Deciding where to spend your advertising budget when you are a small business can be a tricky decision especially as both are constantly tempting you with ‘boost this post and reach X amount of people’ or ‘get £X worth of ad credit when you spend Y. So should you spend your budget on Google ads or Facebook Ads?
You want to drive traffic to your website and convert these to sales but at the same time you want to increase your brand awareness. The simple answer to the question of whether to spend on Google Ads or Facebook ads is simple. Spend on both, just make sure you spend it wisely.
Google is great for finding what you are looking for in a hurry. If there is water pouring through your lounge ceiling you aren’t going to go onto Facebook and scroll your feed in the hope that a post from a plumbing company comes up. Likewise you will not feel like you have made a connection with a brand via google alone (other search engines are available by the way!)
So we have established that Google Ads are great for driving traffic to your website, but what if the visitors are just browsing your shop window to see what is available? Perhaps they are trying to find a few local businesses offering what you offer. This is where combining the two comes in.
So how do we do this to best effect?
Firstly, in order to ensure that we capture those warm leads (people with intent to purchase but not at point of purchase just yet) we install some tracking onto your website. Make sure you add tracking the the page you are landing your traffic on from your Google Ads. This is especially important if you are running campaigns for different areas of your business. This could be your homepage or if you are wanting really good data a specific landing page you have created to track them. The simplest way to do this is to install a Facebook pixel.
Once you have created a Facebook Pixel and embed the code onto your website (or used a suitable plug in I use the Official Facebook Pixel plug) you can them set up Facebook advertising campaigns using the data collected by your Pixel ensuring that those people who have previously browsed your website now see your sponsored content or advertisement in their Facebook feed, reminding them of your brand and your offering.
Creating a custom audience on Facebook
Top Tip: Always make sure that your company name is a keyword in your Google Ad campaign as you build brand awareness. Your competitors will be using your name in their Google Ads campaigns so you don’t want all this effort to be driving traffic to them.
Official Facebook pixel plug in https://wordpress.org/plugins/official-facebook-pixel/