Facebook Ads vs. YouTube Ads

If you’re trying to market your business well, you’ll need to dive into the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements. 

Attempting to market your business organically can only get you so far. Unfortunately, your competitors who do use paid ads will outperform you every time, effectively stealing your customers. 

To stay competitive and improve your marketing reach, you’ll need to add PPC ads to your repertoire. However, you may have trouble determining which platform to use: Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, or a combination of both. 

Both of these popular ad platforms have their advantages and disadvantages, and understanding their complexities can help you make a more informed decision. Read on to learn more about Facebook Ads vs. YouTube Ads, then contact our Client Accelerators team to learn how we can enhance your presence on both platforms. 

Facebook is an incredibly powerful platform for advertising. This social media site has over 3 billion active users, which is over a third of the worldwide population. Users choose to visit Facebook each day, allowing them to view advertisements on the platform organically and be more receptive to their content. 

Facebook ads are advertisements that you can develop for a target audience within the Facebook platform. Your advertisements will appear in Facebook users’ newsfeeds right alongside organic posts from the accounts they follow. 

You can tailor your ads to target specific demographics and populations to optimize their effectiveness. Facebook knows a lot of information about its users, allowing it to display ads to the exact right people whether they’re on Facebook, Instagram or an external site in Facebook’s “audience network”. 

You can create the following types of Facebook ads:

• Image: Photos with descriptions
• Video: Videos with descriptions
• Carousel: Up to 10 images or videos in a single ad, each including its own link to your product or service page
• Instant Experience: Full-screen ad experiences that appear when users click on your mobile ad
• Collection: A collection of multiple products or services that appear in an Instant Experience view when customers click on the advertisement

The efficacy of Facebook ads has drawn in almost 10 million active advertisers. To stay competitive within your industry, you’ll need to become one of them. 

While YouTube has slightly fewer users than Facebook, the platform still sees over 2 billion active users who watch a billion hours of video content each day. As a result, tapping into the YouTube Ads platform can be highly lucrative for your business. 

Like Facebook, Google (the owner of YouTube) collects a lot of data about its users. When you create YouTube or Google ads, the platform will show your ads to people in your target demographic or those who have previously expressed interest in your company or industry. 

YouTube ads are typically in video format. While you can create banner ads for YouTube, these ads usually do not perform as well as videos. 

YouTube supports a few different types of video ads:

• In-feed video ads
• Skippable in-stream ads
• Non-skippable in-stream ads
• Masthead ads
• Outstream ads
• Bumper ads

Each of these ads can provide different benefits for your marketing campaign. It’s important to work with an expert marketing agency to determine the perfect formats for each ad content type.

Facebook and YouTube ads offer a lot of similarities in terms of content, audience, and effectiveness. 

One of the primary similarities between Facebook and YouTube advertisements is their reach. Both platforms have billions of active users. This incredible scope of users allows your ads to microtarget people who are most likely to engage with them and become paid customers. 

Additionally, Facebook and YouTube both allow for direct response ads. Direct response ads guide the user to a specific action within a very short amount of time — like purchasing your product, registering for your webinar, watching your VSL, etc.

(Here is an example of a YouTube direct response ad, and here’s one of a Facebook direct response ad.)

Direct response ads are always optimizing for a conversion event and are the most effective form of digital advertising. These conversion campaigns when setup correctly on both YouTube and Facebook provide a quick, measurable ROI which is what all business owners want to see.

Facebook Ads and YouTube Ads also have significant differences. Understanding these differences can help you determine the right social media platform for your needs. 

First, these platforms charge differently for engagement. For instance, YouTube does not charge you when viewers watch less than 30 seconds of your advertisement and do not click on your links. Meanwhile, Facebook will either charge you every time your ad appears on a user’s screen or every time they click on your ad, depending on the method you choose. 

Because YouTube does not charge for half-watched ads, you can expect the ads you do pay for to have more meaningful results. You’ll only pay when a user has enough time to learn about your company or product.

Users interact with Facebook and YouTube differently. As a result, your ads may be more successful on one platform than another. 

Here are a few unique aspects of the YouTube experience:

• Most users already have their sound on when a YouTube ad appears — making them more likely to listen to your ad. 
• Users are already prepared to watch a video when a YouTube video ad appears — making them less likely to click away immediately.
• YouTube offers unskippable ads — forcing users to view your entire ad before proceeding with their desired video.
• People often watch YouTube videos with a group of people, allowing a single ad to reach several people.

Meanwhile, here are a few unique components of the Facebook experience: 

• Facebook users are prepared to engage with the content on their feeds by liking, commenting, or sharing it, making them more likely to engage with your ad.
• Facebook users scroll through their feeds quickly, waiting for something to catch their attention. As a result, they may not engage with or even notice your ad unless it stands out to them.  
• Facebook users expect to see lower-quality advertisements alongside social media posts, allowing you to spend less money creating your ads for the platform.

Engagement is one of the primary goals of both Facebook and YouTube Ads. Therefore, you should use the platform that can promote the most engagement with your company.

When you post ads to YouTube or Facebook, they must adhere to the platform’s compliance regulations. However, it’s important to note that YouTube has much more lenient compliance requirements than Facebook, which may allow you to implement more effective direct response ads on YouTube. 

For example, YouTube Ads allows you to:

• Bold promises
• Big result claims which CAN be tied to a time, for example, “Get [RESULT] in 30 days or your money back!”
• Various forms of proof

These elements can be critical to your success with paid media and YouTube often supports these elements while Facebook tends to quickly ban ad accounts for using similar tactics.

As we’ve mentioned, Facebook and YouTube allow for different types of ad content. While you can create text, image, and video ads on Facebook, you’ll want to stick to mainly video ads on YouTube. 

Video ads typically take more time to create than image and text posts. However, they have the potential for double or even triple engagement rates. They also allow for longer content, as people are more likely to watch a three-minute video than spend three minutes reading a text post.

Both YouTube Ads and Facebook Ads have pros and cons. Interestingly enough, video advertisements tend to have higher engagement rates on Facebook than on YouTube. However, the exact success you will see with either platform depends on various factors, including your budget, company type, target audience, and more. 

YouTube offers a slightly better experience than Facebook in several ways. Your viewers may be more willing to watch YouTube ads than read Facebook posts. Additionally, YouTube’s lenient compliance regulations may allow you to create more successful ads through the platform. 

All in all, we recommend using both platforms within your digital marketing campaign. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the unique benefits of either platform to promote your business. 

Simply creating advertisements for YouTube and Facebook isn’t enough to see fruitful results. Instead, you’ll need to curate these ads using the most effective strategies in the industry. You’ll also need to monitor their performance and change their content regularly to adapt to your changing goals and audience. 

If you’re looking for a way to maximize your results on YouTube Ads and Facebook Ads, we can help. At Client Accelerators, we’ve spent years learning the ins and outs of both platforms and helping clients like you achieve impressive results. We have what it takes to enhance your PPC ad campaign and grow your company. 

Specifically, we’d be happy to:

• Build a strategic ad campaign for YouTube and Facebook Ads
• Help you create targeted text, image, and video ad content for these platforms
• Monitor your campaigns and identify areas for improvement
• Utilize retargeting to revisit previously engaged leads
• Deliver noticeable, countable results

Contact us today to book your free consultation.