Facebook Video Ads Versus YouTube Ads: Where Should You Invest Your Money?

Update May 2020: Youtube views soared 75% during the COVID-19 crisis. If your country is hit by the virus adjust your SEO strategy and find out if Lebanese Digital agencies are actually benefiting from the Digital Surge or not.

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You may already be aware that videos outperform text and static images by a large margin on social media. Perhaps you’ve decided to leverage the power of video ads to generate organic traffic, leads and sales. And most definitely, you must be wondering whether to invest your hard earned dollars on Facebook ads or YouTube ads.

Maze, an advertising agency in Lebanon, love advertising with videos. We have already launched some decent video ads campaigns on both Facebook & Google. Here is our take on it, starting with a result driven comparison table:

Results comparison

So we’ve run a video advertising campaign in Lebanon on the 2 platforms using these parameters:

1. Duration: 1 week
2. Target Audience: Re-marketing visitors on JSK Real Estate website.
3. Goal: Traffic to jskre.com

Here are our results:

Declaring that one is better than the other won’t really help, because both Facebook and YouTube have an enormous audience. Facebook has 2.38 billion monthly active users, while over 1.8 billion log in to the currently most popular video-sharing website. There is no doubt that your audience is on both platforms, as any advertising company in Lebanon would tell you. What you can compare are the features of each, and how much the same ad investment amount spent on each platform yields.

Checking out the features of each platform is not complex. You can spend a couple of hours poring over how Facebook helps advertisers maximize their ROI versus the same for Google. The second aspect – experimentation – may sound a bit intimidating if you’re new to both platforms. In this case, existing experimentation can be a source of valuable information. It is possible that other digital marketing agencies in Lebanon may have different opinions, but understanding various viewpoints is worth your while.

In this post, we want to clue you in to the benefits and drawbacks of each platform, as well as share statistics in support of the effectiveness of creating ads on Facebook and YouTube.

Benefits of Facebook ads

Precise audience targeting: Facebook’s demographic settings allow you to reach deeper layers of audience segmentation, focusing only on those who are most interested in your brand. The ability to dedicate your ad dollars precisely to a quality audience is more likely to drive organic traffic, form submissions and inquiries.

10-second viewing feature: Facebook offers this metric as way to make advertising on its platform more cost-effective, although Facebook ads have become more expensive of late. Views are measured after 10 seconds of video playtime. You pay for video campaigns based on 3-second, 10-second and completed views. Nearly 50% of Facebook viewers continue watching an ad for at least 30 seconds.

Greater control: You can choose cost-per-impression to control how you buy your ad. Facebook advertising costs have an average cost per click (CPC) of $1.86, but that can reach over $5.00, depending on factors ranging from ad quality to competition.

Augment video with text: You can include a headline and text copy in Facebook video ads. It keeps to feel of reading posts and socializing on the platform. Engaging text copy can motivate people to click through, and you have the option to make your offer, product or the name of your brand instantly seen within the text.

As far as monthly shares are concerned, one study found that Facebook videos outperformed YouTube videos by 478%, while another showed that Facebook native videos have a reach exceeding YouTube’s by 86%.

Anyone new to Facebook advertising may initially find the bids for ads a bit difficult to figure out, and will have to try a couple of times to come to grips with how best to bid without wasting their money. In general, Facebook marketing requires dedicated effort, and doesn’t end with placing the ad. You have to monitor likes and shares, and be proactive in responding to comments. This is a reason why businesses prefer to outsource Facebook video ad creation and management to advertising agencies in Lebanon.

How to improve the performance of your Facebook ads

• Add captions to videos. Captioned video ads boost video viewing time by an average of 12%. Also consider that 85% of videos on the platform are viewed without sound, making the addition of captions even more important!
• Mention your brand within the first 3 seconds of your video ad. A Facebook study found that people are 23% more likely to remember the brand behind a video ad if the brand was featured in the first 3 seconds, and 13% more likely if the brand was mentioned after four seconds.
• Monitor video ad statistics to understand how many people are viewing your ads, how many are clicking on them, and how many are visiting your website. Without this data, you will have no way of optimizing your ads.
• Focus on mobile video. More than 95% of Facebook users access the platform on mobile devices. Facebook’s analysis finds that mobile-first ads have longer average view times and higher brand recall than traditional or mobile-adapted video ads.

Why consider YouTube advertising?

YouTube works in 80 different languages, reaching 85% of the internet, and just 15.8% of YouTube’s visitors are American. In 2018, 70% of millennial YouTubers watched a video on the website to learn ‘how to do something’. Since 2016, the number of small and medium-sized businesses advertising on YouTube has doubled. An advantage of YouTube over Facebook is that 95% of ads on the video-sharing platform are audible, far more than the 15% of audible video ads for Facebook.

In this experiment run by Agora Pulse, YouTube ads performed better than Facebook ads. Your marketing dollars won’t go to waste on creating YouTube ads. You also have help from Google to assess where your ad is performing well and areas of improvement you can pursue to hit your advertising targets. Through AdWords, Google offer information on views, costs and budgets. YouTube Analytics offer more in-depth data on your viewers, including views, clicks, engagement, reach and frequency. The quartile reporting shows how often an ad is seen to 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of its length.

In the manner of Facebook, Google offers advanced targeting, allowing you to reach affinity audiences who have demonstrated an interest in topics related to your industry, product or brand, besides enabling targeting based on age, gender, parental status and interests. You can specifically target in-market audiences who are actively looking for products similar or comparable to those you sell. Additionally, you have the opportunity to place your ads on popular videos relevant to your target audience.

Creating an effective YouTube ad is hard work. You have to capture your audience’s interest in five seconds or less, which is no easy feat. Of course, you can choose for your ad to be non-skippable, but that may potentially create negative perceptions about your brand. In any case, beyond the creative, budget and targeting must be tweaked to ensure the highest possible impact. An experienced digital marketing agency in Lebanon can handle YouTube advertising on your behalf, allocating a dedicated resource to your account.