Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads vs. Bing Ads: PPC Marketing in 2020

Every online marketer has been confronted at least once in their professional career with the decision of whether to use Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Bing Ads: the three largest and most popular marketing platforms. 

The decision on which PPC marketing platform to use is critical for your business. That’s why Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Bing Ads should be on any (good) online marketing plan. 

It’s difficult to decide which of the three platforms to use, in the end. It’s easy to get confused, as you may not have all the information, or you may be suggested a solution where your advisor makes the most profit.  

That’s why we at Cloudwards have written this complete comparison of these three platforms. We matched up Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Bing Ads in three rounds, comparing features, price and ease of use, and then determined one winner for each round. 

After a short introduction of each provider, we will dive directly into the battle rounds, explaining step-by-step how we came to the decision and in what scenario each marketing platform makes the most sense. 

For those of you who are in a hurry and can’t read the whole article, here’s a short summary of each round.

PPC Marketing

Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Bing Ads are pay-per-click marketing platforms, which refers to its billing model. Simply put, this means you create ads that appear on a network, and you pay for every click on your ad, whether people end up buying your product or not.

One form of this is SEM, or search engine marketing. Here, the search engine’s reach is used as a network. Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Bing Ads all fall under the term of PPC marketing, but not under the term SEM. That’s because Facebook itself is not a search engine, but a social network. 

In PPC marketing, you have to consider two things: On the one hand, a lot of clicks can and often do lead to nothing; and on the other hand, a $3 click can turn into a $200 profit if a prospective customer buys your product as a result of your ad. 

That’s why you should find out which clicks go into the ether and which ones lead to a conversion. This, however, is easier said than done.

Setting up a Battle

Before getting to the battle rounds, let’s introduce the contenders.

Google Ads

Google Ads has become indispensable in the modern marketing world. Google’s marketing platform has grown into a complex and very analytical marketing solution that offers modern marketers almost everything they want.

Renamed “Google Ads” in 2018 (previously known as Google Adwords), Google uses its huge data pool and immense reach to provide modern marketers with an optimal PPC tool, in terms of both reach and analytical processing algorithms. 

Google Ads is based on a so-called “quality score” that measures the quality of your ad, but also many other things, as well. The quality score is important because Google Ads requires you to bid on the keywords you want to use. 

Depending on how good your quality score is, your ads will be displayed for different keywords in different timeframes. Both the quality score and the bid define the success of your campaign, not just the bid.

Facebook Ads

Even though we are not the biggest fans of Facebook, we have to admit that it’s hard to imagine a digital world without the tech giant from Menlo Park. From an entrepreneurial perspective, should you not only use Facebook for your social media strategy, but also place paid ads there. 

On average, 1.59 billion people use Facebook every day, so theoretically, you can place your ad in front of 1.59 billion pairs of eyes a day.

Facebook bought the social network Instagram and the messaging service WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively. From a marketing perspective, that means that you now can use both Facebook and Instagram and soon WhatsApp, as Facebook has announced that the first WhatsApp ads will appear in 2020. 

Facebook made $16.6 billion in revenue from its marketing business in 2019. Instagram is currently on a high, but it’s questionable how long the tech giant can grow at this rate and if the planned advertising for WhatsApp will work.

Bing Ads

Bing is — for those of us who have justifiably never really had anything to do with Bing — a search engine from Microsoft. Launched in 2009, it is now the successor to Microsoft’s many attempts to offer a competitive search engine.

After previous lives as MSN Search, Windows Live Search and Live Search, Bing has indeed grown into a serious search engine, with about 6 billion searches per month. This may seem tiny compared to Google’s search volume (5.6 billion searches a day), but hopefully, the platform will grow a little more.

Often underestimated, Bing has been able to continuously expand its market share. Reasons for this include the flowing integration into several Windows 10 products and cooperations with Apple, Amazon and Yahoo. In 2018, Bing became the third largest search engine, behind Google and Baidu. 

Microsoft didn’t wait long to use the active community for marketing purposes. It introduced adCenter in 2006 and renamed it several times. In 2012, Microsoft adCenter became Bing Ads. 

