TikTok Ads vs Facebook Ads vs YouTube Ads

TikTok Ads vs Facebook Ads vs YouTube Ads is a never ending battle for everyone who runs a business in 2022. Watch this video from my YouTube channel to find out the final answer to this question from someone who has spent over $7 Million on TikTok ads, Facebook ads, and YouTube ads as well.

Transcript: At my agency we’ve managed over two and a half million dollars on Facebook. We’ve spent a little over half a million dollars on YouTube and we’ve even started playing around with TikTok ads. And through all of that, we’ve generated over $7 million in sales for our clients, which is pretty awesome. But when I got started doing all of this, I couldn’t find a lot of really great content online to get started. And so I had to just learn a lot of stuff through trial and error, through jumping into different courses and programs and spending a ton of money trying to learn all of this stuff. And so what I wanna give you in this video is breaking down each one of these three big platforms that are out there and help you decide which platform you should be going after for your business, whether that is Facebook or YouTube, or TikTok.

And actually, we did the same evaluation at my agency not that long ago, and we actually decided to cut one platform completely. So between Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, we are only going to be running two of these platforms going forward. So there are actually hundreds of ad platforms out there. I don’t think most people realize how many different places there are to go out and buy ads. I mean between like mobile ads, display ads, social ads, video ads, native ads, and all of these different types of advertising out there. Now the three big ones would be Facebook, Google, and TikTok when we’re talking about Facebook. Facebook includes Instagram, they also own Facebook Messenger. You can run ads in Messenger. They also own WhatsApp and they’re starting to roll out little tests for running ads and WhatsApp depending on where you’re at. So Facebook is a bigger network of advertising placements.

Google the same thing, right? So Google owns Google search ads. The ads you see when you are actually searching in Google and the ads that pop up at the top of the search page, they also own YouTube. So the second largest search engine in the world YouTube is owned by Google. So if you’re running Google ads, that takes place in the YouTube ads platform. The big question is, out of all of these, how do you decide which one is best for you? And so we actually did this same evaluation with our clients. Now at my agency, we work with people who are selling information products, educational programs, high ticket programs, and stuff like that. And so we wanna sit down and figure out how do we decide what is the best platform you’re running ads for them. And so I wanna give you that same framework we used and what we looked at so that you can decide which platform is best for you.

So the things that we need to take into consideration while we’re going through this whole decision-making process is what is your business model like, what is your offer? What are you selling? And what is the whole business model that you have? What are the resources that you have available to you? So what does your team look like? What does your ability to create video and content and all of that stuff? What are your competitors doing in your space? Actually doing competitor research is an insanely valuable way to see what’s working in your space because something that you should know is that people don’t spend money for a long time on ads that aren’t working. So if you see a competitor on a platform that is spending a ton of money on ads, then you can be pretty sure that that’s probably working and that probably means that there’s an opportunity for you to go do something similar on that network.

And then the other huge one is what is your target audience? Like who are you going after? You’re gonna make very different decisions if you’re trying to go after people who are between the ages of 18 to 25, than if you’re trying to go after people who are between the ages of 60 and 70. So your actual target audience is also going to play a big factor in what platforms you decide you might wanna go into. So let’s get started with like the three big ones that we evaluated. And these are the three big ones that you will probably be evaluating depending on what type of business you have. But the first big one we looked at was YouTube. So remember this is on, this is basically, you know, running ads on YouTube through the Google Ads network. So the pros of running YouTube ads, and the intent of someone on YouTube are amazing.

So someone is on YouTube, just consuming a ton of content and they’re probably there either trying to learn something, right, doing educational searches, how to do this, how can I learn this, what’s the best way to do this? Or they’re trying to look for something that’s really entertaining. And so that being their intent and the mindset that they’re in as they’re sitting at their computer searching through stuff, if you can create ads that are either educational or entertaining, then what you can do is just step right into what someone is already doing and quickly get their attention, which is a really awesome thing for us to be able to do is advertisers, right? It’s very different than someone who might be on Facebook or Instagram who is looking at cat photos and arguing with their uncle. It’s very different from someone on TikTok who is just quickly going through 15 and 32nd clips trying to get dopamine hits.

Someone on YouTube is actually there to consume a lot of content. And so that intent on YouTube is really powerful for us to be able to tap into when we’re looking for ways to go get new customers. Another big thing that we considered and that is really great with YouTube is that one winning ad on YouTube can run for months if not years. Some of the best ads that I’ve seen out there have been running for over a year, going on to two years. We’ve seen ads that we’ve put together that we’ve run for nine months, 12 months, and this isn’t as common with the other platforms that we’re gonna talk about. So while getting YouTube ads up and running can take a little bit more work, and we’re gonna talk about that here in a second, Once you get a winning ad, you can run that ad and scale that ad and it is incredible how long like the actual longevity of a great YouTube ad is.

The last big pro that we find with YouTube is the targeting is really powerful. So keep in mind that this is owned by Google, right? So they have all of the data of what this person is searching for on Google, they’re actually doing Google searches and what this person is searching for on YouTube, you have the ability to use those searches as you are targeting. So if someone’s typing in how to trade stocks, you have the ability to go and target somebody who just types that in. Google has the ability to figure out this is what this person is searching for right now. And then if that’s the kind of program that you sell or the product that you offer, then what you can do is just put an ad right in front of that person, which is incredibly powerful, right? So keep in mind the intent, someone’s there to learn, and then you’re also being able to target them based on what they’re searching. So that makes YouTube an extremely powerful platform. Now everything with YouTube is not super easy, right? There are definitely some cons to YouTube. So one of the big ones that we have found is the barrier to entry is just way higher. So as far as other platforms go where especially like Facebook gets started with a lot of text and simple images, YouTube, you need really good videos in order to get started.

