ads and it has it had those issues absolutely you can rewind the clock to when I first started advertising on Google which must be 13 14 years ago and it was definitely worse than with those sorts of issues than it is now it has improved over time I very much hope that meta as a company is going to work on

5:32this and improve Facebook and Instagram ads in that sense over time as well we're going to get better support but I think that is an advantage that Google ads has at this point oh by the way we offer Facebook ads and Google ads as done for you Services you can have one or the other or both if you're interested Link in the video description to both you can go ahead book a call with all my team members find out all the information so let's switch the focus to Facebook ads for a minute now depending on which network within Google ads you are using Facebook ads is very

5:59visual it's more visual it's um therefore beneficial for businesses that have something to demonstrate and display we often find that food companies or apparel brands or things like that are very much Facebook Instagram advertising Focus because the visual element is really really important to them we also find that Facebook ads tends to be a better option for businesses with low average order values because you're going to pay less for traffic on average in comparison to Google ads if you're just not making that much from each customer Google ads is tricky Facebook ads gonna be a better place you're going to pay less for traffic less for exposure on that

6:32platform now I don't want you to misunderstand me if you have a high average order value High customer value don't think that Facebook and Instagram advertising isn't the place to be you will almost certainly get great results on both because having a really high average customer value is one of the the best ways to get good results from any form of online advertising so you should definitely be testing both platforms but just if you are on that lower end of things I would steer you more towards the Facebook and Instagram side of things now the total audience size for both platforms is quite similar it's not

6:59far off three billion users in each case which is just mind-blowing just about everyone that's got regular internet access at this point so it's not a huge amount of difference there but one thing that we do see differences particularly if you're comparing Google search to what you're able to do with with Facebook and Instagram is that the number of Impressions that are available is significantly larger so there's often more scalability as I said particularly when you're comparing to search on the Facebook and Instagram and platform so when we see businesses for example that have funding that want to go really big really fast get massive exposure they'll

7:31often be putting more of their budget into Facebook and Instagram ads than Google they'll normally be advertising on both and we've certainly run ad campaigns for clients in that situation but there's just more sort of Supply to be used up when it comes to ad Impressions there so that might be something to think about Facebook also has the big advantage of audience building so if you take YouTube aside from the rest of what you do on Google you're not really building an audience as you advertise whereas when you advertise on Facebook and Instagram yes you're looking to generate lead sales and all those sorts of things but you

8:00can also be building significant audiences that particularly when you've been advertising for years could be very valuable in their own right because you are going to get some organic reach not just on Instagram but also on Facebook and increasingly so there's been some changes around that over the last few years and you're going to be able to Market to those people that do decide to follow you on Instagram that do decide to to like your page and see your stuff and that can help your marketing scan go further over time as you reactivate those people and potentially get into purchase again or actually get them to

8:28convert in the first place so that is I think a significant advantage that shouldn't be dismissed when it comes to which platform should it be advertising on the side benefit of building an audience as you generate customers is we're really big and personally for my business my following across Facebook and Instagram to a lesser extent but still is significant we generate lots of clients from there organically I've got a Facebook group with more than 200 000 members because of some of the advertising I've been doing we can't really do that with Google so again another big difference between the two and one that I don't think people pay

8:58enough attention to one other thing that I want you to consider when thinking about Facebook ads versus Google ads is following the crowd might not be the best approach because when you do that you're often going to be advertising in a place where the ads are priced appropriately and you actually want to find scenarios where the ads are priced inappropriately so I'll give you an example let's say you offer a relatively Niche high-end service now you might think I'm going to advertise on Google particularly on search because that's where the highest quality prospects are going to come through and it probably are going to see the highest quality

9:28prospects there but if you were to take that business high-end service advertise it on Facebook yes you're going to have to do more in terms of lead vetting and filtering out the lower quality leads but the leads are going to be way way cheaper and the potential for scalability is going to be much larger because if it's a niche high-end service there's just not going to be that many people searching for it so you might find that you have a better overall return on ad spend with a business like that using Facebook ads even though the traditional wisdom would be Google ads and that leads me on to the main point

9:57that I want to get across here and that's that any business that is serious about generating customers online should have tested at least advertising on both platforms there's a very limited downside in doing so and if you've only been focused on Facebook ads you've only been focused on Google ads and you give the other a go the worst case scenario is that you just waste a little bit of budget but it's absolutely worth it to find out because you might find that a the other platform might perform even better which would be fantastic because you can funnel budget over there and scale Etc you might find that it

10:26performs similarly and then you can run both and you've got a more Diversified customer acquisition setup which is great because we all know that Facebook ad accounts Google ad accounts they can get banned and if that goes down how are you going to generate your customers it's particularly important for businesses that are a bit larger have staff overheads things like that you need customers coming in on a regular basis having that diversification is a really good idea if you test both and find that one performs much better than the other maybe you just retarget on that second platform so if Facebook ads is your main thing Google ads doesn't

10:56really work for you just set up a simple retargeting campaign that just ticks along with a small budget I would be shocked if that doesn't help improve your overall performance if you're just retargeting on say the Display Network and people who have visited your website that's almost certainly going to help boost overall performance particularly if you leave it on a on a small budget so given all those reasons I would definitely give both a go and then adjust your budget and your strategy going forward accordingly now you might be thinking that's great then but how do I get started you need to go and watch these videos on screen right now they

11:24are beginner tutorials for both our platforms and will cover everything you need to get your ads up and running go ahead and check them out