Similar to Google Ads, Bing Ads could be used throughout the Microsoft Search Network. This was one of the reasons why Bing Ads was rebranded again. In 2019, Bing Ads became Microsoft Advertising. However, for the sake of simplicity, we will call it Bing Ads in this article.

Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads vs. Bing Ads

Now that we’ve covered the basics, we’d like to move on to the most exciting part of the article: comparing the three largest worldwide PPC-marketing platforms. 

We will benchmark and compare Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Bing Ads in three rounds. There will be one winner and one runner up per round. The winner of each round gets two points, second place gets one point and third place remains empty handed.

In the first round, we will take a close look at the most important features and the reach of the respective platform. In the second and third rounds, the platforms will be allowed to fight in terms of pricing and ease of use. 

Round One: Advertising Features and Reach

In the first round, we will start with each platform’s reach and advertising features, i.e., all of the functions that are indispensable for marketers. 

Among other things, we have examined functionalities, such as A/B testing, audience management, geotargeting, ad formats and general targeting options. We also highlighted features that make each ad platform unique.

Today’s customer journey includes several touchpoints until the final conversion is made. For you as an online marketer to optimally accompany this customer journey, it’s important to be on several platforms at the same time in order to best track and retarget your prospects. 

Therefore, the number of platforms and the size of each ad display network is an important ranking criterion, as well.

Google Ads Advertising Features

As we have already mentioned above, Google Adwords has been renamed to Google Ads. This name fits nicely because, today, Google Ads not only allows you to manage the ads you want to display in the search engine, but you can also advertise on Google AdSense, YouTube or even in mobile apps.

Google AdSense is a service that allows website operators to monetize their traffic by offering ad space on their websites. This service is especially interesting for high-traffic websites. As a marketer, you can then use these places via Google Ads and place yours on such sites.

This feature is especially interesting if you want to retarget people who, for example, clicked on your Google ad in the search engine, added a product to their cart, but then canceled the checkout process in the last step. 

These so-called “abandoned carts” are big bucks that basically slip through the fingers of ecommerce managers. Google AdSense, however, is a great way to retarget these abandoned shopping carts on a wide variety of websites. 

You can also orchestrate and manage your ads on YouTube via Google Ads. This is an enormous advantage over Facebook Ads and Bing Ads.

If you add the reach of Google Ads through the different platforms — i.e., if you look at the entire Google display network — you can place your ads on the following channels:

• 2 million people on AdSense
• 5.6 billion daily searches via Google Search
• 1.9 billion YouTube visitors logged in per month
• 2.5 billion active Android devices (for app marketing)

From a privacy perspective, it’s frightening how many Google products we use and how many touchpoints with its brand we have today. From an online marketing perspective, however, it’s very beneficial.

Now let us move on to the ad formats. Google offers many different ad formats, thanks to its wide reach and the many platforms where you can place ads. Depending on the goal of your marketing campaign, Google offers you the following ad formats: 

• Search: Text-based ads that are mainly displayed in Google Search
• Display: Text- and image-based ads that you can display all over the Google AdSense network
• Shopping: Ads specially optimized for products, which are also displayed in Google Search
• Video: Video-based ads that you can display on YouTube
• Smart: In this ad choice, different formats are optimized by Google for you and your marketing campaign
• App: Text-based ads that you can place in apps and in the app store

In order to place shopping ads, you’ll need a Google Merchant account with products in it. If you’re an ecommerce manager, you should check the integration of your ecommerce platform with the Google Merchant Center, if you plan to place shopping ads via Google Ads. 

The integration is important for the product import because, if you have hundreds of products in your store, you probably don’t want to import every single one into the Google Merchant Center manually. This is something you should consider when choosing the best ecommerce platform for your business. 

Another important criterion for advertising features is targeting. Google Ads lets you align your ads differently. You can adjust your audience — your target group — in great detail. Among other things, Google Ads also lets you set demographics, interests and geographical aspects, which are often forgotten by many online marketers.

From a content perspective, you can also make some adjustments. You can set the topic, placement and related keywords to make your ads more detailed for the right places. 

The last feature we want to discuss is the keyword planner. Google Ads collects significant points in this respect, as it provides a useful tool in addition to Google trends. The Google keyword planner helps you to estimate, plan and manage your ad campaigns and their keywords. 

