Here’s how you can target your ads on Google:
Keyword
Keyword targeting is pretty straightforward and is available both on Google search itself, as well as on partner sites that use Adsense. Keyword targeting involves choosing words or phrases relevant to your product or service so that your ads appear when customers search those terms.
Location
Location targeting allows you to make your ads visible on queries coming from certain geographical locations – such as a country, a region, a city, even a postcode or a congressional district – wherever your customers are located. For example, you can decide to display an ad only to users in the United States, Germany and Japan. You can also exclude certain areas. An example of this would be setting up a global ad and forcing it to exclude Asia entirely.
Language
Language targeting allows you to include or exclude certain languages from queries. Each country or region will have their default language. In the United States, the default language is English, but you can choose to have Google Adwords include Spanish or French queries, or any other language – whatever language most of your customers speak. An example would be, say you’re living in Italy (making the default search language Italian), but you’re only trying to target Americans living in Italy. You could then assign Italy as the location, but use English as your query language, while excluding Italian.
Here’s how you can target your ads on Facebook:
Demographics
Targeting by demographics allows you to choose the audience for your ads based on their age, gender, interests and even languages spoken.
Location
Location targeting allows you to reach customers in the areas where they live or where they do business. You can target your ads by country, city, region, county, postcode, or even specific areas around your business.
Interests
Targeting an audience based on their interests is a great way to advertise your product or service. If they are interested in your type of business, they are most likely to take action and click on your ad. You can choose from hundreds of categories such as music, movies, games, sports, shopping, fashion, and many more.
Behaviours
Behaviors are the activities people take part in online, both on and off Facebook. This may include purchase behaviours, shopping interests, travel preferences and many other activities. By analyzing a person’s activity on Facebook as well as their online activity off Facebook, you can target people that have shown interest in the product or service you are offering. Third-party partners provide the offline activity information to Facebook.
Custom Audience
Custom audience targeting uses information you already have to target different audiences. You can target these audiences in a few different ways. The first way is to target current customers by uploading a contact list of people you’d like to reach. The second way is to target people who are similar to your customers. This “lookalike audience” (as it is referred to) is generated from your Facebook page fans, customer lists and website visitors. The third way is to remarket to people on Facebook who’ve already visited your website.
In my opinion, it isn’t very wise to determine whether to choose Facebook Ads or Google Adwords solely based on cost, because there are so many variables that affect each one – competitiveness of the keyword chosen, the geographical location, the quality of the ad, so on and so forth. The cost of Google Adwords may be higher at first, but the results (and the sales) are usually immediate since you are targeting people that are specifically looking for your product or service. Using Facebook for your online marketing will certainly cost less, but most of the people that will click on your ad aren’t necessarily looking for your product or service, when they click on it. A cat lover may click on your Facebook ad showing personalized kitty collars, and may even “like” your page, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re looking to buy one in that moment. On the other hand, someone that purposefully goes on Google and searches for online pet stores selling personalized kitty collars, is most likely looking to buy one in that moment, or in the very near future.
After comparing these two online marketing giants, you may still be wondering, which one should I spend my marketing budget on? There are pros and cons to both, so the real question you should be asking yourself is, what is your goal or expected outcome for your ads?
The main difference between Google Adwords and Facebook Ads is search intent. When someone searches on Google, they are usually looking for something, whether it be the answer to a question, a solution to a problem or a specific product or service. On the other hand, Facebook Ads are shown to people based on their interests, so they’re not necessarily looking for something, but the fact that you are offering a product or service they may be interested could lead to future sales and brand loyalty.
Google Adwords is about increasing immediate sales and revenue, while Facebook Ads is more about increasing brand awareness, lead generation and long-term traffic growth. Google Adwords is more short-term, while Facebook Ads is more long term. For this reason, they are both winners.
