Grab yourself a snack & let’s talk about paid ads.
When a client is ready to put a budget into paid ads, we inevitably get asked the question, “google ads or Facebook ads, which is better?”. When you are a small business trying to scale, we understand that every penny counts, and it is crucial to make sure that money spent produces an ROI. The tricky part is that asking this question is like asking if sweet or salty snacks are better? The answer is, it depends! I know it's annoying right… Let’s break it down a bit more to hopefully demystify the best place to put your valuable ad dollars.
A better way to frame this question is to ask yourself, what do you want your ads to do for you? Or what part of your customer buyer journey are you trying to impact? Understanding these questions will help guide you to which platform will drive the better results, not necessarily which platform is better.
Before you start spending any money on paid ads, the most important thing is to define a budget that you are comfortable with, then create a strategy and platform decision. As an example, if you can afford $20.00 per day on ads, but the keywords you want to target on Google are $5.00 per click, you can only get four clicks per day, which isn’t going to help you achieve much. In this case, Facebook offers a lower cost highly targeted alternative. You can still include Google as part of your strategy, but you need to do some industry research and competitive analysis to identify lower-cost high intent keywords, look at the display network as an alternative, or focus on users that have already been on your site through retargeting options. There are many ways to maximize small budgets but starting with an amount your business can afford is always the first step.
Once you know what you can afford, you need to consider what you want to achieve. Google search is a great tool to reach in-market buyers or people that have high intent to purchase your product. For this reason, Google search works great to generate sales or leads and hits people in the purchase phase of a buying journey. This challenge is that people have to know about your product or service and search for it for this plan to work. So, what if you need to create awareness or influence comparison at the earlier phases of the buyer journey? In this case, Facebook and Instagram are a better way to go and can offer more direct demographic, geographic, and behavioural targeting to get your product or service in front of your ideal customers.
Another critical consideration for new business is understanding if the product/ service and your brand are known or unknown to the market. If you are launching something disruptive that people don’t realize they could need or you have a brand that people don’t recognize, then likely they aren’t keyword searching for what you sell. This doesn’t count Google out of the mix, but you need to do some research to see what people are searching for related to your offer and start building awareness. Facebook/ Instagram’s targeting options are something you want to take advantage of in this case too. Once people become familiar with your brand and land on your website, engaging retargeting across both platforms is a great way to reinforce your brand message. Let’s face it, most people are on both platforms and need to see a message several times before it sticks.
If you haven’t caught the pattern here, the answer we are getting at is that Google ads and Facebook ads both play an essential role in a paid advertising strategy. Still, they work in different ways and often work best when done together to carry a customer through the buyer journey stages. So which is better? Just like sweet or savoury, it depends on what you want and often the most satisfying snacks have both (anyone else craving chips and chocolate, or just me?).
If you need to pick one to start because sometimes we just have to, follow the steps we have outlined to help make your decision. The most important last step is to test and optimize continuously. Paid ads are great because we can truly understand ROI and make data-driven decisions on where to adjust, make the most out of our ad spend, and create the results we want to achieve.
If you ever need help deciding which ad platform is right for you, just say hey, and we are happy to assist. In the meantime, I will go make a sweet and salty snack, and I hope you do too!
