GUIDE

Making Search
and Social Ads
Work Together
How to combine Google and
Facebook ads to increase
conversions throughout the
buyer journey
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Contents

INTRODUCTION
Introduction 2

Uniting the power of Google and Facebook 3

1 Build your brand with Facebook, close with Google Search 6

2 Create consistent messaging across search and social 7

3 Use Facebook to retarget users from Google Ads 9

4 Align Facebook Audience Insights with Google search queries 10

5 Use a cross-platform ads management solution 12

Introduction
The marketing “rule of seven” is still relevant today—a prospect will
have seven interactions with your brand before a conversion takes place.

In the noisy online space, a cross-channel digital advertising strategy

can help you achieve these interactions by targeting potential customers
with the most relevant content, on the right channel, at the perfect stage
of their buyer journey.

This guide describes some of the key ways you can use search and
social advertising in tandem to accelerate these interactions and drive
conversions faster.
 Uniting the power of
3

Google and Facebook

UNITING
There’s no denying that Google (and YouTube), and Facebook
(and Instagram) dominate the digital space—they’re the world’s
most visited websites and account for 59 percent of all US digital
advertising spend.

7 billion
searches per day on Google
2.4 billion
monthly active users
56%
of all digital advertising
on Facebook spend in the US goes to
Google and Facebook

While both of these platforms offer a variety of advertising options

that span use cases from brand awareness through to conversion
advertising, for the purpose of this guide, we’re focusing on Google’s
search network and Facebook’s News Feed ads only.

Google Search Ads

Excel for targeting people who are actively searching for your
keywords

Provide access to enormous search traffic, as Google owns

75% of all search engine market share

Offer little control over who sees your ads, but a lot of control
over what keywords your ads appear for

Traffic has intent to convert—users are actively searching

for something—so click-through rates (CTRs) and conversion
rates are high
 Facebook News Feed Ads 4

Deliver sophisticated audience targeting options from Facebook’s

UNITING
large and diverse user base

Provide an opportunity to engage audiences before they know you

Offer a lot of control over who sees your ads, but viewers are not
specifically looking for your product or service in their social feed

Have a very cost-effective cost per click (CPC) and daily spend

Google: Users have intent When a pipe bursts in your home, which is
the more likely scenario?

A. You visit your Facebook News Feed to see if

any plumbing-related content shows up

B. You do a Google search for plumbers in

your area

Google visitors have intent. They are actively

searching for something—and while they may not
know your brand yet, they have a pain point that
you can target with the right keywords.

Facebook: Users are highly targeted Facebook offers a different ad experience—

because of the wealth of information it collects
about your audience and their networks, it can
serve up ads that are more targeted and more
likely to convert.

In this example, Facebook knows that the user is

Vancouver-based, has been to a Cirque du Soleil
show in the past, and has friends who reacted to
this post.
 Each of these advertising types serves a different purpose—and is 5
delivered at a different stage of the buyer’s journey. If you want your
digital ad campaigns to be as effective as possible, you need to stop
choosing between search and social and start considering their

UNITING
combined role across the entire buyer journey.

Awareness Consideration Decision

Facebook ads get your
product or service in front
of new audiences
Users visit Google search
to conduct their own
research
Share insights across
Google and Facebook to
reach the “rule of 7”
Users visit both Facebook
and Google to search for
reviews, coupons, and
offers
Retarget Google search
visitors with an offer via
Facebook ads

In this guide, we’ll share everyday tactics that help you effectively use Google’s
search network and Facebook’s News Feed ads together to capture your
audience at the perfect stage of their journey.

1 Build your brand with Facebook, close with Googlesearch

2 Create consistent messaging across search and social ads

3 Use Facebook to retarget users from Google search ads

4 Align Facebook Audience Insights with Google search queries

5 Use a cross-platform ads management solution

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BUILD AND CLOSE

1 Build your brand with Facebook,
close with Google Search
Facebook ads are a proven way to build brand awareness and put
your product in front of new audiences.

