The Marketing Method: The Difference Between Converting on Facebook and Google

Instapage is where conversions happen, and that’s why we’re coming to you with the marketing performance education you need to thrive. How’s everyone doing now that we’re in November? Have you experimented with any of the tactics we mentioned in our last newsletter, 5 Lessons from Retail Stores for Digital Marketers? If so, let us know how your experiment went!

Today, we’re going a little less analog and a little more digital. Now that we’ve talked about landing pages a bit, let’s go back to the pre-click stage. We’re going to talk about advertising on two of the biggest digital platforms: Facebook and Google, and how both of these channels require different strategies and tactics to drive consistently high conversions.

Here is an easy, high-level way to separate how to approach advertising on Facebook and Google:?

Think of Google Search Ads as pull advertising, as search ads respond to the question that customers are seeking the answer to. Facebook Ads can be thought of as push advertising, as on-platform ads are used to convince potential customers to join the conversion journey. Knowing that key difference can help impact your tactics to ensure your efforts are rewarded.

Converting on Google

Prospects searching on Google generally know what they are looking for. However, they may be open to new or better solutions to the problem they’re seeking to solve, within their search parameters. It is up to the advertiser to make sure users see their ad when they’re looking for solutions—and the best way to achieve this is with a high Quality Score.

A higher Quality Score means your ad and landing page are more relevant and valuable to someone searching for your keyword compared to other advertisers. Google calculates this metric on a scale of 1 to 10 based on the combined performance of the following three components:

• Expected clickthrough rate (CTR): The likelihood that your ad gets clicked
• Ad relevance: How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user’s search
• Landing page experience: How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad

To see the highest possible advertising conversions on your Google Search ads, it’s essential to understand that relevance shouldn’t stop with the ad. If you want the ad click to translate into advertising conversions and not waste your advertising dollars, you must connect every ad with a compatible, optimized, personalized page

Converting on Facebook

Now, let’s get back to Facebook. As we mentioned above, those on Facebook don’t necessarily have the intent to buy anything—they might just be scrolling around for entertainment. However, the platform can still target them for ads based on their online behavior, interests, location, demographics, etc.

Facebook Ads allow you to generate awareness and interest in your product. What Facebook lacks in user on-platform search intent, it makes up for in its myriad of targeting capabilities. The platform measures your ad’s relevance to audiences via the ad quality metric.

Creating relevant, optimized Facebook ads is about understanding user behavior and interests and developing an ad that perfectly describes what they’re looking for before they are even looking for it. Similar to advertising on Google, converting users on the landing page involves following through with the offer on the ad, staying on-brand, and ensuring there’s a message match.?

In Summary: Remember to Stay Relevant

While Google Ads and Facebook Ads may not count conversions the same way, they both reward relevance and attention to customer intent. If you’d like to dive deeper into the difference between advertising on these platforms, head to the blog.

In order to keep your curiosity and creativity up, we wanted to share some examples of high-converting ads and great examples of ad-to-page relevancy.

• This Facebook Ad for Calm calls out users for feeling stressed, and if you clicked on it you’d be delivered to a landing page that features copywriting focused on getting rid of anxiety, stress, and nervousness and an offer for a 7-Day free trial of Calm.
• In a Google Search Ad, someone has googled “easy project management solutions for small teams” and Click Up pops up in the #1 spot because they utilized the most keywords and noted their offer. When you click on it,?you’re delivered to a landing page where the headline and subheadline reiterate that the tool will manage all projects in one place, which is perfect for small teams. It also echoes the CTA to sign up for the platform for free, which was seen in the Google Search Ad.

Now that you’ve explored some of ours, we’d love for you to share your brand’s ad-to-page relevancy examples or just your favorite examples from brands around the world to keep the inspiration flowing!

As always, stay tuned for more actionable content, and give us a follow on our main LinkedIn page for the latest announcements on webinars, blogs, events, marketing tech updates, and more.