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How Facebook & Google Ads Can & Should Work Together

Dijitally

Social Media, Google Ads

August 29, 2022

10 min read

Never silo your Facebook ads and Google ads ever again. Combine them to keep and drive your customer through the various stages of the sales funnel to conversion.

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How Facebook & Google Ads Can & Should Work Together

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Despite the fact that Facebook and Google are direct competitors who have their own ad products, there is no need to treat them as such in your advertising campaigns.

In fact, we believe that they need to be treated as equals when and if you’re including them both in a digital marketing strategy for your own business or your clients.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to discuss in our latest blog - how both ad platforms can work together to produce your desired result.

Once you’ve finished reading this blog you’ll be much more informed about where both platforms sit in the sales funnel, how both channels work together rather than in a silo, and how they can prompt sales for each other.

Facebook & Google Ads - The Sales Funnel

If you have a business and have already been marketing your products and services to potential & existing customers then you’ll be well aware of the sales funnel.

For those of you who aren’t aware of what the sales funnel is it involves the three stages, a potential customer goes through starting as a prospect and ending as a customer.

Awareness - introducing your business to those who aren’t aware of you. You can achieve awareness by driving traffic to the home page of your website.
Consideration - your prospects are aware of who you are and what you do, but they are now considering whether your product or service will solve their problem. You would produce & market tailored content to them or prompt them to visit a particular product or service page.
Conversion - your product or service is a good fit for your prospect and this is where they take the desired action.

But Where Do Facebook & Google Ads Sit in the Sales Funnel?

The psychology of each platform is a key consideration here which will inform the creative, audience, etc that you choose to use for each advertising campaign.

We believe that Facebook ads can be used across all three stages of the sales funnel, whilst Google Ads can be used in both the Consideration and Conversion phase purely because those who convert on Google Ads are already in a buying mindset.

Whereas those who don’t know the answer to their problem need to be made aware of this and thus Facebook is key in the Awareness stage.

But despite what those in the advertising world, Facebook can certainly drive conversions (whatever that might be) and we’ll discuss that a little bit later in this blog.

What Content Should Be Used?

The types of content or ads you’d use for Google Ads are pretty straightforward, so we’ll start with that.

Depending on your product or service, we’d always recommend Search Ads & Dynamic Search Ads, to begin with.

Utilising various SEO software tools will assist you in your keyword research so you can determine what keywords to target and use in your ads.

Furthermore, Google Shopping Ads are particularly effective when you’re an eCommerce business.

Facebook ad content is a little different because it will rely largely on your strategy and your audience.

However, as a start, we would recommend using videos and imagery where possible across all stages of the sales funnel.

Your objective at each stage will take this a step further and influence what specific content and audience you actually use.

But again, we’ll discuss this in further detail later on in this blog.

How Facebook Ads & Google Ads Work Together

Up until this point of the blog we’ve discussed where each platform is best utilised in the platform as well as what types of content & ad types would work best.

Now, we’re going to take a look at just how your Facebook ads and Google Ads can work together.

This will include further detail as to what audiences, objectives, and strategies we’d recommend you’d employ to ensure these two platforms are working together to drive your customer to your desired conversion.

Facebook Ads

Recognising that Facebook ads can be used at all stages of the sales funnel, and Google ads are more suited to Consideration and Conversion (with a heavy emphasis on the latter), we’ll start off with what you need to do to set up the Facebook ad campaign side of the strategy.

What needs to be a focus here for your campaign is that you create campaigns, content, and audiences that are contextual to where your prospects are in the sales funnel.

Awareness

Use video content and target your ideal audience. You can also utilise imagery here which would mean the ad objective is post engagement rather than video views.
The objective here is to acquire as many eyeballs as you possibly can through video views but we don’t want to send them to your website just yet.
Remember, we want as many prospects to be aware of your business as we possibly can.
The video should introduce your business without selling them anything

Consideration

Now we can utilise your website and drive traffic to your home page or category page.
Your Facebook ad objective here will be Traffic as we want as many people as possible to visit the specific page.
However, you want to create what’s known as a Remarketing audience of people who have watched all or a percentage of the video in the Awareness phase.
The copy, creative, and call to action you use in the ad will be contextual to where they are in the funnel
We’d recommend a “soft” call to action such as Learn More because while we want them to convert as quickly as possible, and they can do so if they wish, they might not be ready.

