Whether you are currently running digital ads or thinking about it, you need to consider all the pros and cons for using different advertising platforms.
Ecommerce businesses can be profitable with both, but you will want to consider whether one or both should get your advertising budget, and how much.
To help you make critical advertising decisions, we’re going to lay out the critical differences between the two. The interesting part of this comparison is that these platforms are surprisingly complementary, rather than adversarial.
In other words, you need to use both to get the best advertising results.
One of the main differences between Facebook Ads and Google Ads is the type of placements available.
Placements are where purchased advertising space will appear to your desired audience. This can be in social media, apps, email, paid search, websites, videos, or other places where audiences spend time online.
In addition to paid search, your ads can be placed on the following Display Network targets:
Facebook’s main audience is people actively using social media platforms. They offer placements both on their Facebook and Instagram platforms, and also through their Messenger service and Audience Network. This offers a powerful and wide variety of placement options which is great for flexibility.
Facebook ads can appear on any of the following four platforms:
Facebook Placements:
Instagram Placements:
Facebook Messenger Placements:
Audience Network Placements:
The key difference in audiences between Facebook Ads and Google Ads is that Google audiences tend to already be searching or otherwise have shown some intent to purchase.
Facebook audiences are generally social, so purchases from Facebook placements will be more impulse or interest buyers and not searching with intent.
Google users make approximately 5.6 billion searches per day. Each of those searches is an opportunity to use paid search ads to target people searching with intent to buy.
Over $X billion of ad spend for Wicked Reports clients, we've found that average e-commerce metrics in 2025 follow these approximate industry benchmarks:
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CPC (cost per click) |
Average CPC is around $1.72 | CPC is higher, around $2.69 |
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CPL (cost per lead) |
average CPL near $27.66 | average CPL near $70.11 |
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CAC (customer acquisition cost) |
The majority of our clients are ecommerce brands, so this gives you a great benchmark for your own brand.
If you aren’t achieving these results, or you just want to get better, then you might want to consider getting your own Wicked Reports dashboard.
Book a free demo here to find out if we can help improve your brand’s ROI.
Facebook is incredibly powerful in their audience specificity. You can target very specific niches down to incredible granularity.
This can be both a blessing and a curse. Meta's AI-Driven Campaigns (e.g., Advantage+) Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is aggressively pushing Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. These AI-driven setups are designed to use the full power of their machine learning engine, often outperforming manually structured campaigns. The current best practice is to lean into these automated solutions by feeding the AI high-quality data and giving it broad parameters to optimize performance.
Both Google and Facebook ads are highly scalable with a little bit of experience. Media buyers will want to pay attention to things like audience size, bidding method, frequency ads are seen, and regularly supplying fresh creative.
Over the short time, Facebook consistently performs better. People clicking on Facebook social ads tend to impulse buy, they are seeing ads in their feed to remind them to buy, and so they tend to convert faster.
In the long term, Google Ads consistently get higher ROI than Facebook Ads. This is because Google buyers are already searching with intent. They tend to buy over and over again, rather than just one-time impulse buys. This results in higher overall customer lifetime value (LTV).
Because it’s costly to bring in new customers, focusing on LTV results in greater ROI over time.
If you are reading this article, it is likely that you need to use a combination of Facebook Ads and Google Ads to get the best advertising ROI for your brand.
As discussed above, each platform has its strengths and weaknesses, but both can be used complementary to get incredible results.
That just leaves the question of: How much should you spend on each?
The answer is going to be unique to every brand.
This is why the two fit together like puzzle pieces in creating the optimal strategy for your brand. Use Facebook to grow your and retarget your audience, and Google to target people searching with intent.
The best way to decide is not to look at your overall channel results, but instead to look at individual campaign results from both ad platforms.
The problem with this is that if you are comparing results from inside the ad managers, they are going to be taking credit for some of the same sales. This is bad data to make decisions on.
You need a third party, unbiased data source for your ROI on campaigns that gives fair credit to where each sale is due.
That is exactly what we do here at Wicked Reports.
We take data from all sources, including advertising platforms and your CRM, and then provide performance data that’s accurate.
Accurate, multi-touch marketing attribution gives you clear performance at each step of your funnel, for every channel and campaign, which makes it easy to determine which campaigns are working and which ones are not.
Want to learn more about how accurate attribution can improve your ROI?
Book a free demo of our Wicked multi-touch marketing attribution dashboard here.
FAQ
Facebook Ads generally performs better over the short term. Its social nature and reliance on impulse buying mean customers convert faster than on Google, which targets higher-intent, slower-converting searchers.
Using a multi-touch attribution solution, like Wicked Reports, is vital because both platforms will otherwise take credit for the same sales, leading to inaccurate data. Multi-touch attribution provides an unbiased, third-party view to accurately assign ROI to each campaign.
Google Ads audiences are typically high-intent, actively searching for a product or solution. Facebook Ads audiences are generally lower-intent social browsers, meaning purchases are driven more by interest, impulse, and discovery.