14: Google vs Facebook Advertising - Comparing the 2 Biggest Players on the Net

If your products have a proven audience and you are ready to start driving serious traffic to your site, the 2 biggest games in town are Google and Facebook.  In assessing Google vs Facebook advertising for consumer product brands, I’m going to share my experience in marketing our line of lifestyle bags. Other products and businesses may experience very different results

 

How and why we use Google and Facebook advertising

We primarily rely on Google and Facebook for top-of-funnel activities. In other words, this is where we first lure a potential customer to visit our site. To align with this goal, we set up all of our campaigns to prioritize click-throughs to our products.

For a full explanation of the marketing funnel and some examples of other techniques we use see the post:How to increase website traffic and conversions

Some other context

We do not have a good way to track the ultimate effectiveness of various types of traffic, since we assume that a first time visitor will make several more visits before actually purchasing a product. So, by the end of the sales funnel people may have come through one channel, been retargeted by another and then Googled our brand name to make their actual purchase.

We also use a service called Criteo for retargetting, which does offer better tracking of purchase activity. However the majority of our “new” traffic comes through Facebook and Google. I will not be covering Criteo here but may in a future post.

Google Advertising for Consumer Product Brands

I’ll start with Google because they are the incumbent, and for many years have dominated the online ad space.

The Pros of Google Advertising Search Intent

Google’s unassailable advantage is that it owns the world’s most popular search engine,  giving it the ability to target people as they seek a product just like yours. Someone who enters a search query tends to be a much more motivated buyer than one who happens to stumble upon an ad the you’ve served. Because of this, some businesses can build a very valuable stream of traffic off of just a few key search terms.

Reach

Google’s advertising products have the ability to reach 90+% of the sites on the internet.

Accurate analytics

Because it is free and extremely powerful, Google analytics has become the defacto standard for tracking your online traffic and performance. Google’s ad products integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics to provide a single dashboard for assessing your campaigns, though you will probably end up spending a significant amount of time in the Adwords dashboard also.

Variety of products

Google’s wide variety of products can get a bit confusing, especially as they continue to evolve under new names and with enhanced features. I’ll just cover the main concepts/products that would be relevant to indie consumer product brands.

Adwords/Text Based search campaigns This is Google’s “classic” product: campaigns that serve up a text based ad alongside organic search results. This approach can be extremely effective if you are selling a niche product that does not have a lot of competition for keywords.

Google Shopping/Image-based search campaigns Like AdWords, this is an ad with a product image that is served in response to a specific search query, where you control the keywords. This is best for lifestyle and fashion products, where a visual image can be a key differentiator. Since you will only pay for click-throughs to your site, it can be more cost-effective if you have a product that will only appeal to a certain segment of the audience for that keyword. For instance “Leather tote bag” – will only attract buyers who respond to your preview image in the search results.

Video You can use video both as pre-roll to a requested youtube video and as a banner ads. We have tested video on youtube but did not see a lot of click-throughs. I think the issue is that people are interested in seeing the selected video – not yours – so they are unlikely to leave the site unless you have an unusually novel product or video ad. I think this channel would be best for established consumer product brands, who want to reinforce their brand image without needing to drive website clicks.

Remarketing Remarketing, also called retargeting, is a key component of any online marketing campaign. Once you’ve paid to get someone to your site the first time, remarketing places a cookie in the visitors browser allowing you to continue to serve ads across numerous websites. Google has a product that can automaticaly serve ads for the specific products that a visitor has view. It can be a little complicated to set up, but if you are using Shopify, there is an app that makes it fairly seamless.

Support

Google does offer phone su