With the keyword planner, you can get inspiration for new keywords, if you want to expand your campaign a little. You can also get forecasts for existing keywords in terms of volume, competition and cost-per-click. 

Facebook Ads Advertising Features

Now let’s move on to the second provider: Facebook Ads. Facebook can’t even come close to Google in terms of reach. In addition to 1.59 billion daily Facebook users, there are also a billion Instagram users. 

However, this is by far not enough to compete with Google. While Google covers almost the entire internet, you can only use Facebook Ads to place ads on Facebook and Instagram. 

On the other hand, Facebook has a decisive advantage over Google and Bing: emotions and social behavior. On social media, we unconsciously reveal information about ourselves, our behavior and our habits. This makes it incredibly easy for a data giant like Facebook to generate knowledge about us, which, as an online marketer, you can use.

Emotions play a big role in the buying decision. If you, as a marketer, have access to this information and don’t have to work with personas or assumptions, then you’ll have a lot of possibilities to realize your marketing goals. However, we don’t wish to discuss at this point how correct or right we think the whole thing is.

Facebook doesn’t have a keyword planner, like Google Ads, but you don’t need it. The principle behind Facebook’s marketing is fundamentally different from Google Ads and Bing Ads. It doesn’t make sense to think in keywords or search queries, so obviously you don’t have to plan them. Facebook runs more on interests and audiences. 

A powerful feature of Facebook is lookalike audiences, which are, as the name suggests, a reflection of an existing audience. 

Let’s say you have built up the optimal audience for your product or service across several marketing campaigns. With the lookalike audience feature, you can now create a similar audience that Facebook believes resembles your existing one. This similarity refers to things like demographics or interests.

Depending on how similar your lookalike audience is, the size of the audience changes. Put simply, the more precisely the new audience resembles your old audience, the smaller it will be. In order to create a lookalike audience, you only need to have 100 people in your initial one.

We find this feature particularly interesting because you can run multiple campaigns, set different goals, and then see which audience is best for you. Then you simply create a lookalike audience from your ideal one and, in the next step, you can go into more detail and generate more revenue, conversion and subscriptions.

In this case, the quality of the initial audience and the size of the lookalike audience are decisive for your marketing success.

When it comes to targeting, we think Facebook Ads does a better job than Google and Bing. Above all, Facebook has an incredible fortune of data that you can use for marketing purposes. For example, you can start targeting people who have liked or followed a particular page on Instagram.

You can filter people not only by demographics or geography, but also by interests. In comparison to Google Ads and Bing Ads, you can get very detailed and work with these so-called “connections.” Examples for frequently used connections are people who have clicked your site or  installed a certain app.

In our opinion, you should only use this feature at the beginning of your marketing campaign or to test certain hypotheses. Ideally, you should automatically create all further audiences via the Facebook pixel.

Last but not least is ad formats. Facebook lets you choose between the following ad formats:

• Photo: A simple ad with pictures, text and links
• Video: Video advertising
• Story: A video or picture embedded between two stories of connected Facebook users
• Messenger: Actually, this ad does not count as a single ad format, because it involves photo ads that are simply displayed in Messenger.
• Carousel: This advertising format lets you display multiple images (each image has its own link) on the same topic and text
• Slideshow: A photo ad with changing images
• Collection: An advertisement for products and collections, with pictures, prices and links

We don’t really count the “messenger” and “slideshow” ads as separate ad formats because we don’t think it really differs from the other ad formats on Facebook. You can find out more about Facebook’s ad formats here.

Bing Ads Advertising Features

Bing Ads is, essentially, the Microsoft version of Google Adwords. As mentioned above, Bing Ads uses the Microsoft Search Network. This includes not only Bing Search, but also other platforms, such as Windows 10 and Yahoo. 

Microsoft has already been allying itself with Yahoo for several years. The result is that your advertising will be displayed in both Bing and Yahoo search results.

For better planning of the respective capacities and keywords, Microsoft has provided you with a keyword planner, just like Google. However, we find Google’s keyword planner much easier to use (see the ease-of-use section below).

