You spent hundreds of hours working on developing your mobile app, Right? But you might don’t know which ad platform is best for app promotion? Google or Facebook Ads? In this blog, we are going to tell you which one you can choose for getting the best results.
Google Universal campaign
Google names its app awareness promotion as “Universal App campaign” on the platform. Only a single campaign type is available in Google ads for app promotion. But when you choose the universal campaign, you may opt into three objectives called App Installs, In-app actions, & App Pre-registrations. You can select the campaign subtype according to your goals.
Ad Control
Google app campaign is completely machine learning with minimal options to optimize. You can only optimize ad images, titles, description, budget and locations. The audience setting is completely out of control from you. It is purely working on Google’s machine learning mechanism to leverage the ad performance across all formats. It is recommended to use all types of creatives like HTML5, images, videos, text, description as maximum as possible.
Ad placement
Google optimizes your app campaign to show across Google search, Google play, Youtube, Google display network and Discover on Google search. As we said earlier, you can’t determine which network performs the best since it is an automated ad rotation system.
Changes in bid optimization:
Google always implies you to set the daily budget and wait for some time to get data about the performance. Frequent changing of daily budgets will likely cause some trouble in your app campaign. Google machine learning technology needs valuable data from hundreds of user signals and optimizes your campaign accordingly. What we recommend is to set the optimum budget and set it free for 10-15 days. Once the campaign is in a smooth performance stage, you can go for a bidding change.
Cost per Installs/action
Most of our clients ask which is the cheap one in terms of cost? Google or Facebook? Our answer is Facebook. When we compare previous data for various clients, we came to conclude that Facebook ads are somewhat cheaper than Google ads. The reason can’t be explained that it may differ in many aspects. But we can suggest you to choose the platform as per your business category.
If your business belongs to industries like apparel, entertainment, games, cooking, then it is advised to choose Facebook ads. Other than this, most of the app categories can fall into Google for best performance.
Facebook App Install campaign
Facebook app ads allow you to create and run ads on Facebook, Instagram and Audience network. It consists of upto 16 ad placements which you can customize your ad creatives or set it as automatic placements. When we choose to create a Facebook App installation campaign, there will be two choices left for you.
One is manual control of ad placements & optimization. Another one is automated ads which are completely automated with respect to some inputs from our side.
Ad Control
As we mentioned above, we can have full control over the ads on manual creation. Or else, we have few options like location, languages and limiting the target cost per install called ad optimization for low cost delivery. Comparing both the automated & manual campaign objective, the cost for automated ads is lower.
Ad placement
Facebook lets you to showcase ads on Facebook feeds, Instagram feeds, Facebook marketplace, Facebook video feeds, Facebook right column, Instagram explore, messenger inbox, Facebook stories, Instagram stories, Messenger stories, Facebook in-stream videos, IGTv videos, Facebook search results, Messenger sponsored messages, Facebook instant articles and audience network. You can manually customize each placement with respective image sizes.
Cost per Installs/action
In Facebook ads, the average cost per app install in India varies between Rs.4 to 10 for automated ads while the manual campaign setting may cost you Rs.10 to 20 per install. Based on our opinion & comparison, we see cost per install is lower on Facebook than Google ads. But you should consider the category your business is focusing on. Facebook gets more conversion for e-commerce, Gaming, and entertainment apps-related categories.
Concluding this, both Facebook & Google ads perform well in their machine learning capabilities & ad showcasing. Your results depend upon the audience you are targeting. If it is entertainment related you can get more on Facebook or else if it is utility-related you can get more installs(conversion) in Google ads.
