Which Ad Platform is Best?

0:00Cutting through the noise as a business owner or marketer is harder than ever on social. It's democratized reach, but most people struggle to get past 300 views and blame it on view jail. Paid social is a way to guarantee reach because you pay for it. It's a way to take quite average content and convert it into actual sales. But which platform is best for paid? Today, I'm going to rank the big hitters: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads Yes, we're including it. And TikTok in a classic YouTube style tier list. I've done my homework and looked at the data, so this is going to be a proper honest ranking

0:29with some advice from me. And if you disagree or have any knowledge add, drop it in the comments below. By the end of this video, you'll understand how you can make money from each of these social platforms and which one might be best for you in your situation. Whether that's a short-term play, a steady side hustle, or more of a long-term business

0:44plan, let's get into it. Now, let's start with one of the holy grails of the internet, YouTube. As an advertiser or business owner, there are three main ways to win on YouTube. Firstly, you've got pre-rolls or mid-rolls, traditional YouTube ads. You've got integrations or sponsorships, or you've got investing in building your own organic content. YouTube ads are quite different from ads on other social media platforms because they interrupt the content that you're trying

1:08to watch. Most YouTube ad spend is spent on pre-roll ads, so ads before your video starts, or mid-roll ads, ads that pop up partway through your video. And if you are a consumer of content on YouTube, these ads are probably quite annoying for the most part. You just want to skip them as fast as possible to get to your next thing. That's quite different to an ad on say Instagram that's embedded within the feed, or if you're scrolling through stories, it's like the next story along. So, it has a different feel. YouTube advertising mimics traditional TV advertising much more than it does other social

1:41platforms. The way you run YouTube ads is also quite different to integrations or creating your own organic content. You are running YouTube ads through the Google Ads platform. You are telling Google/YouTube who you want to reach, what type of person, and then for the most part, that platform is then going to go out and try and work out where should your ads be placed, which channels, which videos, etc. to try and get you the result that you want. It's a different mechanism to directly putting an integration in a video or building your own organic content. So, what this means is that YouTube ads typically perform best for

2:15consumer brands, businesses that sell products that you buy regularly, where the price point is relatively low, it's a somewhat of an impulse purchase, an easy decision to make. They wouldn't perform as well for a plumber, for example. They'd be much better off advertising on other platforms. Just think about the sorts of businesses that you see advertised in pre-roll, mid-roll ads. It's going to be those consumer brands. We also do see YouTube ads perform very well for businesses, actually particularly people, that have an organic following on YouTube. Cuz what that allows them to do is leverage that audience and make sure that with ad content, they put their stuff in front

2:51of a much larger proportion of their audience, some of which may no longer be watching their organic content, or may just dip in here and there. And YouTube ads are quite different from working with creators and using integrations and sponsorships. So, I as a creator, I work with various businesses who have integrations within my videos. It tends to be very natural in terms of we're pitching something that is relevant to the content that we know is highly aligned with the people that watch my videos that they may well be interested in. For me and my audience of advertisers and marketers, that's often going to be software AI businesses that

3:25have a tool that helps people save time or improve their results through their advertising. Now, the downside to working with creators directly is budget. It's going to cost money to work with these creators, typically at a higher CPM, so cost per thousand impressions for views on an integration is going to be higher than if you were to run a YouTube ad, for example. And it's people management. You've got to contact these people, work with them, extra work, extra effort involved, whereas with YouTube ads, you can just go and set it up and off you go. In my experience, the best way to build trust is by organic YouTube content. Building

3:57your own content, reaching your own audience, and converting them to buy your product or service. This is exactly what I do. On a personal level, I built an ad agency which last year spent a hundred million dollars of my client's budget on Meta ads. My leads for this service come from email list, Meta ads, but I also attribute a large percentage

4:14of my client leads to YouTube itself. People watch, binge my content, and then feel a level of trust that me and my team can help them with their marketing goals, which of course is true, backed up by the numbers. YouTube content creation though requires investment and consistency. It's a whole strategy on its own, but it can pay off and convert like no other platform or tool out there. So, with all of that, I'm going to put YouTube in as a B tier. If you don't have an organic following on YouTube, if you do, I'd stick it in an A, but most obviously don't, so I'm going to pop that in a B tier as an ad

4:44platform for now. Next up, we've got Facebook. More specifically, using Facebook to run ads to sell your product or services. And look, I'm obviously going to be biased here. I'll be the first to admit that, but you still want to hear me out on this one because this is far from the platform it was when you first heard about it, probably mid-2000s. This platform gives you access to one of the two most sophisticated advertising machines that have ever existed for small and medium-sized businesses. I genuinely mean that. The breadth of ad formats, the volume of people you can reach, there's very little else that comes