Anyone who thinks that Microsoft can compete with Google and Facebook is mistaken. The 6 billion queries per month, mentioned above, can’t really be compared with the 5.6 billion queries a day from Google. Bing can’t compete with Facebook’s general audience size, either.

Bing Ads lets you choose between the following display types:

• Expanded Text: Identical to the search ads on Google Ads
• Dynamic Search: Automatically generated ads. With the “expanded text” ads, you have to manually create and optimize each ad; with “dynamic search” ads, Microsoft creates and optimizes the ads for you, depending on your website and what you are looking for. This type of ad is only available in France, Germany, the UK and the U.S.
• Product: Ads for products, which are displayed to the right of search results
• Microsoft Audience: Ads displayed directly in articles along the Microsoft Audience Network (similar to Google AdSense). This type of ad is only available in the U.S., Canada, the UK and Australia
• App Install: Expanded-text ads that automatically discover the operating system of the smartphone and send the customer directly to the right app store. This type of advertisement is only available in the U.S. for iOS and Android. Moreover, according to Microsoft, “Not everyone has this feature yet. If you don’t, don’t worry. It’s coming soon!” However, “who” is not further specified

We deduct points here because some ad types are only available in certain countries. “Dynamic search” ads, for example, are only available in France, Germany, the UK and the U.S. That’s pretty bad, especially because the total audience is small, anyway.

In terms of targeting, however, Bing Ads offers a rather unique feature not seen with either Google Ads or Facebook Ads: LinkedIn targeting, which allows you to specifically target companies, industries or job titles from the LinkedIn network. This feature is actually only available with Bing Ads, maybe because LinkedIn is now a Microsoft company. 

Furthermore, it is possible to target according to geography and interests. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the option to limit the audience in terms of demographics.

Round One Thoughts

The first round already contained a lot of information about Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Bing Ads, so here’s an overview of the most important key facts:

Google Ads has by far the largest reach: a perceived 90 percent of the internet. In addition, the marketing platform has a keyword planner, lookalike audiences and many ad formats.

Facebook Ads has better targeting options and is close to Google in overall performance. However, in our opinion, it’s harder to keep up with the customer through multiple channels via Facebook Ads. Bing Ads is ranked third due to its lack of platforms, reach and features.

Round One Winner: Google Ads

Runner Up: Facebook Ads

Round Two: Price

It’s incredibly difficult to make general statements about pricing in the field of PPC marketing. How much you ultimately pay per click varies from keyword to keyword. The competition also plays a very important role. This means that you can determine competitive markets on the basis of the average cost per click, or CPC. 

We wanted to avoid questionable statements that some other online publications make, like “Google Ads is more expensive, and Facebook Ads is cheap” or “the average CPC of Google Ads is $2” (which is completely absurd, anyway). Rather, we strive for better — and correct — evaluations, so we established a way to measure prices.

We researched our way into three different niches and looked at the respective CPCs for certain keywords and compared them with each other.

Obviously, we know that this process is not necessarily representative, either. That’s because, for example, in one area, more people promote on Bing Ads, while in other areas, you might find more people promoting on Google Ads. However, it gives you a good feel for the general costs and, above all, it shows you a way to find out the costs for your use case.

We used the following three niche areas to evaluate the Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads vs. Bing Ads fight on a price level:

• VPN (Keywords: vpn, free vpn, nordvpn, expressvpn, ipvanish, free vpn for firestick, vpn free android, best free vpn)
• Hair brush (Keywords: hair brush, revion one step, hair sponge, revion one step hair dryer and volumizer, hair straightener brush, blow dryer brush, revion brush dryer, detangling brush, straightening brush)
• Website builder (Keywords: website builder, free website maker, free website builder, wix pricing, best website builder, website maker, wix website, sitebuilder, web builder, easiest website builder, ecommerce website builder)

Google Ads Price

We first had Google Ads generate a list of keywords. Accordingly, we received the following prices for the respective keywords in the “vpn” niche.

“Top of Page Bid” is a new term that we haven’t explained yet. A top of page bid, as the name suggests, is about bidding for a top position in the search results. “Low range” and “high range” indicate the price range. 

For example, the keyword “vpn” costs at least $3.20 and at most $12.06 to reach a top position in the search results. This means it would cost you this much money if someone clicked on your top of page ad. The average cost-per-click for this niche is between $1.72 and $6.76. 

