As a business owner looking to pay for advertising online there are two main choices for you. They have long been the leading lights and most successful platforms on the internet and also need no introduction. We have Facebook and Google who both offer business direct access to potential customers.

Until very recently the two giants of the internet were always advertised as rivals with a long standing feud, but in reality this couldn’t actually be further from the truth. Business owners do not necessarily have to choose between the two and many are choosing to leverage the benefits of both companies simultaneously.

In this blog we are going to look at the differences between the two and explain in more detail the options available to business owners and why you should consider using both to increase the scope of your digital marketing strategy.

What is the difference between Facebook ads and Google Ads?

Before we go into any more detail let’s look at the main difference between the two.

Google Ads = Paid Search

Google ads was previously known as ‘Adwords’ which is by far the internet's most popular Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. How it works is by leveraging keywords in text based adverts. Where people use specific phrases or words that they hope will be used by people using Google’s search engine and their ad will be displayed next to the results of the search.

The advertiser is then charged every time a user clicks on their advert, see what they did there with the name. Very clever! Basically you are paying to potentially be found in users' searches.

Facebook Ads = Paid Social

Facebook is the world's largest and longest running social platform with current users in the billions. It is a very profitable and lucrative way of targeting businesses and people. Rather than using keywords and text, paid social enables you to find a person or business based on their interests and how they behave online.

The easiest way to sum up the difference between the two is this;

Google Ads helps you find customers, Facebook helps customers find you.

Benefits of Google Ads

Google is by far the internet’s most popular search engine and has been for a long time. Beating the likes or Yahoo and the useless Ask jeeves a long time ago. It handles nearly 4 billion search enquiries every day and offers businesses a massive potential audience who are looking for the product or service.

Google offers business to networks, these are the search and display networks. The search network utilises the search engine, where you can bid on phrases and keywords to target potential consumers.

The display network is more visual and offers options such as banners and adverts that will span 98% of the internet. These are excellent when trying to raise brand awareness rather than direct PPC marketing.Google handles about 40,000 requests a second and over a trillion searches a year. So you can only imagine the amount of people who will see your banner each day. No other platform can rival what Google offers you as a business owner.

Benefits of Facebook Ads

Facebook is a lot newer to the advertising game than Google but they are improving their service every year. Facebook like Google has a vast audience and boasts to have more than a billion active monthly users on the platform. That’s nearly a fifth of the world's population.

The strength of Facebook's marketing is that you can really target users. People share their entire lives on the platform, from life moments, loves, likes and dislikes, holidays, jobs, family members. They display their beliefs, interests, political leanings, every conceivable detail about people's lives is on the profile. All of this information offers advertisers a platform that was not before conceivable to advertising companies.

The most powerful tool available on Facebook is to create a lookalike audience. Where businesses can upload information and then match users to the profile. This creates a lookalike audience which effectively doubles the potential to reach customers who have similar interests, like and behave in a similar fashion. It gives advertisers the chance to get close to audiences in a manner not deemed possible before.

Facebook ads are also rather surprisingly very affordable and give smallbusiness a chance to advertise and compete with the big brands with excessive marketing budgets.

So which should you be using?

What we recommend people do is rather than see them as competition you should use them simultaneously and harness the power of both PPC marketing and Paid social. To learn more about how to get a larger return on your investment please don’t hesitate to contact us here at VIVI creative and we will explain how you can leverage the two in far more detail.