How Does Facebook’s Audience Network Compare to Adwords?

How Does Facebook’s Audience Network Compare to Adwords?

The two biggest PPC ads in the world right now are Facebook and Google. Yes, I said PPC ads, not websites or social networks. Facebook’s audience network is massive but restricted to the platform, while Google’s AdWords is even more expansive but equally more expensive. How do the two stack up?

A Note About Usage

Any PPC network is only as effective as you make it. Facebook works great if you have the right targeting, but you can throw thousands of dollars at it for a negative ROI if you’re ignoring the basics. Likewise, AdWords can be great if you do your keyword research, or you can bid on the fifth rank ad on unpopular keywords and waste money.

Both platforms are reliant on quality ad copy and, where applicable, images. Get everything right and you can pull in a massive return. On the other hand, get them wrong and you’re wasting your time.

Targeting

Facebook allows a lot of detailed targeting options for your ads. You have all of the information Facebook collects at your fingertips for targeting. This includes age, ethnicity, race, religion, pages liked and a whole host of other factors. It also includes off-site factors, like people who visit your website or people who have registered for your mailing list, if you use Facebook’s Custom Audiences features.

Google, my contrast, is nowhere near as focused. You’re restricted to a chosen keyword, and that’s all. You can’t choose to only display your ad to the middle-aged men performing the searches. Google doesn’t track that information, or if they do, they don’t allow you to use it for advertising. They only have very basic demographic information available, and hardly any of that.

The best you can get through Google is the display network, which displays your ads on content that is relevant to the topic. Again, this isn’t targeting by demographics, but is restricted to targeting by keyword and topic. It’s also not perfect, but the volume Google provides tends to be worth it.

Both Google and Facebook allow certain factors with geotargeting, though they work in different ways. Facebook targets through the user’s set geographic location, while Google reads the location based on IP address. Both use mobile targeting factors using cell tower triangulation or GPS tracking.

The Ads Themselves

There are a number of different types of ads for both platforms.

On Facebook, you have the news feed ad and the sidebar ad, along with the mobile ad. The news feed ad looks like a normal Facebook link post, with a flag added to notify users that it’s an ad. The sidebar ads are more traditional, with an image, a headline and a few words of body copy. Mobile ads are like news feed ads, fit to display on mobile devices.

Google AdWords has the sponsored ads highlighted in yellow on top of the search results. It also has the sidebar ads that look more like advertisements and less like Google results. None of these have images; Google doesn’t like display images in their search results. There are no ads in image search results. The Google display network ads can be more visual, including banner ads, because they are not displayed on Google’s SERPS.

Building a Presence with Advertising

Advertising through Google gives you a lot of brand presence very quickly. Specifically, this comes from the huge number of users you can access for a given query. It’s a bit like putting your name on every billboard in town; sooner or later people will start to recognize it, even if they don’t know why.

However, there’s a bit of a risk; Google does pay attention to the performance of your ads. If your landing page is terrible and most of your users bounce, Google will begin to lower your ranking within the system. It might not hurt your organic ranking, but your AdWords ranking will suffer.

Facebook, of course, comes with all of the deep targeting and social proof you could ask for. It also gives you access to functions beyond a simple click through to your site; Facebook ads can integrate a Like button so the user doesn’t even need to click.

Comparing the Costs

Both platforms are PPC, of course, which means they cost money. And, again, using them incorrectly means you’re wasting a lot of cash on ads that don’t convert. You need to pay attention and optimize your ads as you go in order to maximize your cash flow. This means analytics, split testing and keyword/audience research.

Google AdWords has the benefit of the keyword planner tool, which gives you an idea of the volume of keyword searches for various keywords and their variations. It also gives you an estimate of the competition and the suggested bid you might want to use to be positioned well. You shouldn’t take this as gospel – it can be misleading – but you should consider it a place to start.

Facebook’s ad estimator is a little different. It gives you a meter that scales between too specific and too broad, indicating when your targeting is “just right.” It also gives you an estimate of your potential reach, and a suggested bid. Again, this is only a baseline; you might want to adjust both your bid and your targeting as you go.

A Note on Facebook Atlas

Atlas is a new technology recently launched by Facebook on a small scale. It’s invite-only for the moment, meaning it’s difficult for the average marketer to use. However, it promises to potentially make Google a much less attractive option. Atlas is a unified form of social tracking that keeps tabs on people throughout their lives, online and offline, the same way Facebook tracks everything on their platform. It sounds a little sinister, but it’s nothing that hasn’t been going on for years. It’s just being leveraged by Facebook for ad revenue.

Once Atlas has the kinks worked out and goes into wide-scale release, it’s going to be a very attractive option for all marketers. Until that happens, it’s just going to be an ad-related boogeyman.

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