If you’re planning to invest in online advertising to drive traffic to your website, then you may be looking at both Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. Both advertising platforms have been proven to be effective for advertisers and both use an auction model. This is a model where your ad position and priority are based on how much you bid for an action, along with other factors. While both use the same model, there are important differences that will affect the results of your campaign.
How Bidding Works for Google AdWords and Facebook Ads
Google AdWords uses a cost per click model where the position of your ad is largely determined by how much you are willing to pay. You can place manual bids as well as automatic bids. To get the most out of Google AdWords, it’s recommended that you bid manually to control costs and to get an idea of how your campaign performs before you increase your bid price for more traffic.
Facebook uses a bidding model where your ads run more based on various factors. Of course, one of the biggest factor is your bid price. Like Google AdWords, you can use manual or automatic bidding. Some advertisers like to start with auto-bidding to get the lowest costs and test their campaigns affordably over time. However, the best way to go about the bidding process is to start high and win the ad auction. You can then scale down the costs slowly but make sure you don’t change it too often. You need to allow the Facebook algorithm learn about your audience so that you can improve targeting.
How is Quality of Your Ad Judged by Both Platforms?
Both platforms use the quality of your ad to help determine your advertising costs and placement in the ad auction. Google AdWords uses the click-through rate (CTR) and the landing page to determine quality score. To increase your quality score, you should constantly be testing new ads to see which ones result in a higher CTR. It also helps to create tight keyword ad groups for improved targeting. For the landing page, refer to Google’s guide to help you optimise your page and make the necessary improvements.
Facebook’s relevance score is different from Google AdWords in that relevance score is determined by the feedback users provide about your ad. If users hide or disable your ads, your score will be lowered. If users click on your ad and interact with it, it will improve your score. The key to attaining a high relevance score is to start by targeting the right audience. Then you want to work on testing different images and conversational angles to see which ones result in higher relevance scores.
Further Improving Your Campaigns on Both Platforms
If you’ve let your campaigns run for some time, there are various improvements you can make. For Google AdWords, you want to be tracking your conversions and see which keywords are resulting in the highest conversions. You can then place higher bids for the best performing keywords. And of course, you can also pause campaigns that are not performing to try drastically different ads or use other targeting options.
Facebook uses something called estimated action rate to determine your place in the ad auction. This is a metric that Facebook uses to predict how likely a user will take action on your ad. Facebook does not reveal this metric to you but you can improve it by working on various aspects of your campaign. For example, you can require less forms fields for lead generation pages or optimise your shopping cart process, so that it is easier for Facebook to identify your target audience.