Businesses of every size can use Facebook’s advanced targeting

options to get the right content in front of the right people. The best
part is that you don’t need a massive budget to be successful on
Facebook—you just need to know your audience and tinker with your
targeting options until you find the perfect blend.

Eventually, when they’re ready to move along the buyer journey from
awareness to consideration, the people who saw your Facebook ads
will go to Google to search for your brand.

Tips: Turn cold audiences into leads and drive awareness of your
brand, product, or service—then close the deal when they decide
to search for your brand—in two steps:

Use Facebook ads to target an audience that has no awareness

of your brand but has expressed interest in offers and brands
that are similar to yours.

Run Google ads using your brand name as a keyword.

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Running Google search ads for your own brand is an established best
practice. It helps your new audience find you, and it also helps you
stay competitive—in fact, it’s likely at least one of your competitors
is using your brand name as a keyword (see how Asana has used

BUILD AND CLOSE

Monday.com’s brand name as a keyword in the example here).

Don’t let your brand awareness efforts on Facebook go to waste by

sending your audience straight to the competition on Google!

Prospect sees an ad for Monday.com Prospect searches for Monday’s brand on Google
on Facebook or Instagram. and sees the search ad.

2 Create consistent messaging

across search and social
The buyer’s path to purchase is no longer linear—the route people
take to find out about your offering, learn about your brand, and
ultimately buy something from you can be long and convoluted. In
fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, marketers use an
average of 13 tactics in their efforts to convert a lead.
 Consistency of messaging is very important because people rely on 8
repetition to help with memory recall. Facebook is the perfect place to
set the tone with compelling visual assets and messaging that you can
then recall with consistent messaging in your Google search ads.

CONSISTENT MESSAGING
Tips: Be consistent with your messaging—people are just as likely to
search Google for your offering, your tagline, or your Facebook ad
headline as they are to search for your brand. Here’s how to do it:

Use insights from Facebook IQ to help with stronger keyword

targeting—you can learn a lot from the creative used on Facebook
to build stronger keyword targeting on Google.

Test creative headline options. A catchy headline can be more

memorable than a brand name and generate more direct searches.

Consider using the headline as a long-tail keyword on Google

to bring down CPC.

Drift promotes attractive visuals and a The user doesn’t register the Drift brand but
compelling piece of content to create searches for the title of the content and is served
brand awareness. with the Google search ad.
 3 Use Facebook to retarget users 9

from Google Ads

RETARGET
The previous two sections describe an informal—and for the most
part, unmeasurable—form of retargeting. These tactics rely on people
“warming up” to your ad on Facebook and then finding their way to
Google to conduct their own search.

“Behavioral retargeting” is advertising targeted to potential cus-

tomers based on their previous online actions. Retargeting takes the
connection between Google and Facebook further and is a proven,
effective technique to bring back potential customers who might
otherwise drop off before continuing along the customer journey.

Tips: Use Facebook to retarget people who landed on your

website from a Google search ad. Here’s how:

Ensure your Google ads and Facebook ads are sending users
to a unique landing page. All campaign links should have UTM
parameters for this page.

Use Google ads to retarget visitors to the page.

Set up a Facebook pixel for the same landing page and create
custom audiences for additional Facebook ads targeting and
audience expansion.

Try targeting the audience with a clear call to action such as a

limited-time offer to create a sense of urgency to convert.

Prospect searches for “beach vacation” on Retarget the prospect on Facebook to stay
Google. They click through a few sites—yours top of mind and move them forward in their
is one of them. buying journey.
4 Align Facebook Audience 10

Insights with Google search

queries

ALIGN INSIGHTS
The more customer insights you have, the better targeted and more
cost effective your digital advertising campaigns will be.

Facebook Audience Insights is a useful tool that helps marketers learn

more about their target audiences, including aggregate information
about geography, demographics, purchase behavior, and more, so
they can make better decisions about content, ad spend, and timing.

