There is a lot of hype about Google AdWords and how it can work wonders for your website. I’m not entirely sure I could agree with that. Google definitely have the biggest audience for the ads, but that doesn’t mean it’s better value for money, or whether the audience is more targetted.

Facebook Ads is the Ad management tool for displaying ads on Facebook, and personally my favourite ad platform. Due to Facebooks nature the customisation of the Facebook ad’s is phenominal. I recently launched an advert for one of my Facebook applications (you can advertise anything*) that is designed for Baseball fans. I was able to tell Facebook that I only wanted to display the advert for users who are in the USA (where the Facebook app is hosted) and who are fans of Baseball and like some Baseball TV shows. This was a great help as it meant maximum exposure. Having said that, it doesn’t neccessarily mean I’ll save any money…

Pay per click is what it says… you pay every time someone clicks your ad. Google AdWords is pay per click. Facebook allows you to run campaigns on a pay per click or a pay per impression basis. This gives huge amounts of flexibility and allows you to save money depending ont he type of advert. If I was advertising a car insurance company then I’ll want to have it display to a large number of people, so I’d run pay per click, only paying if someone clicks through. But if I was advertising a car insurance promotion that only female students aged 21 or above, attending university in the UK, then I can easily drill down to only have the advert display to girls in 3rd year of uni or above who live in the UK – it’s then much cheaper to pay per impression, as less people will see it, but the one’s that do see it are more likely to click. Facebook also tells you how many users it has meeting this criteria.

Facebook is also MUCH cheaper than Google. I recently ran a campaign for the project Downtime Preventer. The average cost per click on Google was over £5. The average cost per click on Facebook was £0.05. You can see that this is a massive difference in price. However, the reason Google excels is the amount of traffic it receives. It took me a month to get through £15 on Google, for ‘downtime’ related keywords, hardly worth doing. On Facebook it was quite difficult to pick specifics for the campaign, so ended up going for ‘All users with their on company page’, hoping that would be small business owners.

Another plus Facebook has over Google are the ads themselves. Google is text-based only. Facebook allows more characters and one small image. The Facebook ads are subtle enough to not disturb the user but allow the advertiser to get their point across more easily.

Although my preference is definitely with Facebook, Google has it’s plus points. Facebook can only be used for so much before Google comes into it’s own. If you’re advertising a huge campaign then Facebook just won’t cut it, the audience just isn’t the same. The Downtime Preventer example is a good one, as it goes to show how difficult it can be to advertise something niche.

The bottom line is this: Google knows what people might be looking for and displays your advert, Facebook will display ads that people might like.
If you remember that golden rule then you’ll probably make the right choice.