Blog

Finding customers for your newly set up startup business is not an easy task. It is because customers are not aware of your brand and the products/services your brand offers. Even when they come to know about your business, they won’t buy your products straight away. The reason for this is they are not sure about the credibility of your brand and products. Only when they begin trusting your business they will start buying your products. Such things make it pretty challenging for startup businesses to acquire customers. 

So rather than waiting for customers to come to your startup business, it would help if you approach them. It will require you to take a proactive approach and start promoting your brand and products among them. 

The online promotion offers businesses various advantages over physical promotion. These are wider reach, easy to manage, adjust and measure promotion campaigns, lesser costs, greater audience engagement, and increased ROI. You may also want to go with the online promotion route in view of these advantages. 

For the online promotion of your products, Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the two most popular and influential advertising channels. 

Google manages Google Ads, the largest search engine in the world. Google is known to handle more than 40,000 search queries every second, and this totals more than 1.2 trillion web searches every year. Such vast reach of Google makes it one of the most preferred advertising platforms for marketers and businesses.  

Compared to Google, Facebook has got 1.55 billion monthly active users, and this is more than one-fifth of the world’s total population. Such an enormous audience makes Facebook an undisputed leader among social media platforms. 

While Google is synonymous with paid search, Facebook is synonymous with paid social. 

You may be considering using one of these two advertising platforms for your product promotion. But you may be finding it difficult to decide which one to choose because you don’t know how they work. And how they will impact your lead and sales generation.   

Without knowing their various strengths, features, and differences, your startup business may make the wrong choice and regret later due to loss of money, less leads and sales, reduced return on investment, and non-achievement of business goals. 

To choose the ideal platform, you ought to know the fundamental differences between Google Ads and Facebook Ads in 2022. So here we are sharing significant dissimilarities between these two most popular online advertising platforms for your benefit.

1. Cost

Before choosing one of them, you should have a rough idea of how much money you need to spend on them and the cost of acquiring every customer. 

For Google Ads, you have to check in Google Keyword Planner the new and relevant keywords related to your business’s industry. It will also show the estimates of the searches received for these keywords and the cost of targeting them.

Certain industries or sub-industries like law and finance have expensive keywords from cost per click and ad budget perspectives. Suppose your startup belongs to them and your budget is small. In that case, Google Ads won’t be the right option for you, and Facebook would be a better option due to its affordability and compelling targeting capabilities for many industries and massive return on investment.  

Without proper Google Ads vs Facebook Ads cost analysis, you risk spending massive money on advertising without appreciable returns.  

2. Goals of Your Marketing Strategy

Whether you should use Google Ads or Facebook Ads also depends on the goals of your marketing strategy. 

If your goal is to increase brand awareness or demand generation, Facebook ads may be more economical. 

Demand generation is about driving awareness in customers about your products/services and arousing their interest in them.

But if you want to generate leads or sales, then Google Ads might be a better choice. One worth noting thing here is that your Google Ads campaigns may be less successful than those of your established competitors. It is because your startup business is new and customers are not aware of your brand and do not recognize it. So there will be lesser clicks on your Google Ads than those of your competitors whose brand is recognized by customers. 

The ideal thing would be to generate awareness about your brand through Facebook Ads. And when it gets recognized by customers, switch to Google Ads for generating leads and sales. 

3. The stage of the buyer’s journey

A buyer’s journey consists of three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

In the awareness stage, a customer may first realize he has a problem or need and will start gathering more general information about his problem or need. 

In the consideration stage, a customer or lead completely understands his problem or need and starts to evaluate potential solutions. Prospective lead is still not ready to buy as he still needs some help to understand the best option.

The potential customer is now more ready to buy in the decision stage. He has done the major part of the research and now understands the problem and what his ideal solution probably looks like. The prospective customer may need some final information on why he should choose a specific brand or product/service among those being offered. 

To capture customers in the decision stage where they are actively looking to purchase a product, Google Ads will be ideal. Such an audience has a high level of intent. 

To target customers in the awareness or consideration stage, Facebook ads will be suitable. It will help you create more initial awareness about your products among customers with a current/unknown need for your product. It also enables you to influence their continuing consideration toward your product offering. 

4. Search volume for the product

There may be a case that your new product may have no or very less number of search queries on Google for a particular keyword. Here Google search ads will not provide you much clicks by customers. 

But if your product addresses a particular pain point of customers and they are actively looking for solutions for it on Google, then Google Ads would be ideal for you. For forming Google Ads for your product, you need to use relevant keywords in your ads that describes how your product solves the pain point or issue. Such ads will help to generate more volume for your business.   

If your product is solving a problem but people are not searching for solutions for this problem on Google, then Facebook Ads will be the better option.  

5. Demographic-centric product

If your product is associated with a specific life event or audience, Facebook is most likely the better option. Powerful targeting capabilities such as to target an audience based on life-changing events make Facebook an ideal platform for marketers.  

People tend to share almost every piece of information about their lives on Facebook. It can be about the school/college they attended, the birth of their children, new career moves, and much more. Also, they search for and consume content based on their personal beliefs, interests, ideologies, and values. It allows advertisers to target a particular audience with a common interest and behavior which helps them to customize their advertising message accordingly.