5:14close when it comes to most businesses. So, one of the things that Facebook really has going for it is a massive user base. Literally billions of users all over the world and very engaged users. The majority of Facebook users use the platform every single day. Facebook also has an older demographic in terms of its user base, which can be a pro, can be a con, depending on your business and who it is you're looking to reach and what you sell. If you are looking to reach an older demographic, very unlikely that you're going to find a better ad platform for your business than Facebook. If you're one of those

5:45businesses where you just sell along a lane and you're not really after a specific age group, I think there's a tendency amongst those businesses to discount Facebook thinking, we want our brand to be seen as cool and go after a younger demographic. And I've had many conversations with business owners and marketers and explained to them that the average 55-year-old has a lot more disposable income than the average 25-year-old. You absolutely want to be factoring that in to your market. If you were to assess the buying power of a Facebook audience in a country like the US, that's going to be much larger than most of the other social platforms and

6:20that's a really big pro. But like all social ad platforms, it's not perfect. The cost of advertising on Facebook has certainly increased a lot since I first started running ads more than a decade ago. As advertisers have gotten really good results from the platform, more and more have joined it, more have scaled their budgets. That increase in demand for Facebook advertising has increased the price. So it could be harder now for businesses getting started than it used to be. The platform has also become more

6:46complicated for advertisers to use. Particularly if you're a beginner, you first set up a new ad account, you log in and you are met with a series of options and you don't know which to choose, which will produce a better results for your business. The reason why Meta have built that out as part of the Facebook ads platform is to give advertisers more flexibility, more control, more options to suit their specific circumstances. So it is a good thing for those advertisers that know

7:11what they're doing and understand that. For beginners it can be really difficult. So factoring that in, I'm going to put Facebook in A tier. Next up we've got Instagram, which is an interesting one because here's something a lot of people don't know. When you run ads on Meta, maybe you think you're just running ads on Facebook, you're actually already running ads on Instagram as well. The two platforms share the same ads manager because they're both owned by Meta. So in a sense, Instagram isn't really a separate conversion channel for most businesses, it's a placement option within your Meta ad campaigns. Instagram as an ad platform has a lot going for

7:44it. Like other options, massive user base, highly engaged on the platform all the time, so scalability is not a concern. Instagram tends to perform really well for very visual businesses. If you can visually demonstrate your product, even your service, it's what it was originally designed to be, and that's carried through to the present day version of Instagram. Instagram is also probably at the forefront of personal brand and advertising. When most people think of like, "I'm building a personal brand," the default would be Instagram, and it marries the ability to leverage people's personal brands, creators, in your advertising, I think, better than any other platform. So, you

8:24can run partnership ads. Let's say you've hired a creator to produce a video or two to promote your products and services, you can then run those assets, that bit of content, as an ad that comes from both your profile as a business, but also the creator's profile. You can tap into their audience, put your stuff in front of their audience, benefit from their recommendation to buy your thing. Often, we see the best results from partnership ads working with creators. It's also really easy to get started with Instagram advertising. You can simply boost posts within Instagram. When you boost a post, that is running an Instagram ad. It's not actually how I'd

8:59recommend you run your Instagram ads. You're better off creating campaigns through Ads Manager. You have extra functionality. That's the better way to go about doing it, but it is an option. A couple of other things to note about Instagram advertising is that it is relatively expensive. If you look at the cost of Instagram ads measured in CPM, cost per thousand impressions, it can be

9:17more expensive than other platforms. It's more expensive than Facebook, which some people are are surprised to hear. Certainly wasn't the case many years ago, but it has overtaken in terms of cost. That's because there's a lot of advertiser demand. We also find that from a content standpoint, the actual stuff in your ads, your imagery, your videos, what performs best changes very quickly on Instagram. Because it's such a visual first platform, so we've been through spells of really polished ads performing really well, other spells where you want more native authentic ad creative to do well. It means that to have a successful long-term Instagram ad campaign and Instagram ad strategy, you

9:52need to stay on top of things, you need to do your research, you need to know what's working well. So it does require effort and time to stay on top of it. Okay, so I think I'm going to put Instagram in at top of the log, put that in as S tier. Yes, there are some downsides like all of these, but the upsides are massive. With that in mind, one of the absolute keys to scaling ads is working with the right data. If you can't see all of your sales from ads or the true long-term value of each ad, you're flying blind and substantially limiting how far you can scale. You'll

10:21end up slowing down winning campaigns, scaling failing campaigns, and optimizing based on the wrong data. That leads to lower returns on ad spend, period. That's why I wanted to tell you about Hyros. It solves these issues, which is why it's used by major players like Alex Hormozi, Tony Robbins, myself, Four Seasons, Playboy, and thousands of large-scale e-commerce stores. Here's an example. Hyros helps point out gaps in tracking. If I couldn't see this data, I wouldn't be able to scale as effectively. That said, I'd never suggest anything to you if I thought it had a chance of you losing money. That's why I'm comfortable recommending Hyros. They literally

