Google or Facebook Ads - What's Best?

Sarah Orchard: 00:00:23

You're listening to get fully booked with Sarah Orchard. Are you ready to master your marketing so you can ditch your reliance on the online agents and grow your direct bookings?

I'll be sharing with you exactly what it takes to grow your direct bookings and the simple marketing steps to get more profit in your pocket. Hello. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Get Fully booked podcast.

Hi, I'm your host, Sarah Orchard, and today it's a solo episode and I'm covering off a question I get asked all the time. My marketing club members often ask me on the weekly helpdesks should I do Google Ads, previously known as Google Adwords or Facebook ads. So Meta ads, now from the off, just to clarify, when I say Facebook ads, I mean Facebook or Instagram ads. So that's on the Meta Ads Manager platform, not promoted or boosted posts.

I'll use the term Meta to cover any ad on either Facebook or Instagram or both.

So okay, let's dive in.

So I think the first thing is like what's the difference between those two different advertising options?

Well, obviously they're paid advertising.

Google is the world's largest search engine and I think the key thing is that when users are on Google, they are primed to purchase, they're ready to buy. Now obviously when people are on social media, often they are just looking for entertainment. So they're in a very different buyer state.

And I think that's the major difference between the two advertising options, is actually the state of the actual recipient of your ad. The key thing also with Google Ads is that the volume of searches is absolutely huge and that's almost part of the issue.

That makes the ads quite expensive to actually do in the first place. So what you're doing is you're paying per click, so you're paying to get clicks to your website.

Now that's obviously not necessarily the bookings that you want as a host, but you are getting traffic to your website and obviously it's then your job as the marketer in your business to convert those visits to your website into an actual booking. So you're responsible really for the conversion and Google Ads is really only responsible for getting that traffic to your site in the first place.

So the key thing with Google Ads is they're always designed to be on, they're often used by big retailers and they are designed to be like that ever present advertising. That ad out there, a bit like a billboard that's out there all the time, and you're bidding for prime positions on a daily basis.

Now, Meta ads work differently in that you're paying to play, but you can set either a lifetime or a daily budget. So you can start with a lot less money, which I'll cover a bit later on. So I think that for me, that's the key differences between the two options.

And obviously that can dictate whether they're right for you or whether they're actually not an option that's viable for you.

Now, a question that I get asked again is how much budget do I need to actually participate and to do these paid ads?

Well, with Google Ads, you're actually, you know, you're bidding within the search volume. So you need a much larger budget to get any sort of traction because what you're doing is you're bidding on keywords.

Now, keywords, if you're not familiar with them, they're the terms. So they're just the terms that people put into a search engine. So put into Google.

So, for example, I might be searching for a glamping pod with a hot tub in the Cotswolds, so I've typed that. Or I might be looking for a Airbnb or a short term rental in Miami. So basically, that's what I type into the search engine.

And what you're doing is you're bidding for those keywords. So you're bidding to get to the top of the search results.

And due to the competition and the volume, you need to bid quite high for each keyword to actually get to a prime position. And we all know that we're then competing with some of the big players like Airbnb, Booking.com, Cottages.com, Sykes Cottges, etc etc. They're always very dominant within the search results. And you'll probably notice when you look, if you go and do a Google search, you'll see all of those.

They now are labeled as sponsored positions at the top of the organic search results. So the organic search results are the ones that come up naturally and haven't been paid for. That's what we all probably aiming for. The Holy Grail is we want to be at the top of those. But obviously some of the biggest companies, they actually bid to be at the top of the search results.

So it can be quite expensive to actually bid for each keyword. And you're literally doing that on a daily basis.

I'd also say with Google Ads, they need constant management to see what's working, what's not working, and it really isn't something that you can just set and forget. You do need to be managing it and you might need the help of a professional Google Ads specialist to help you with that because otherwise it can be quite easy to have the budget basically run away with you.

and in a month she ran up a £: 3000

I think you need around £500 pounds a month, or around US$650 a month to do any sort of Google Ads campaign. With less budget than that you're not going to get much visibility and therefore it's not really worth your time and energy.

Whereas with Meta, so ads on Facebook and Instagram, you can almost start with the money that you want to put in and then it just basically defines the size of the audience that you're going to get in front of. So it's quite a different way of approaching the advertising. So obviously the more money that you put in, the larger the audience.

And with any type of advertising, only a small percentage of people will click on your advert around between 1 and 3%. So obviously you need a reasonable budget to actually get any traction.

You know, if you say you're only gonna spend £10 or $10, you're not gonna get much in the way of visibility that, but I think you can start with a budget of about £50 to £100.

You could either do a short lifetime campaign for about £50, so say like US$65/$70, or you could do an evergreen sort of monthly campaign and you're probably looking at about £100 pounds, say like US$125 a month. And you can actually do that quite easily and have a very focused campaign running for those sorts of budgets.

As I said, Meta ads tend to be a better way of being discovered. So we've got to remember that you're on a social media platform, so therefore people are looking to be entertained.

They weren't necessarily in that state of wanting to buy like they are when they're on Google. So I'd say that people obviously on Google are further down the buying journey. But Meta ads can be a great way of being discovered.

