Facebook advertising vs. Google Adwords – clash of the titans.

There are many different views out there, but I’ll set forth my view and conclude early from my findings so far; at present – Facebook advertising is far less effective than Google Adwords at achieving full conversions. By this, I mean someone clicks from your Facebook advert and completes a purchase on your website. I really wanted it to work, but it’s very clear that when it comes to development of the advertising platforms on each side of the coin, there is simply no contest.

This applies for many reasons.

Matching Ads with Consumers

Facebook is basing its matching criteria almost solely on 2 factors – Profile Page information submitted by users, and geo-targeting (this could be a combination of IP address tracking and user-submitted information).

Now, when you compare this database of user-submitted information – yes, there are however many millions of Facebook users (then subtract all inactive/spam accounts) – this simply pales in comparison to the quantity of data in Google’s database, alongside its user base, i.e. anyone with a computer. (I’ve even intentionally left out the content network and search partners that Google offers as additional sources of traffic.)

Arguably, you will say that this is actually a niche factor when using Facebook, but unfortunately I think it really affects its ability to achieve any kind of real effectiveness – especially when up against such strong competition.

Now, I don’t want to come across as some kind of Google fan boy, but criticism of the Facebook advertising network continues.

Review Time

Wow, review time on Facebook takes what feels like an eternity. Google adverts are reviewed and can be seen online very quickly – you’d barely notice there was a review process at all. It took over 24hrs for the first advert on Facebook to be reviewed and approved, and only slightly less for the second.

Keywords

Facebook does allow you to enter keywords, but only from a preset selection, which I assume is derived again from the content that is submitted by users on their profiles. What becomes immediately apparent, is that the selection of keywords is incredibly limited – again, this is easily understandable, as the majority of Facebook profiles neglect ‘wordy’ information as users would rather interact via chat, pokes, photo-sharing and applications. Google on the other hand allows an almost unlimited amount of fine-tuning when it comes to keywords. In Facebook’s favour, however, due to its undeniable restrictions, it does present you with an exact audience figure that will be targeted from your campaign, which is a nice touch.

Advertising Blindness

Additionally – and this is a fairly personal view in terms of my usage of the social network – Facebook is used primarily for social reasons. Keeping up-to-date with friends and family, sharing photos etc. I feel that advertising blindness has never been more present for contextual adverts than they are here. I even started to question myself halfway through running the campaign; could I even recall adverts I had seen when using Facebook myself? This is in stark contrast to Google’s contextual adverts, which run along the top and side of search pages, which I’ve found to be incredibly useful in the past, when the organic search is sometimes a little lacklustre.

CPM vs. CPC

This is where I believe Facebook may have a gem – albeit a tiny one – in its crown.

CPM (cost per mil) is the old method of paying for advertising on the web, which didn’t work for advertising buyers, so internet advertising began to fall out of favour. Most of the networks switched to the CPC method of billing – also known as PPC – where the advertiser only pays when a user takes action and actually clicks through to the target site.

However, Facebook offers this as an option when setting up your advert – and it is much cheaper than I can remember – you can spend just 10p per thousand impressions. Google offers this only on its content network, but not on its search or search networks.

As an example, in the last few days I ran two almost identical adverts in parallel on Facebook, one CPC and one CPM to compare the results, to a very focused target audience. On the CPM side, the advert achieved around 60,000 impressions with about 12 clicks. On the CPC side, the advert achieved around 3,000 impressions, but no clicks. Both of the bid rates were the suggested averages.

Now, although the overall CPC cost was higher on the CPM campaign, the cost was relatively cheap considering the amount of impressions that were displayed and I feel that in the long run – for a branding exercise – this could well help a brand achieve critical mass. But, of course, the issue with branding is that it is fairly difficult to measure success in a short period of time.

Conversion

From a conversion point of view – and the vast majority of online advertisers will probably be focussed on this, rather than exposure – the results are very clear. (The budget was approximately the same for both.)

In the Google campaign, from just 2 days – the advert achieved around 200 impressions, 15 clicks and 1 transaction.

Facebook achieved 60,000 impressions on the CPM campaign, 12 clicks, no transactions. The CPC campaign achieved 3,000 impressions, no clicks and no transactions.

I don’t think anymore really needs to be said.