Facebook and Google have pushed a huge growth in their advertising options. Both offer behaviourally-targeted options to engage with customers – but how can you compare the two? What’s Hot takes a look at the pros and cons of running campaigns with these two behemoths of the web.
Targeting – Google obviously has a more established advertising model than Facebook, having built its entire business around the development of the ‘pay per click’ approach. Google Display Network operates around a robust pricing model that moves with demand, seasonality etc, but not with the wild, often unexplained swings that Facebook’s CPCs do.
Facebook on the other hand uses profile information to target consumers with relevant ads. While Facebook is limited to its own (admittedly vast) network, it offers highly targeted display advertising opportunities, based on profile data and user habits. This way, it can serve messages that have ‘social currency’ among Facebook users. Google’s raft of social launches, most recently Google +, show it is desperate to move into this space.
Data – Facebook is also sticky – it wants people to hang around, rather than directing them elsewhere to other sites as Google does. Via its API Facebook Connect, it is taking Facebook outside of its network and collecting data from user habits on these sites to add into its rich database.
However, Google’s insights into our browsing habits add a unique degree of contextual relevance to any placements across its network. Google is still learning and is making both search and display network results more relevant, with a truly semantic web as the end goal.
So which platform will have the edge in the future, or can they both happy co-exist?
Big egos – not to mention competition commissions – might prevent there ever being a Google/Facebook merger, but both will define the future web. The next few years will see the two circling as they seek to compete with, or aggregate each other’s data.
Each wants to dominate the web experience from first to last click, whether information gathering, paying a bill or claiming a geo-located deal in a restaurant. We’ve seen Google toying with real-time Twitter results in its results pages, and Facebook partnering with Bing to bring internal search capability to Facebook.
The big play for both is clearly mobile/tablet. With new Geo-location services such as Foursquare, both companies reacted with products of their own. Google’s ambitions with Android, not to mention its recent acquisition of Motorola, shows its intentions, and this will no doubt have implications for advertisers.
In short, Google wants to become more social, Facebook more relevant as navigation. Let battle commence!
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