Facebook Ads Vs Google AdWords

For years Google AdWords has been the most reliable and effective form of paid advertising. With the huge, rapid growth of Social Media is AdWords falling behind? Below I will compare the positive and negative for both facebook ads vs google adwords.

Facebook Ads Vs Google AdWords : Comparison

Google AdWords

Google AdWords was released on 23rd October 2000 and is the main resource for Google’s income, which is currently $42.5 billion back in 2012. For the first five years of Google AdWords you used to pay Google a monthly fee, who then managed your campaign and traffic.

This then evolved in 2005 to Jumpstart, which offered telephone support to business. Also in 2005, GAP (Google Advertising Professional) was introduced. GAP allowed companies and individuals to sit an exam and display the AdWords certificate on their website.

GAP lead to the Google Online Marketing Challenge in 2008 where people from around the world compete in an annual challenge. Today, in 2013 Google updated again to Multi Device World where the users campaign did not have to be edited for each platform available (desktop, tablet, smart phone).

Google AdWords allows you to advertise on a pay per click (or Cost Per Click – CPC), cost per thousand impressions, and cost per mile basis. Your adverts can be displayed either as a text, rich media or banner ads.

Google displays your AdWords by two different means:

1) The first one being through search engines searches.

When a user searches Google for a certain keyword, you Ad will trigger. Depending on your bid will determine the positioning of your Ad.

2) The second option is through Google’s Advertising network.

Website owners sign up to Google AdSense where they display relevant Ads upon their site, which they then get a commission for each click.

Below are the Pro’s for using Google AdWords

• Huge amount of daily impression.
• Huge amount of potential clicks.
• Good referrals from relevant sources.
• Live Chat support.
• Ad restrictions, such as language, country, area or device.

Below are the Con’s for using Google AdWords

• Can be very expensive per click.
• Unable to target specific clientele.
• Attract spam clicks (companies trying to sell to you).
• Onsite SEO needs to be perfect for each keyword for any quality impressions.
• Highly competitive.

Facebook Ads

We all know about Facebook. Over 1 billion of us have a Facebook profile. When every user signs up to Facebook they are required to fill out important information about you, such as, age, sex, education and interest. The more and more you use Facebook, the more and more Facebook gathers information.

Every time you like a page or add a new interest, the data is fed to Facebook to generate a full marketing profile about you. Using sophisticated algorithms, all your ‘Likes’ and interests allow marketers to display Ads that are 100% relevant to you.

This information is invaluable to advertisers as they can target their exact audience for their product. Google tried to gain the valuable marketing information by creating Google+. This was supposed to be the next social media platform (according to Google) to try and move people on from Facebook, this didn’t work. Many of you probably haven’t even heard of Google+. This is probably one of the main reasons Google AdWords charge so much.

A perfect example of this would be for a wedding photographer based in London. Using Facebook Ads, your ad will only show to users that live in London and are engaged. This is perfect marketing as your targeting your exact audience. The is no way Google AdWords can deliver your advert in this way, they only rely on keyword searches to trigger your ad.

Below are the Pro’s for using Facebook Ads

• Target your ad to specific client genres.
• Roughly 10 times cheaper than Google Ads.
• Drill down specific details about user to show ads.
• More impressions available than any advertising program.
• Stats on potential client reach.
• Attract very little spam clicks.

Below are the Con’s for using Facebook Ads

• Miss out on search traffic.

To be honest, I have been sat here for the past 30 minutes trying to think of anymore Con’s for using Facebook Ads and I cant! Just due to the data Facebook collects from each user, which allows advertisers to reach specific clients is worth its weight in gold. As Facebook has taken a life of its own now, there is no way any new or existing platform can deliver better advertising for businesses, including Google. They have tried and failed.

What if Facebook created a Search Engine? They already have over 1 billion users that would use their services. They could roll out an App, add a simple addition to your homepage, make deals with web browsers, smart phones and tablets to make Facebook the default search engine for these products, they certainly have the budget to make these offers, or even by out a search engine and rebrand it!

Facebook could easily become the leading search engine, making Google, Bing and Yahoo redundant with use financial loss.