They can be a great way of creating brand awareness and getting people to your website, getting them onto your email list, and then being able to build that relationship with them so that you can then convert them into guests and to make bookings. So when you run meta ads, I think the thing to remember is that you're unlikely to get instantaneous bookings.

Sometimes you can be lucky and you can put your first campaign out there. I've had members that have done my trainings and they've gone out there and done their first ads and they've done really well and they've got bookings immediately and they've always been thrilled with that. But you have to be in it for the long term gain and visibility.

It's not something that you're going to be able to necessarily put an ad out and get an immediate booking, but it's your job to obviously, as I said, get people to your website and then for your website to do a great job at converting them into potential guests. And even if they're not ready to buy, then obviously that's why email, you know, data capture and getting them onto your email list is so important.

As I said, your goal really is to get people to your website. So, you know, that website has to work hard to actually convert them into bookings.

I've got a key fact for you: So I think it's useful to think about how many searches a day are done on Google. I don't know if you know this, but 8.5 billion searches a day are done on Google.

So as much as we spend a lot of time on social media, it actually is still a very, very powerful platform, as anyone who knows and been in my world for a while will know that I'm a huge fan of investing in your website and making sure that it's optimized for search. So it's called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

A little bit of a dry topic, but really, really important and can drive a huge percentage of your bookings. So it's definitely one that I'll probably be covering off in a future episode of this podcast.

Now that we understand the differences between the two platforms. So we've had a think about maybe what sort of budget we might need to spend. So which one is best for a holiday or hospitality business like yours.

Now, most of us don't have £500 a month to spend, and that's per month or that's US$650. We don't have that sort of amount of money to spend on paid ads every month. And what we don't really want a large pool of shoppers.

We want to, which is where, you know, Google Ads are so great.

Because obviously, if you're thinking of having, say, you're an e-commerce business, say you're a retailer, having a massive pool of shoppers is probably what you want. But what we want as hospitality businesses is we want to reach the right ideal guests.

And that's, I think, where Meta ads are so powerful and it almost will shock you what they know about us. They have an amazing bank of rich data about us as users.

We happily go onto the platforms, whether we're playing on Instagram or Facebook, and we don't really think about all of the things that we're clicking on the pages we follow, the groups we join, the reels we interact with, that's giving signals to Meta about us as individuals.

Now, they may not be able to identify us as individuals to deliver an ad with personalization to me as Sarah Orchard, but they know an awful lot about me. So they give a much richer and precise targeting options for us than Google.

If you imagine with Google, we're just putting it out there based on the keywords, but that's all we know is what they're searching for. We don't know anything else about them actually as an individual.

So Meta ads allow us to get much quicker to our ideal guess, and I think with a lot less money. So Meta targeting is based on interests and demographics.

So for example, if you know that you want to attract, say, honeymooners or dog owners or maybe both, obviously Meta knows that. So when someone goes onto a Google search and they're searching for a type of accommodation, as I said, the keyword, that's all you know.

But actually when they are on Meta, you know that they've possibly just got engaged, because life events are actually recorded, demographic factors are recorded. All of our interests are recorded.

So if you've got a camping site or glamping, you'll know whether they're interested in that, because that's one of the interests that you can target. You'll know what car brands they love.

So if you look at your guests that are arriving and you notice that they all turn up in Teslas or BMWs, obviously that that's a way of targeting people who are similar. If you know what shops they like.

So maybe you've seen what clothes they're wearing, then obviously you can target them based on those clothing brands. And Meta has a vast pool of individuals, obviously over 3 billion people. So you're never going to run out of people to potentially target.

So if you know your ideal guest, you can find them on Meta. If you know, like I said, what clothes they wear, what cars they drive, what interests they have, what life events have happened to them.

So if you want to target families, like I said, honeymooners, dog owners that they love glamping or they like eating out they are foodies, they like staying in boutique hotels. Whether they follow Airbnb, you'll even know that in terms of their interests, you can actually target them.

I'm not going to go into ideal guests in a huge amount of detail today on this little podcast episode, but I'm sure I'll talk about it on a future one because it is actually a really big topic. So I hope that's given you a little bit of a taster for the difference between Google Ads and Meta ads.

People often get confused about the two and wonder which ones they should be doing, but hopefully that will help to demystify and make you consider the different options and what's available to you. So that brings me to the end of this episode.

I'd encourage you to give Meta ads a go if you haven't already, or perhaps you've had a little dabble with them and felt like it really didn't work for you. If you need some help, I actually have a three part step by step Meta Ads Bootcamp. Please feel free to check that out.

It's on my website, on my Everything page. Have a look at that. I literally walk you through, hold your hand as you go through step by step, the Meta Ads Manager and creating your first ad.

So if that's something that you'd like to have a go at and you think would be very powerful for your business, particularly if you know who your ideal guests are, I'd encourage you to have a go with it. And like I said, you can start with quite a small budget.

Thank you for listening.

I'll be back next week with another solo episode looking at email marketing. It will be packed as ever with loads of actionable marketing tips and real life holiday business examples.

If you've enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you could leave me a review. You know how much us hosts love those five star reviews. I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard.

If you want to see if you are ready to ditch the likes of Airbnb and grow your direct bookings, put your business to the test with my free Direct Booking Roadmap Quiz, Head to my website, get-fully-booked.com/quiz and let's get you more direct bookings and more profit in your pocket!

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