Conversion

Utilising the traffic we have built in the Consideration phase, we want to drive this traffic further down the funnel and to a product page or an enquiry form.
Our Facebook ad objective here is Conversion and whatever that might be i.e a sale, a form submission, etc.
Similar to the Consideration phase audience, we’ll remarket to those who have visited our home page or category page through our ads or our Google ads.
Our copy, imagery, and call to action will be more direct using Book Now, Buy Now, Enquire Now, etc and will be obvious what we want our audience to do
If the ad campaign is set up correctly, this direct approach shouldn’t be unusual to your audience as they’ve already been exposed to your business online via our Awareness & Consideration ads.

This might seem like a lot to take in at first, but once you set up the various campaign elements such as objectives, audiences, and creative, it will all fall into place fairly seamlessly.

Now For Our Google Ads

Now that we’ve covered our Facebook Ads and how they work in this strategy, we can now discuss how Google Ads work in parallel.

Whilst Google Ads can be utilised at the Consideration phase of the sales funnel, for the purpose of this example strategy, we’ll focus purely on Conversion.

Conversion

Based on the traffic we have built in the Consideration phase, we want to drive people to the same product or service page as your Facebook ads.
Our Google Ads objective here is Conversion and whatever that is will depend on your business.
Using various tools at our disposal in our Google Ads account, we will focus on search queries & keywords that are relevant to our audience but also that have good monthly search volume and aren’t overly competitive from a cost-per-click perspective.
These search queries & keywords will also need to appear naturally in our ads as they are found through the Google Search Network once live.
Our geo-targeting, as well as various demographics, needs to be the same as our Facebook targeting to ensure both are focusing on the same audience.
Given the psychology associated with Google Ad campaigns, the copy and other elements used in your Search Ads should be conversion-related.

We want to ensure that our Google Ads are a key driver for conversions in your campaign but in the event that some of your audience doesn’t convert on your website, they will be remarketed via Facebook.

Contextual Audiences

As we previously mentioned, the above campaign strategy is grounded in what we refer to as contextual marketing.

This ensures that the ad your target audience is seeing is contextual to where they are in the sales funnel.

But how do we make sure that the right people are seeing the right ad?

We do that by creating audiences in Facebook Ads manager that we exclude at the various stages of the sales funnel.

The simplest audience we would recommend using during all stages of your campaign is your existing customers.

Now, this will depend on what sort of product or service you sell and whether it’s a one-off purchase or involves repeat purchases, but it’s the most effective exclusion audience you can use in your Facebook ad campaigns.

This ensures that once someone becomes a customer of yours, either during the above campaign or during any campaign, then they will no longer see your ads.

Facebook will show ads across all three stages of the funnel and the copy, imagery, objectives, and call to action will be relevant to each stage, while your Google Ads will be heavily based on conversion.

A platform such as Google Analytics will be able to show you directly how each platform has contributed to conversion

How Facebook Ads & Google Ads Drive Attribution

We’ve discussed where each platform sits in the sales funnel and a basic setup of each one across the various stages.

Now we’ll discuss how each platform drives conversion using attribution.

As you might be aware, your customer will typically never convert on one channel or platform alone and it requires several touchpoints before a conversion can occur.

For example, a customer might first engage with your business via Google Organic Search, which then leads them to your website.

From there, they might jump on social media and because they’ve visited your website, they are delivered one of your Facebook ads prompting them to revisit your website.

They might not take your desired action there and then, but your Facebook ad delivered a few days later prompts them to type in your business name into Google and arrive back at your website and join your newsletter.

After receiving a welcome email, a week later they receive a welcome discount code which they use and purchase your product.

In order, the touchpoints used on their path to conversion are:

Google Organic
Website
Facebook Paid
Website
Facebook Paid
Website
Email

While many analytical platforms measure based on last-click attribution i.e. the final channel that acquires the conversion is deemed solely responsible for that conversion, any good digital marketing agency will know that there are a number of platforms responsible for that particular conversion.

In the case of the example above, there have been exactly seven touchpoints.

And this is where attribution needs to be factored in and, more specifically, how Google Ads and Facebook ads are partly responsible for each other’s conversions.

Rising Tides Raise All Ships

By utilising the traffic we have built on Facebook at the Consideration phase, we can drive that through to conversion through advertising on Google Ads, either directly or indirectly.

We’ve spoken about how that can be done directly utilising the campaign structure above, but simply advertising on Facebook with a focus on driving traffic can indirectly prompt searches on Google that will result in traffic, and conversions, produced via paid ads.

A platform such as Google Analytics will be able to show you directly how each platform has contributed to conversion on any given day, week, month, or year.

But also your business will indirectly feel a rise in conversions if both platforms are working in parallel and set up correctly.

Summing up...

Use Both Platforms Concurrently

It will keep your customer in the sales funnel for longer

Context is Key

Deliver messages at every stage of the funnel

Reap the Benefits

Watch sales & revenue grow