A question I now get asked most weeks, in one form or another: should we put our money into Facebook Ads or Google AdWords? Usually there’s an assumption buried in it that these are two versions of the same thing and you simply pick the cheaper one. They aren’t, and you can waste a lot of budget learning that the hard way.
The cleanest way I’ve found to explain the difference is to think about what the person is doing at the moment your ad reaches them.
Someone on Google has typed something. They want a plumber, a pair of running shoes, a hotel in Bath. They’ve announced their intent, and AdWords lets you put yourself in front of that intent at the precise moment it exists. That is an extraordinarily valuable position, and the auction prices it accordingly. You pay a premium because the person is already halfway to their wallet.
Someone on Facebook is not shopping. They’re looking at photos from a friend’s wedding and half-watching for anything more interesting to come along. They have announced no intent at all. What Facebook knows instead is who they are; age, location, interests, relationship status, the pages they’ve liked. So you target them on who they are rather than what they want, interrupting them with something you hope they’ll find relevant enough to stop for.
That distinction drives almost every recommendation I make:
- If people are actively searching for what you sell, start with AdWords. You’re capturing demand that already exists. For most businesses with a clear product and clear search demand, this is where the first pound should go.
- If you’re trying to create demand people didn’t know they had, Facebook earns its place. New products, lifestyle brands, anything where the audience is defined by who they are rather than what they’re currently hunting for.
- The click prices tell a story. Facebook clicks are cheap, often strikingly so, but the person is a long way from buying, so a cheap click is not automatically a cheap customer. AdWords clicks cost more and tend to be worth more, which is why I look at what a sale costs rather than what a click costs.
Where it gets genuinely interesting, and where I spend a fair bit of my time now, is using them together. Facebook to introduce a brand to the right people, AdWords to be there when those same people later go and search for it. Measuring that hand-off properly is still awkward with the tools we’ve got; the analytics we all use hands most of the credit to whichever channel closed the sale and ignores whatever warmed the person up first.
That measurement gap is the part of this job I find myself moaning about most. We can run both channels well. Proving how they help each other is another matter, and right now it comes down to judgement more than any number I can put in front of a client.
