Mobile app installs campaigns are geared specifically toward getting more people to download your app. When more people download your app, you could improve your app store ranking, which in turn can result in even more people downloading your app. Here we going to discuss about two advertising platform Google and Facebook, which one better for mobile app installs campaigns.

Google ads have become popular in the online media from last decade and Facebook is also getting popular and smarter day by day. Google has already made innovative changes in the ads targeting to target specific mobile devices, desktops or tablets. Google adwords team is quite innovative and makes changes in the advertising module every month that makes advertisers’ ad experience uncomplicated.

Google AdWords Offers following target setting

  • Google adwords used to allow us to target mobile devices only through display network but now they have introduced ads within mobile app to show ads specifically on mobile devices.
  • We can also target specific mobile devices like expensive iOS or Android, Mobile or Tablets devices.
  • We can go one level further, be targeting specific mobile OS version or device models, like if our app support only iOS9 then we can target iOS9 user.
  • They also allow us to target mobile devices by mobile operators they are using.
  • You can run ad specifically on iOS devices to reach target audience who access entertainment, finance, news apps etc.
  • Google adwords also offers radius targeting to target users at particular locations to reach right audience at right time.

Facebook Advertising Offers following target setting

Facebook has made innovative changes in terms of type of ads but failed to make changes in the ad targeting like radius targeting, device targeting etc.

If you are running Facebook Ads then you would face following issues:

  • You can’t run ads specifically targeting only iOS and Android devices (you can target either iOS or Android)
  • You can't target based on Operating System version like iOS9.
  • You can’t target devices based on their model number (e.g. iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, Samsung Note 3 etc.)
  • You can’t target devices based on operators they are using
  • You can’t take online technical support as their technical support guys don’t have enough knowledge
  • You can’t do radius targeting
  • You can’t reduce radius length less than 10 miles if targeting particular location (radius targeting is allowed in Adwords)
  • You will never find popular locations, like in Mumbai Bandra, Worli, Kurla, Andheri etc. in Location Section
  • You can’t be eligible for invoice-based account system unless you spend $ 10,000 from past three to six months
  • You can’t show ads to popular Facebook Pages if you are not admin
  • You can’t run Cost Per Acquisition model to gain more number of leads

Which Facebook Ads Features are better than Google Adwords?

  • Demographic Targeting helps in Facebook ads as user has to put birth date to create an account (Google offers three types targeting male, female, and unknowns. This is why they don’t have control on unknown audience)
  • Facebook estimates how many people can be targeted based on campaign targeting e.g. budget, location, interest, age group etc. (which is not possible in Google Adwords)
  • Remarketing campaigns run on Facebook are better than Google Adwords when campaigns are run by using email ids

Conclusion:

Facebook needs to work very hard on advertising targeting to survive in the market to reach right audience. Google Adwords has already gone far ahead and Facebook is still struggling to compete Google Adwords in terms of ad revenue. Facebook should make ads targeting as customize as possible to reach right audience at right time through mobile devices as mobile users are more in numbers than desktop users.

Source - Mehul Bavishi (via LinkedIN)