Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads and When to Utilize Them

There are few skills as valuable in the world of digital advertising as learning to leverage Google and Facebook ads properly. These goliaths of online search and social activity link millions of businesses with their prospective customers every minute of every day, making them both extremely powerful and often overly saturated with content vying for attention. Understanding when to leverage these respective platforms and how best to cut through the noise of your competitors will enable your business to reach its fullest digital potential.

Here’s what you need to know about how Google and Facebook ads work, the key differences between the two, and how best to apply each to a full-funnel marketing strategy.

The Google Ads Basics

At its most basic level, Google advertising targets customers based on the keywords they search. Google takes in billions of searches per day, using advanced algorithms to pair search queries with the results (including paid results) it estimates will most benefit the user. When advertisers work to optimize SEO, marketing copy, metadata, and other appendages of the campaign, they are essentially making ads more attractive to the search algorithm.

Paid advertisements introduce keyword-specific budgets and bids in various forms to beat out competitor ads for placement on the page.

Facebook Advertising Basics

Similarly, Facebook as an ad platform is constantly aiming to provide meaningful content to prospective audiences in ways that improve the user experience. Paid social ads use geography, interests, behavior profiles, demographics, and other targeting levers to fine-tune the delivery of ads to audiences the campaign parameters deem “qualified.”

Additionally, the introduction and expansion of Facebook Page Shops have given ecommerce brands the ability to set up a full digital storefront without directing users away from the Facebook app. The endemic fit of an easy-to-use, straight-to-checkout option for brands looking to shorten the customer acquisition window makes this development particularly appealing.

When To Use Google Ads 

While the concept of search advertising is relatively simple, there are plenty of complex factors at play that can raise or lower a brand’s standing among its competitors. Google ads offer access to a seemingly endless supply of potential customers, can be adapted to both high-funnel awareness campaigns or low-funnel retargeting and conversion goals, and can provide valuable data through an intuitive dashboard on ads, users, and your market at large.

With some experimentation, paid search has proven a staple in advertising for years. It’s a natural fit for products and businesses closely tied searches representing strong intent to convert (“How much is my car worth?” or “floral shops near me” are just a few examples). 

However, expectations for success on the platform depend on who you ask; playing to Google’s strengths and optimizing high-performing campaigns while discarding underperformers can lead to a strong ROI. The wrong goal, campaign setup, keyword list, or budget can likewise sink your strategy before it can ever gain any sort of momentum.

When To Use Facebook Ads

Facebook’s business model similarly relies on pairing advertisers with relevant audiences, going so far as to offer many of the same targeting levers as paid search plus adding custom, behavior, and lookalike audiences to the mix. Paid social ads may not attract the same intentionality of a search query typed into Google, but instead offer a wider variety of formats and strategies to connect users to new brands.

Facebook is a popular channel for companies looking to expand their respective audience, due in large part to its dynamic retargeting capabilities. Retargeting awards millions of small-to-medium business campaigns the keys to Facebook’s massive user base that might otherwise struggle to capture the interest of paying customers or compete with the large-scale budgets of major competitors on Google ads.

As with paid search, paid social is a fine-tuning process. Not every ad type, targeting lever, or campaign objective is right for every business. Some brands may not be a fit for the platform at all, and those that are still require A/B testing to zero in on the most impactful tactics as customer preferences evolve.
Understanding the depth and reach of Google and Facebook advertising is just one stage of your brand’s marketing journey. Learn how our team at Adtaxi can help you take the next step forward in digital marketing by contacting us here.

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