Next, we analyzed the niche “hair brush,” with the following results.

As we can see, the prices in this niche are significantly lower. The average cost-per-click is between $0.36 and $1.50. 

Last but not least we looked at the niche “website builder” and derived the following keyword suggestions and prices.

As you can see in the table above, these keywords are the most expensive ones from the three niches. With an average cost-per-click of $5.98 to $20.63, the keywords in this area are significantly higher than in the other two niches. 

Facebook Ads Price

Unfortunately, the price of Facebook Ads can’t be easily measured in advance. At this point, we have to work with estimates because Facebook doesn’t provide an estimation tool, like the keyword planner for Google or Bing Ads. 

However, this is again because of how Facebook works as an ad platform. While Google and Bing ads are based more on planning and forecasts, Facebook requires you to experiment more. Maybe that’s why Facebook is cheaper than Google or Bing Ads.

In order to give you at least a feel for the pricing on Facebook, we have found for you quite a useful Facebook ad cost calculator, which you can check out here.

According to Hootsuite, the average CPC for Facebook ads in 2017 was between $0.35 and $0.50. In 2018, the prices were roughly the same. 

Bing Ads Price

The Bing Ads keyword planner doesn’t have any estimates like Google does, with upper and lower bid limits. It suggests a bid to you, and that’s it. On the other hand, we think it’s cool that it gives you exact data on the monthly searches, unlike Google Ads.

For the “vpn” niche, we extracted the following data.

We needed to find a way to compare Bing Ads with Google Ads. That’s why, in this example, we pulled the average of the upper and lower bid limits for Google Ads’ CPC. As you can see from the table, Bing Ads is much cheaper than Google Ads, but you end up showing your ads to a smaller audience.

For the niche “hair brush,” we have obtained the following values.

In this niche, it makes more sense to stick with Google Ads, as the price differences are not that big, especially because the monthly search volume at Bing Ads is much smaller.

It’s not worth it to miss out on thousands and thousands of potential prospects because of a 10-cent difference. Additionally, for some keywords, such as “blow dryer brush,” Bing Ads is even more expensive than Google Ads. 

Finally, here are the numbers for the keywords from the “website builder” niche.

Here you can see the difference very clearly. With the keyword “ecommerce website builder,” Bing Ads is cheaper by a whopping $22.11 per click. Of course, the volume is much lower, but in this scenario, if you look at it from a pricing perspective, it could make more sense to use Bing Ads instead of Google Ads.

Round Two Thoughts

If we look at the average cost per click here, you might think Facebook is the clear winner. The clicks may be cheaper on Facebook and Bing Ads than on Google Ads, but our measurement method does not guarantee that they were compared according to other performance indicators, such as return on investment.

Price is one thing, but how the average click-through rates and conversion rates differ from platform to platform, for example, are things that you should consider, too. Not to mention the user intent, which is quite different on Facebook than on Google or Bing. 

However, it’s difficult to make general statements on which platform is cheaper or more expensive. This is why we stuck with price as a comparison medium, and that’s where Facebook Ads is unbeatable. Bing Ads takes second place because the average CPC is a lot cheaper than Google Ads.

Round One Winner: Facebook Ads

Runner Up: Bing Ads

Round Three: Ease of Use

Let’s put it this way: None of the software solutions listed here will receive an award for their ease of use, and that’s okay because people have complex requirements on a PPC platform. It’s perfectly normal for such a system to have many different tools, windows, calculations, analysis and dashboards. 

Therefore, it’s natural that you will spend some time getting used to Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Bing Ads. As with any learning phase, you’ll need access to its support and  knowledgebase. That being said, we will not only focus on design and usability, but also on documentation, support and much more.

Google Ads Ease of Use

At first glance, the user interface of Google Ads seems quite old. The dashboard you see right after logging in, however, is arranged clearly.

Most other dashboards follow a tabular design:

If you want to manage your marketing audiences, you will see that Google’s interface is not really visually appealing. In addition, under the “audiences” tab, you will find the audiences you have added to your campaigns or ad groups, but not your custom audiences. 

These so-called “in-market audiences” are defined by Google as interest groups or people who have already been active in a certain market. 