It’s also a great source of insights for your Google ads campaigns.
One effective tactic is to use Facebook lookalike audiences to find
your new best customers. Lookalike audiences are a powerful way to
improve Facebook ad targeting by using data points about your most
successful customers to find new people who are likely to be good
customers, too.

A lookalike audience basically allows you to target people who are

similar to your ideal existing customers, making it one of the most
efficient ways to optimize your ad spend. For example, if your search
query custom audience is made up of just 1,000 people, you can build
a lookalike audience using your list to target 10,000+ prospects who
are similar to your original list.
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ALIGN INSIGHTS
Just because you didn’t convert the people who clicked on your
Google search ad, doesn’t mean you won’t convert their lookalikes!
In a similar way, you can also use Facebook to find and connect with
audiences with strong affinity towards competitors or businesses that
are comparable to yours in some way.

(A word of warning: Don’t use heavily overlapped audiences! If you

target the same people more than once, you’ll end up competing for
them in different ad sets. You can avoid this by excluding the original
audience set from your lookalike audience.)

Tips: Be insights-driven and apply Facebook insights to Google

campaigns and vice-versa. Here’s how:

Use Facebook’s Audience Insights to analyze your customer

base and generate insights like age, gender, likes, purchase
behavior, and interests.

Use these insights to craft your copywriting strategy.

Build your lookalike audience in Facebook using a group of

1,000 to 50,000 of your best customers based on lifetime value,
transaction value, total order size, or engagement.

Create audience segments in Google based on engagement

insights from Facebook for more precise bidding and targeting.
For example, if women converted at a significantly higher rate
than men during a Facebook campaign for a particular product,
you could add female demographic targeting to your Google
ad groups.
To use a similar approach for competitive targeting: 12

Use Facebook’s Audience Insights to analyze what
competitors or businesses like yours are doing—you
can get this information if your current audience is
following these brands.
ADS MANAGEMENT
Bid on branded search terms for those brands or
businesses. These companies are already attracting
prospects via Google—and in some cases, the
prospects are already solution-aware and ready to
find your product or service.

5 Use a cross-platform ads

management solution

There are several benefits to managing your search and social

ads from one platform. First, you can unify your reporting across
Facebook and Google so you can compare and analyze your perfor-
mance across channels in real time and easily reallocate budgets from
underperforming ads to those that see the best results—even if it’s on
another platform.

Second, with an ads platform that includes automatic data sync to

connect your CRM to Facebook and Google for retargeting purposes,
you can automatically send your Facebook leads to your CRM and
feed to Google for further retargeting. The key thing here is to use
a platform that automates this process for you, making it easy and
efficient.

Save time, optimize your advertising budget, and simplify execution

of your retargeting tactics by bringing your search and social ads
together in a cross-platform ads management solution like
Hootsuite Ads.
Tips: Use a cross-channel ads platform to simplify the manage- 13
ment of your digital advertising campaigns:

Publish, monitor, and report against all your advertising

campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and Google in one

ADS MANAGEMENT
dashboard.

Take a snapshot of your ad spend and performance across

Facebook and Google from one dashboard.

Automatically sync leads from Facebook to Google to create

new audiences.

Reallocate your channel budgets depending on which

campaigns are performing better on which channel.
Next steps
14

Hootsuite helps digital marketers around the world connect with new audiences, launch
ad campaigns, and measure return on investment through our cross-platform Hootsuite

NEXT STEPS
Ads solution.

Request a demo or learn more at hootsuite.com/ads

Further reading
Infosheet: Hootsuite Ads Blog post: Facebook Ads vs Google Ads:
When To Use Each Ad Network
Blog post: A Complete Guide to Google Ads
On-demand webinar: Best Practices for
Guide: Optimize Your Facebook Ad Spend
Using Search and Social Advertising Together