When you have an e-commerce business, you’re most likely to turn to two forms of online advertising – Facebook advertising or Google Ads. Whilst both have a multitude of advantages, it’s important you choose to invest in the one that’s best for your business. We’ve created a guide to help you decide where you should be putting your online marketing budget.
What are Facebook Ads?
Facebook ads is a form of social advertising, where places ads in various settings on the Facebook platform. These ads can be shown to a user in various ways. You can target your ads at specific demographics, interest groups, or can even push them towards people who are approaching certain big life events. In addition to targeting your ads towards users based on Facebook’s data, you can also create remarketing or lookalike audiences to target based on your own.
How do you set up Facebook ads?
Setting up Facebook Ads is really quite simple. Once you have a Facebook page for your business, you can go to your Ads Manager and start creating your ads. Once you create your first ad, you can check the progress of it to know what to amend to make sure your campaigns are performing to the best of their ability.
The benefits of Facebook ads
Facebook ads are often used by brands as Facebook understands potential customers’ social behaviour more so than Google. Additionally, Facebook has the advantage of being able to pin down your exact target customer, and only advertises to people who are likely to purchase your product or service. This is done through the platform’s specific targeting options, and you can set ads to be shown only on users newsfeeds who have particular interests relevant to your business.
Your brand should use Facebook advertising if your overall outcome is to focus on your brand outreach, awareness, and social following. By focusing on your brand’s awareness and social following, you can help generate sales, with stats showing that 87% of e-commerce shoppers believe social media helps them make a shopping decision, with 30% of consumers saying they would make purchases directly through social media platforms.
What are Google Ads?
Google Ads are paid advertisements which appear in search results on Google. Also known as pay-per-click advertising, Google’s advertising platform allows you to target users when they search for specific keywords relating to your product or brand. The advantage of this is that your product will come up when users search for specific keywords— putting your business in front of potential customers in the right place at the right time. Google allows you to see how many users find your brand using those keywords, helping you better understand your customer base and discover new keywords to target.
You’re only charged for keywords when someone clicks on your ad, which keeps costs lower as your budget is only spent on people who click-through, rather than those who just see the ad.
The advantages of Google Ads
- Increasing brand awareness and reaching more customers – Facebook ads are best used for a customer who is not specifically looking for a product and can help build awareness around your brand, where Google Ads are aimed at customers who actively seek your product, which puts your business at the forefront of their minds.
- Reconnecting with visitors from your website – by creating remarketing campaigns, Google will directly target these visitors with the intention of pushing these visitors to convert.
- Consistent performance measurement – you can see key analytical stats which tell you exactly what has happened to your campaigns. This includes click rates, leads, traffic, keyword information, and cost per conversion.
What do I need to start Google Shopping Campaigns?
There are two platforms you’ll need to utilise if you want to build out a Google Shopping Campaign, Google Merchant Centre and Google Ads. The Merchant Centre is used as a place for you to upload your business’s inventory to create a product feed. Google Ads is used to take care of all the bidding and advertising aspects of your Google Shopping ads.
We are Google shopping experts that can help you to set up your advertising platform and increase your online sales.
Which should I use?
As an agency, we always say both is best! This is due to the fact that using each platform offers a range of different benefits, and when using both in a business strategy, this can help maximise KPI’s, brand awareness, and conversions. Facebook and Google Ads are useful together to:
- Build your brand with Facebook and close deals with Google
- Use Google Ads Data to understand audiences to target on Facebook
- Find similar audiences on Facebook to boost both platforms
Have any questions about Google advertising or paid social media management? Get in touch today!