10:55guarantee increased ad ROI or you don't pay. Their usual result is around a 10 to 15% increase in ad revenue. Even better, they'll let you try it for free and get those results first. Use the link below or enter Heath 1 when booking a demo. They've offered the first 30 people from this video a 10% discount. Next up we have Google Ads, another area of expertise for me personally, but I think there's a big distinction between Google Ads and the other social ad platforms, and that's intent. So what I mean by that is when someone searches on Google, they are actively looking for something, not just scrolling

11:28mindlessly, seeing stuff that they may like, may not. This is really powerful for advertisers because you're not interrupting someone, you're meeting someone when they've got a need, when there's a demand that's already there. The biggest pro to Google Ads when comparing to these other social ad platforms is the size of audience. Over 4 billion people worldwide and people use Google products all the time, whether it's Google Search or Google's various AI products, Gmail, Google Drive, etc. There's places for ads to be inserted into all of it. You can run ads through Google on websites and apps. If you spend any time online, you will see Google Ads pop up. But the challenge is

12:03that with Google Ads, there is a very steep learning curve. It's complex, more complex than the other platforms. You can run ads on search, shopping, display, as performance max, demand gen, lots of different campaign types and lots of different ads with different formats, different requirements. It can be very difficult to get up and running

12:21and then to manage on an ongoing basis. One of the really good things about Google Ads today, and this is only going to become more prominent in the future, is your ability to tap into people's interaction with AI and put ads in that experience. So you can already run ads above, below, and in AI responses to regular Google searches. Google have very recently announced that they're going to start running ads within Gemini. And we know that conversion rates from AI-based searches are going to be higher than from traditional Google searches because people are more specific with what they're asking for, they provide more context, there's more

12:57back and forth, and the ability for an ad platform as sophisticated as Google to put the right ad in front of the right person represents a massive opportunity for advertisers. But one of the downsides of Google Search Ads specifically is that you don't often have as much scalability as you do with other ad platforms. Only a relatively small percentage of your market is searching at any one time, maybe 10% or less. That means you can have an ad campaign that works really well, that benefits from that intent, but you might not be able to scale it as much as if you had an ad campaign that was

13:30performing really well on Instagram, for example, where you could reach a much larger proportion of your market. You're not relying on someone having searched or or taken that step first. So, weighing all that up, I'm going to go ahead and put Google in an A tier. Very strong pros, also some cons. Which brings us to Gen Z's favorite doom

13:47scrolling app, we of course have TikTok. Now, I'll be totally honest with you, this is the one I have the least experience with, so I want to make sure I'm giving you the data alongside just my own perspective here. So, I'm going to quickly rattle through some pros cuz we've got some interesting stats to share here. So, CPCs, cost per click, are 40 to 50% lower on TikTok than they are on Facebook. You've got a user base of nearly 2 billion people spending

14:10almost an hour a day on the platform. That's really high engagement rates. And TikTok Shop is getting bigger and bigger in Western countries, perfect for lower ticket items. Obviously, it only really works for product-based businesses. TikTok is definitely paving the way for shopping platforms and social media, emphasizing the live element in that, too. On paper, these sound brilliant, but here's where I want to be a bit more nuanced because when I look at the actual return on ad spend data, which is really what matters to advertisers, TikTok is more mixed. The average return on ad spend on TikTok is around 2.2 to 2.5. That's lower than a well-run Meta

14:45or Google ad campaign. And in some industries, the numbers look really poor. There's clearly a disconnect between cheap clicks and actually people following through and purchasing, becoming a lead, etc. And here's a temporary pro that will become a con. If you're somewhat budget restricted, TikTok, at least for now, is one of the cheaper options when it comes to advertising. Generally, newer platforms take longer for cost to build because the cost of advertising is dictated by demand and supply from advertisers. As more and more businesses start advertising on the platform, as they get results, as long as they continue to get good results, demand builds, and that

15:21pushes the price up. So, at some point, TikTok is likely to be as expensive as the other social platforms. Also, TikTok doesn't quite have the user data that Google or Meta does. Google and Meta have been gathering data for decades because people use their platforms an enormous amount. I heard recently that more than 50% of time that people spend on smartphones is using a Meta app. They have so much data. That data is useful for us business owners and advertisers because they can better match our ads, our products and services with the people they put those ads in front of, make it more likely for us to get

15:58conversions. So, for me, TikTok is C-tier, honestly leaning towards D-tier. It's not that the platform's bad, it's that there's a gap between what it promises and the massive engagement numbers, and then what it actually delivers for businesses when it comes to conversions. There are many businesses type, many service-based businesses, B2B businesses that are just really going to struggle to get anything going with TikTok. So, yeah, I'm going to pop that in as a C. So, there we have it, there's the tier list. And if this video inspired you to get your ads pumping on Facebook or Instagram, you're probably going to get some real value out of this

16:29guide I made about succeeding with a brand-new Meta ad account. So, be sure to click subscribe so you don't miss another video from me.