Google also provides businesses and marketers with the ability to target life events. But it only lets you target people searching for related search terms (keywords). There may be a case where your product solves a pain point, but such solutions are not being widely searched for. So, here demographic targeting will not help you in Google Ads.

Apart from keywords, Google Ads also allow businesses to target users based on geographical location, language, and device. Google also lets companies target people through retargeting or remarketing. Still, Google’s targeting options are more limited in comparison to Facebook. 

In Facebook, demographic targeting is the primary targeting mechanism, and that allows your business to reach far more people in certain life situations. The “lookalike audiences” functionality in Facebook adds to the capability of demographic targeting. 

With the help of Lookalike audience’s functionality, advertisers can find new users whose information (interests and consumer behavior) matches with their own customers. These new users are found from Facebook’s data and data provided by its third-party data brokers. This lookalike audience of new users lets advertisers double the potential reach of their advertisements.

6. Text vs Visual

While Google Ads are primarily text-based, Facebook Ads are inherently a visual platform. 

Google Ads consists of the Search network and the Display network.

The search network allows advertisers to target prospective customers by creating text-based PPC ads. These ads contain specific keywords and phrases that advertisers bid on. The search network covers the whole of Google.  

The Google Display Network gives advertisers the option to display visual ads like banners on websites associated with Google. This network covers approximately 98% of the World Wide Web. Unlike PPC ads that drive conversions, banner ads help to raise awareness about a business brand on a large scale.  

Unlike Google’s PPC ads, Facebook Ads have a visual nature. These enable you to create compelling images and headlines for virtually any product you can think of. It makes the people read and click the Facebook Ads and buy the products on offer. Facebook Ads do not require using keywords and phrases in the text. Minimal but exciting text with a beautifully presented image is enough to spark the audience’s interest in your product. 

Google Ads vs Facebook Ads comparison varies from business to business depending on their unique needs, budget, industry, target audience, etc. 

Google Ads or Facebook Ads for Dropshipping

The impact of Google Ads is different from the impact of Facebook Ads. Because they are two different mediums which work in their own way. Customer intent, ad type, and ROI from them also vary. To avoid quick consumption of your budget without tangible gains, you need to understand these two platforms and the markets that use them.   

Google Ads enable you to promote your dropshipping business directly above or next to organic search results. It means you can pay to gain an edge over your competition and customers are not put off by your face-to-face advertising. However, these ads are only helpful in showing your dropshipping brand to people already searching for a similar product or business. But if your business is competing in a less popular dropshipping niche or you don’t have a good understanding of your market, Google Ads will not benefit you. If you are competing against best dropshipping websites with huge budgets, Google Ads will become too costly for you.

Facebook Ads have a visual nature. So they can be beneficial to your dropshipping business if you sell unique products that are better seen than read about. They are also much cheaper than Google Ads. But Facebook Ads have less reach when compared to Google and are best suited for direct-to-consumer dropshipping businesses and not for B2B ones.   

Google Ads vs Facebook Ads for the real estate industry

As a real estate business owner, you may consider whether Google Ads or Facebook Ads is more effective for generating leads. To clarify this, you first need to understand how customers behave on these two popular advertising platforms.

On Facebook, consumers browse and engage with their near and dear ones and check what is happening in the world. The leads have not come to Facebook to see ads or buy a house. If you try to gain their attention with an ad message like “looking for a house?”, they won’t be interested. Facebook users typically have lower buyer intent. It does not mean these leads are not good, but it means you need to follow a different process to capture Facebook leads. 

Change your approach rather than creating ads that directly ask leads if they are looking for a house. Instead, create a compelling ad copy that provides information about a home in an exciting way. Along with the copy, you can display a stunning image of the house, and this will compel the leads to go through the ad and stop them from scrolling through the Facebook newsfeed.

Such ads made for a particular demographic group will help your ad reach the maximum number of people in that segment.  It helps to elicit the maximum response from them to click on your ad and share their email with you. These groups can be people 30-39 years of age, those who are married and with children, etc. They may not buy the house you offer straight away, but they are likely to purchase it in a year. So you need to nurture these leads to generate sales in the coming time. Generating leads from Facebook is generally less expensive when compared to Google Ads.  

But in Google Ads, you can effectively target leads who are searching for homes to buy or those looking for help from real estate agents to sell their homes. They are on Google to buy and not for browsing. These leads are at the last stage in the buyer’s journey and have higher buyer intent. So you can straight away interact with them and convert them into buyers or sellers, whatever the case may be.  

The only downsides with Google Ads are that they are more expensive and have a higher learning curve. So, you should not use them if your budget is limited or you don’t have time to learn how to use the platform. 

Thus, you can see that both of these platforms are beneficial to real estate agents in different ways. Facebook’s custom audiences help nurture the database of potential future customers. Compared to this, Google Ads are ideal to find and generate leads and convert them into sellers and buyers. 

We hope this comparison between Google Ads and Facebook Ads will help you choose the better and more rewarding platform that you can include in your overall marketing strategy and maximize your gains from its use. This decision is crucial for your business’s growth and profitability. So, take it diligently after doing the necessary research, analysis, and consultation.  

You may require help to manage your Google Ads or Facebook Ads campaigns properly, efficiently, and cost-effectively and for getting the best results from them. In that case, help is just a call away at Vcana Global, a reputed and trusted Digital Marketing Agency.