LinkedIn Ads Or Google Ads: Which Should You Use?
SEO is an extremely significant deciding factor in the discovery and consequently, the conversion rate for your brand. However, the contribution of paid ads is often ignored in many conversations.
A Moz study reveals that PPC advertising has a conversion rate 50% greater than that of organic search results. There is also a 50% greater chance of a purchase being made when the customer comes through a paid ad.
However, since paid ads, obviously, are costlier than organic marketing, a company must give a lot of thought to the platforms and lead generation services they are going to utilize, the keywords and audience they will target, the budget they will reserve, and so on.
One such point of contention is the one surrounding Google and LinkedIn ads. Most lead generation agencies will go with Google if asked to choose one. But the situation is not so simple. The truth is, both have their advantages and disadvantages.
You should choose according to which platform provides the features most useful to you. You can either test both or take the best features of each and make up for what one of them lacks with the other.
So, Why Google Ads?
If you are asking someone to give a reason off the top of their heads, then it is the pervasive accessibility, popularity, and reach of Google. Google is the leader in terms of paid ad traffic not only among search engines but also among most platforms used by people to look for products.
The State Of PPC 2019-2020 report states that 96% of businesses invest in Google paid ads, which is a titanic percentage when you compare it to the meager 40% that invest in LinkedIn.
The same report predicts that 77% of marketers and digital marketing agencies will spend more on Google PPC while 32% will spend more on LinkedIn ads in the year after. After all, Google has a 200% ROI, which clearly explains the reason.
Google Ads target audiences based on their search intent. Therefore, the focus is on keywords. Ads will turn up in search results based on the nearest connection to keywords and intent. Pricing is, thus, also based on how a keyword is faring. The more popular the keyword, the higher is its price to bid.
Moreover, Google has a high level of reach: the audience it can reach is greater than any other platform. This is because search engines are used pretty much universally. Hence, it can be utilized for B2B as well B2C purposes in a profitable manner.
However, when it comes to the smaller details, specifically targeting, Google might fall a bit short. The reason is simple. The purpose of Google is to help people search for any information they want. As such, Google does not ask for too many details about a person. One does not even need to log in to Google to use the search engine.
Therefore, targeting is mostly based on audience, behavior, and content. This also means that a lead generation agency will have to put in greater effort to define a lead completely and remarketing might be a longer and more complex process here.
However, Google does offer a vast variety of ad types. It also provides wide analytics and testing capabilities. Also, the fact that a customer on Google knows what they are looking for makes it easier to reach your goals while simultaneously bringing down the cost of acquisition. The truth is, irrespective of the lead generation services you utilize, Google is not one you can ignore.
So, What Makes LinkedIn Ads Special?
LinkedIn is a platform created for business owners and organization managers. It is like the Facebook of professionals. Naturally, its target audience is also professionals. The largest percentage of users that have benefitted from LinkedIn are B2B companies, with 82% of businesses using it and 65% raking in customers through LinkedIn ads.
The difference in the nature and purpose of Google and LinkedIn makes most of the difference here. LinkedIn targets people based on their profile and behavior rather than their explicit search intent. Therefore, it is not unusual to view ads on LinkedIn that might not pertain directly to your intent but rather, are implied in your activities and user details.
This helps businesses target people whose profile matches the audience personas you created for your business. Hence, you can get your product directly to your audience in a more outbound manner.
The audience-based targeting method also costs much less than that of Google since you only have to compete with those who have an identical target demographic, which is rare, keeping the number low.
While your audience will be much smaller than that of Google, it will be more accurate. It will attract far fewer unproductive clicks and save you a lot of money.
If that was not enough, the level of granularity you can achieve in your targeting and remarketing is much higher than that of Google. Of course, it will be based more on your educational and professional details, since that is what LinkedIn is interested in.
However, one drawback of LinkedIn is that it does not offer as many ad types as Google and neither does it have a universal presence on other sites and platforms like Google does. Its analytics features also fall slightly short of Google.
Nonetheless, these are inconveniences that you can solve easily with third-party applications. All in all, LinkedIn is valuable if the professional world is your aim.
Concluding Line
A good lead generation company knows that the key to a successful marketing campaign is to be in the right place at the right time with the right product. That means advertising on Google for ads that have a better chance of performing well there and using LinkedIn for the ones you feel will succeed there.
Thus, striking the right balance is essential if you want to spend your budget in a cost-effective manner and obtain the results you aimed for.