This blog post is a basic explanation of Facebook ads and Google ads if you are a small business owner who does things by yourself.
To generalize this, we can go back and define what we call pay-per-click or PPC advertising. PPC stands for pay-per-click and it’s a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one user or one of their ads is clicked which essentially becomes a way of buying visits to your sites or sales pages.
When Google and Facebook started, all you can see are posts from the page feeds organically but then advertising was introduced by both companies. Facebook or now called Meta has launched its business platform or Meta Business Suite or Business Manager. On the other hand, Google has a platform called Google Ads or AdWords wherein you can buy keywords from its Google search page. So while trying your best efforts to show your posts organically, you can buy them so you get faster exposure and awareness to your brand or to your company, or the products that you sell.
So what is the main difference between Google and Facebook ads?
If you’re a small business owner, which ones would you choose especially if you have a budget constraint? If you have a marketing budget you can try both platforms but again if you have a low budget then try first either of the two.
Google AdWords is intent-based advertising. Since it’s keyword-based, people who are looking for a product or a service can just type in Google search, and then your website shows up on the first page or at the top of the search if you have winning bid ads. Usually, you can see the ads on the google search page before the main organic websites that show up.
For example, if you are selling services like accounting services, you can type “accounting service firms”, then ads and top-rank organic websites will show up on the first page. It is intent-based because the user is intentionally looking for a particular service or product.
Facebook, on the other hand, is not intent-based because people use Facebook to connect to people or friends or get updates about pages that they are following.
Facebook is for broad segmented audience behavior based while Google is intent-based.
Let’s dive into Facebook advertising first. Firstly, it’s established that you can only advertise with your Facebook page and not with your personal account and most people often turn to the boost button to advertise.
Although boosting can be helpful, it’s not the best strategy to use because it’s only for awareness and not much for sales conversion.
If you have a new Facebook or business page, try to post or promote valuable content first before asking your audience to buy from you. It can be an educational video, entertaining materials, and/or downloadable freebies or ebooks.
There are three levels when you set up Facebook ads, the first one is the campaign. There are three types, number one is awareness, the second is consideration, and the third is conversion.
Awareness is normally to reach cold audiences or people who don’t know you. Consideration is for the warm audience which means they are familiar with you but they need more information on your brand.
Conversion is when you get to bring your audience to your sales page or eCommerce website so that they can do an actual purchase of your product or service.
In the campaign, there’s also an option to put a budget so make sure to set and plan your marketing budget.
There’s also a technique in Facebook wherein you can do A/B testing or Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) where you disseminate your budget in the campaign per ad set level so you can automate that so Facebook knows by the algorithm how much budget it will allocate in a certain type of ad.
Ad Set is the 2nd level and is where you set your target audience, target location, and your placements. You can also create custom audiences based on your email list of your existing customers and upload it on Facebook which will target them.
Facebook Pixel is an important variable in Facebook Ads where you can embed a code snippet and pixel ID in your website so every time a user visits your website, it will collect the audience’s behaviors, engagement, and page visits and place it in the pixel. By doing that, if you post an ad, you have the option to target those people who visited your website based on the collected data from the pixel.
Additionally, you can create multiple ad sets in one campaign especially if you are testing your ad.
Google Adwords on the other hand focus on keywords. A good reminder is don’t use short and generic keywords because that’s already been saturated. Analyze the different market segments so you can specify an effective keyword to use. There is a feature called Google keyword inspector where you can analyze the keyword if there are volumes of searches for that particular keyword and if the competition is high then the price of that keyword is also high. Optimize your keyword based on your target market and your long tail. An example is instead of using “accounting service firms”, then use “accounting service for micro-businesses in the Philippines”.
The next level is the Ad itself or Ad Creative. On Facebook, that’s the one that shows up in the feed so it’s important to include good photos and videos with the right headline, ad copy and call to action. There is also what you call a Facebook Ad Library where you’ll find templates on how people are doing it.
With this structure in implementing Google and Facebook advertising, what is the actual level of effort that businesses should put into it?
I would say that it takes a lot of time, cost, and energy. If you have funds to hire experts, then go for it but in my case, for example, I have the liberty to do these things because I have an organization that pretty much runs by itself in terms of operations and partners who are helping me deliver our services.
But if you’re an entrepreneur who’s juggling between sales delivery, back office, and admin work then it’s really difficult to make time for marketing so you have to balance your efforts based on your business goals but I recommend spending 10-20% efforts in digital marketing because new customer acquisition is a vital part of any organization.
If you want to learn more about Facebook Ads and Google Ads, then go ahead and check out my Simplified Digital Marketing Course for your small business.