The Difference between Google & Facebook Advertising

 While there are many places online to market, most digital advertisers focus on just two: Google and Facebook

• They have the largest audiences
• They offer the best targeting capabilities
  
• They’ve developed the most robust features for advertisers

But choosing which platform is best for your company requires you to first understand the fundamental difference between them.

Google is intent-focused

Google offers advertisers many different ways to target and display their advertising, but its main one is search ads.

Those are the ones that appear on the top of the search results.

In general, advertisers “bid” on certain keywords (a.k.a the phrases they think people are searching for) to show their ad in the search results.

Google assumes that people who search for a certain term (keyword) have a specific intent at that moment in time.

This presents you, the advertiser, with the perfect opportunity to put your product or message in front of people who are looking to take a certain action if your search result matches their intent.

Think of how different that is from TV advertising, where you get interrupted by an ad during pauses of your favorite show.

Traditional ads use interruptions, while search ads (if done correctly) offer value to the specific intent of the searcher.

Facebook is interest-focused

Facebook, on the other hand, uses a different approach.

They have gathered tons of data on each of their users: what they like, who they know, where they’ve been, what they are interested in, and even what they do in websites other than Facebook.

They may not know what you’re looking for now. But they can triangulate your demographic and psychographic data, and make a good guess about what you might be interested in…

… yeah, let’s be honest. It’s a little creepy. But it’s an insanely powerful tool when it comes to advertising. Facebook uses that data to show highly relevant ads to its users.

Allowing you, the marketer to target specific audiences within Facebook that have shown interest in your product or service.

This is also drastically different from traditional ads.

With TV ads, you launch ads to a massive audience hoping a portion of them might be interested in your product.

With Facebook Ads, you are carefully choosing to show your ads to people who, based on a ton of data, are very likely to be interested in your product.

That’s why Facebook ads are based on interests.