Google AdWords vs Social Media Ads

Why compare when no two people are alike?

And this article is in nowhere comparing two people, but two important platforms; Google vs Social Media (Multiple including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram & Others)

To start with the discussion, here are a few basics for everyone’s reference;

There are 2 business types;

• B2B: Process-driven
• B2B: Emotion-driven

And every marketing platforms have their own relevant business types to focus on. For e.g.,

• Google – can be relevant to both B2B & B2C
• Bing – can be relevant to both B2B & B2C
• Facebook – can be relevant to both B2B & B2C through the social network
• Instagram – can be relevant to B2C majorly
• LinkedIn – can be relevant to B2B majorly
• Quora – can be relevant to both B2B & B2C
• TikTok – can be relevant to B2C
• Pinterest – can be relevant to both B2B & B2C

Saying this, what are the individual strengths of each marketing platforms that keep them profound in front of their advertiser’s interest, let’s try to understand;

Advantages of Google Platforms for Marketers:

• Very important, You can display your ads on the #1 position of Google
• Secondly, with keyword specific targeting, you can only connect with the audience who is searching the specific keyword as queries compared to social media platforms where it’s purely audience targeting (except Twitter, where they still have an option to target by keywords)
• You can target your audience with different ad formats including text ads, banner ads, gallery ads, video ads, gif ads, responsive ads, shopping ads, etc.,
• You can drive brand awareness, engagement & conversion objective campaigns through Google advertisements
• There are multiple targeting options to reach your target audience specifically
• You can target your audience by City, Region, State, Country Globally from one given location
• You can also implement Re-marketing strategy where you can target the audience who has visited and left your website, in order to bring back the same audience to convert
• You can expand your reach to Google, Google Search partners, Google Display Partners, YouTube, Google Video Partners

Advantages of Facebook Paid Advertisement for Marketers;

• 2.3 Billion active users per month, while an individual spends 144min average per day on Facebook
• From local diner to a major tech company is on Facebook
• Thus help increase the spread of information & build brand awareness
• Drive buyer behavior through the custom audience and lookalike audience targeting
• Provide reminders to curious buyers through remarketing concept
• You can run carousel ads while targeting audience on feeds, stories, messengers, in-stream and other placements along with the Instagram platform
• With a minimum ad spend $1 per day, you have a low cost per click compared to Google Ads
• Very important, during this COVID-19 period, what I’ve realized is, there are certain industries who have turn out be very profitable through Facebook Ads or educating Facebook or Social Media platforms, where everyone is active on social media network, and something that is yet to monetize i.e., WhatsApp
• Add-on, while today Live & Stories have picked up, so targeting on Stories is a strong point for Facebook & Instagram

Advantages of LinkedIn for Marketers;

• You target by the audience rather than keywords, so the competition varies in terms of cost in LinkedIn, since the way you structure your audience targeting will decide how aggressive you fall in competition to spend. Generally, it will be low compared to Google AdWords for the target audience set than bidding on same keyword multiple competitors.
• There is no chances that you might drive irrelevant clicks because your audience set will allow you to reach the right set of target audience thus avoiding any wastage of click spend

Advantages of Instagram for Marketers;

• If your target audience is youth, then the Instagram platform will definitely benefit
• Run ads of different format including Photo, Video, Carousel & Stories
• As Instagram is now owned by Facebook, so you would use the Facebook Ads to run ads on Instagram while using the different audience targeting options

Advantages of Quora for Marketers;

• What I personally feel, Quora has integrated a bit of Google AdWords targeting strategy, Facebook, and so on to create suitable targeting options to best push ads on the Quora platform, but the way the ads are positioned in front of the target audience is awesome.
• A high user intent platform, since most of the audience here spend a good amount of time referring the Q&As
• With an active and growing huge database, it surely gonna stand a strong advertising platform in the coming days
• Shows ads next to Quora promoted answers to more connect with your targeted audience is a strong advantage on Quora
• For sure, the CPCs are low compared to Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads thus creating an advantage with the benefits of high user intent to keep your ads more engaging with the audience.

And not to forget, Advantage of Bing Ads for Marketers;

• Less competition thus low CPCs
• Don’t force match type close variants on you in Bing Ads
• Better social extensions in Bing Ads to increase credibility and thus CTR rate
• Control search demographics bidding at campaign level, a little different than to Google AdWords campaign settings

And would avoid TikTok advantage discussions because of it’s litigation on the type of content being pushed in the platform, which has created many different complications to the standard of advertisement.

So to conclude, comparing Google Ads vs Facebook Ads vs LinkedIn Ads or with any other platform would be a mistake when it comes to online paid platforms since all have their own specificity, target audience, and working model to perform best in their own boundaries. Yes, cross-promotion of the platform to target an audience with the help of Google Analytics is now possible while trying to use Facebook and Adwords together.