If you plan on running paid ads for your business, the chances are that you—like most businesses—are torn between spending your limited budget on Google ads vs. Facebook ads. Before you make that decision, you need to find the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two platforms and weigh the most valuable features for your business.
To guide you in your Google ads vs. Facebook ads decision process, this blog outlines the differences between the platforms and their advantages for B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business) businesses.
Facebook Ads for B2C Businesses
Facebook is massive. If you were to combine all of the other social media platforms (except YouTube), you would have a conglomerate about the same size as Facebook. With its 2.8 billion users, Facebook is akin to the world’s largest mall for digital marketers. However, for the privilege of setting up a shop in the world’s largest proverbial mall, Facebook charges you a pretty penny.
With that said, Facebook can charge the prices they do because of the quality and effectiveness of their ads.
For B2C businesses, Facebook provides incredible data and targeting abilities that contribute to their industry-leading average conversion rate of 9.11%. For example, B2C companies can give Facebook a profile that converted and ask Facebook to find other people like them. With the data Facebook has on that one person, they can find tens of thousands of lookalike profiles to target your ads.
Facebook Ads for B2B Businesses
B2B businesses frequently discount Facebook ads because the platform’s interactions are almost entirely between individual users. However, we propose that those businesses need to shift their thinking from B2B to B2P (business-to-people). In other words, people are the fundamental building blocks of every business; people make, manage, and move businesses every step of the way. Therefore, B2B marketing is actually B2P marketing.
While B2P companies may not market directly to other companies through Facebook, they can sell to people who work at those businesses. For example, say a business wants to sell hammers. Ideally, they want to sell to large hardware stores because they buy hammers in bulk. When they go to market on Facebook, they don’t see any way to market directly to Home Depot or Lowes. But, we do see thousands of employees who work at those hardware stores. Because we know those employees may sway the stocking of their employer’s warehouses, planting our brand in their minds is the best way to get our products on their shelves.
Essentially, B2P businesses should not discount Facebook for their paid ads because, while they may not target enterprises themselves, they can target the employees who work there.
Google Ads for Both B2C and B2B Businesses
When choosing between Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads, we need to recognize that Google provides many of the same functions that Facebook does. To draw a difference between the two platforms, we will discuss features that are exclusive to Google.
Unlike Facebook, Google is a platform built around questions and answers. Therefore, to target your ads to your desired audience, ask yourself:
- What questions are my target audience searching for?
- Based on those questions, how can I get my ads in front of those searches?
- What kinds of ads would my target audience interact with best?
With those questions answered, Google has a wide variety of ad types for you to use, such as responsive ads. With responsive ads, Google gives you access to their AI that creates, experiments and optimizes your ads without you ever having to lift a finger.
Merely provide Google with headlines, taglines, and pictures that you want to be included in your ads, and Google will create ads for you. Through trial and error, the AI will learn what ads work best for you, making ad optimization more accessible than ever.
Unlike Facebook, Google can disguise ads as search results to fool people into clicking on an ad that fits their search query. In other words, if someone looks up an “advertising agency” for their business, the first several results may be ads in disguise. The only way for someone to know if they click on an ad is a small gray “Ad” box before the URL.
Google also provides a geotargeting option for their customers. With geotargeting, you can target ads specifically to people in a particular geographic area. In doing so, you can attract local traffic or target people who—based on their location—would be more interested in your business than people who are not in that location. For example, we geotargeted ads to the Cooperstown Hall of Fame (and the surrounding hotels) for a company that targets baseball fans. As a result, they sold their products to baseball fans who were visiting the area.
Finally, Google lets you piggyback off your competitors’ success without replicating their grunt work. With competitor advertising, you can find the audience your competitors advertise to and copy it. You simply need to give Google a competitor’s URL, tell them you want to target the same audience, and Google will target your ads to a lookalike audience.
Which Type of Paid Ads Should Your Business Use?
Choosing between Google ads vs. Facebook ads is not an easy process. Unfortunately, there is no copy and paste answer as to what platform is right for you. If one were always better than the other, only one would exist.
To guide you in your paid ads journey and to help you decide which platform is best suited to your business, we recommend that you use a team-based approach for your digital marketing.
With a team-based approach, you get all the benefits of a full-time team of professional marketers without any of the downsides. At Farotech, we have dozens of experienced marketers who are ready to take your leads and conversion rates to new highs for at least 40% less than any traditional marketing alternative.
If you want to learn more about how to incorporate your choice of paid ads into a holistic marketing campaign with the help of a team-based approach, click here.