Furthermore, it is quite time consuming to set up audiences that automatically fill up from external sources. Ideally, you would “only” need to use two systems: Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. 

Especially for ecommerce owners, tracking the individual checkout steps is quite time consuming. Facebook is a lot more straightforward in this respect. 

Another usability flaw is working in “views.” You quickly lose track of which campaign, ad group or ad you are editing. This usability approach might be useful for large amounts of data, but for beginners, it’s just confusing. 

If you want to create a new campaign in Google Ads, you will see that the menu itself is very simple, even though beginners will have to research one or two terms.

Speaking of which, Google has built a thorough knowledgebase and excellent support that answers within a few hours. If you have any questions, you can always contact Google’s support team. 

You are also welcome to have a look at our articles about Google Ads, especially if you need help concerning how to promote your business with Google Ads or if you need some general beginner tips for Google Ads.

Facebook Ads Ease of Use

Facebook’s campaign manager and audience manager are very visually appealing. We especially like the overview of your account, which looks like this: 

The given hierarchy — Account > Campaigns > Ad Sets > Ads — is clearly displayed, and the “view problem” from Google Ads doesn’t exist because the navigation between the different levels is very visible. 

The audience manager is also clearly structured and easier to use than Google Ads. The bottom line is that the visuals make it easier to create audiences on Facebook Ads. 

It’s also more straightforward to create audiences in Facebook than in Google. While Google Ads requires you to configure several systems, Facebook simply wants you to integrate its tracking pixel and connect it to the desired campaigns, all in just a few steps. In general, we find Facebook’s handling of audiences more appealing and clear.

It’s best to turn off your browser’s ad blocker so you don’t have any problems setting up Facebook. To create a campaign on Facebook Ads, simply click “create” under the “campaigns” tab.  

As you can see from the above screenshot, creating new campaigns in Facebook is very easy and doesn’t require multiple steps, unlike Google Ads.

We also find the “creative hub” appealing, where you can create your ad mockups and get inspiration from other Facebook marketers. Between the three platforms compared here, this creative hub is the best way to make your visual ads look good.

Bing Ads Ease of Use

With Bing Ads, you see the most important things on the screen as soon as you log in. However, we didn’t find it easy to understand, as there are several navigation menus, and it’s not always clear where to find what you’re looking for. 

Both the campaign manager and the audience manager are very similar to Google Ads. Here, too, everything is very tabular and not really eye-catching.

The audience manager seems even more confusing because different visual elements come together: first the dashboard graphics, then a process explanation and, at the bottom, the actual audience overview and the possibility to create new audiences (also called association).

Bing Ads provides live support, but it’s not really helpful and makes you feel like you’re writing to a bot and not with a person. This assumption manifested from strange sentences, long wait times and answers to questions we didn’t ask. 

Furthermore, the documentation is by far not as good as the one from Google or Facebook, and it requires a lot of work to catch up.

Round Three Thoughts:

As we already mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, none of the three platforms here are really user-friendly. However, this is more because of the nature of the software than the lack of designers. Google, Facebook and Microsoft have proven several times in the past that they know how to build good software. 

The bottom line, however, is that Facebook Ads is the easiest to use. With many visual components and a consistent design, the social network convinces us on all levels.

Google Ads takes the second place because it’s easier to use than Bing, and you’ll get the information you need easier from support or find it in the documentation.

Round One Winner: Facebook Ads

Runner Up: Google Ads

The Verdict

In our comparison, Facebook Ads finished first and Google Ads second.

That doesn’t mean Facebook Ads is the best solution for your business, per se. It always depends on your marketing goals, your personal skills, the business model and many other things. Even Bing Ads can achieve better results than Google Ads, in certain situations. 

The bottom line is that it’s normal and common for companies to use multiple PPC platforms for different purposes. For example, it can be useful to use Facebook Ads to increase brand awareness and Google Ads to boost sales.

Sometimes it can also help to simply build a landing page and then test different PPC platforms by driving traffic to the site. 

What do you think of our review? Which PPC platform did you like the best: Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Bing Ads? Let us know in the comments section below, and check out our list of the best social media analytics tools, too. Thank you for reading.