If you’re gonna capture someone’s attention, you have to have a captivating educational, and entertaining video and not everybody has the resources or the people to just jump on camera and do a really great video. And so that creates a higher barrier to entry and it might be something that holds companies back. And one thing you definitely don’t wanna do is wait three months because you’re trying to figure out how to get a video done. If you don’t have the resources to consistently create videos on a monthly basis, YouTube might not be the best platform for you to go into or you need to figure out how to get those resources so that you can make sure that you’re able to stay up with the creative needs of YouTube. So the last thing that that’s a big con here with Google is Google tries to optimize their platform and give you suggestions and your ads manager about how to get the best delivery and how to spend the most money, but they’re not performance marketers trying to figure out how you can make the most money.

And so you really always have to be taking what they’re saying and what they’re changing into consideration because they’re not trying to be performance marketers for you. They’re trying to help them make as much money as possible. And so because of that, they keep taking away options that are really valuable for performance marketers. Earlier this year, back in January, they took away the option on YouTube to only run Instream ads, and now you have to run responsive video ads, which means it’s showing instream and on different mobile placements and all that stuff, which means you have less control. They also just came out with a notification where going into 2023, they’re taking away keyword targeting, placement targeting, and topic targeting, which means your option to target people is going to go down. That’s something that we’ve used with our clients with incredible success. Keywords are one of the best things we’ve done.

And again, this isn’t only happening on Google, but this is definitely something you have to be aware of because this means you don’t just get to set up ads and then let them run and you’ve got all these targeting options, all this stuff, but we’re moving into a world where it’s really gonna be about how good can you send data back to Google so that they know who’s good leads, who are buying your products, who has the highest average order value and all this stuff. And then how can you just make really good creatives because you’re gonna have less and less targeting options going forward. So that’s YouTube. Now let’s talk about Facebook. And remember with Facebook we’re talking about Facebook and Instagram ads. One of the big pros here is that Facebook and Instagram are two of the top-used social networks. So if you are tapping into Facebook ads, you are tapping into pretty much the largest pool of people that you could target in the world.

Between Facebook and Instagram, they have billions of users. And so once you get onto that platform, you have such a huge reach to tap into the people that you want from young, old, all different demographic types of people all over the world are using Facebook and Instagram, a huge pro with Facebook. It is definitely the easiest platform out of these three that we’re looking at to actually get ads up and running. So YouTube, you’ve gotta have great video ads. TikTok, you’ve gotta have great TikTok-style ads, Facebook, a couple of images, and some text, and you are up and running with ads. So you could be up and running in a few days with a really good Facebook ad campaign if you wanna take some time to do some good pictures, write some good ads, set up your tracking, all of that stuff with YouTube, you’re probably gonna have to shoot some videos, record some stuff, edit some things, TikTok, the exact same, it’s just a longer process creative process.

And so we have definitely found that out of all of these platforms, Facebook is hands down the easiest to get up and running. And then another huge pro with Facebook and Instagram is once you find something that’s working, it’s not terribly hard to scale that thing up. You need to know some technical things and how to kind of work it inside of the account with account structure. But if you’ve got a really great offer, a funnel that’s converting, and some great ads, you can get quickly up to like  $1000, $2,000 a day. And this has probably been one of the easiest platforms that we’ve found to kind of get to that benchmark where you’re spending 1000, 1500 bucks a day and you’re making good money and you’re profitable because it’s pretty easy to just get in there and start scaling things up once you’ve got something that’s working.

That said, there are some really big cons that we’ve run into with Facebook. And Facebook is the platform that I have spent the most money on the most time on. I don’t know how many hundreds of hours staring at the ads manager inside of Facebook. One thing that was huge was things definitely changed after iOS 14 was rolled out. If you’re not familiar, iOS 14 was a big privacy update that happened with Apple and this affected all platforms, but it affected Facebook primarily because Facebook only has the data of what people are doing on Facebook. And pretty much what most people do with advertising is have people click on an ad that takes them somewhere else. And so once Apple decided that they’re not gonna share all of that data, that happens once somebody leaves the Facebook ad platform with Facebook, Facebook’s tracking got really bad.

It wasn’t always great before, but it got even worse. But the big one is their algorithm started having a harder time optimizing. And so they’ve tried coming up with solutions with CAPI and server-side integrations to have better tracking. But we’ve definitely just seen overall the performance on Facebook just hasn’t been the same. It’s not the same running ads on Facebook right now as it was two years ago for most of our clients. And so that’s one of the big issues that we found with Facebook. And when we think about these other platforms that, you know, the other one really big one being Google, Google just has so much more first-party data. You know, they own Google as a search engine, they own YouTube, they’ve got Google Analytics, they’ve got all this data that can better track people. Facebook pretty much has the Facebook social media apps and the Facebook pixel and they’re trying to do the best they can with all of that data.

And so that’s really been a big hit and I would expect that these privacy updates are just gonna keep rolling out. I know Android’s gonna start talking about their privacy updates and these things will just continue to happen and privacy becomes more important to people, which is great for people. But it’s gonna hit platforms, advertising platforms pretty hard and Facebook probably will be one of the ones that get hit pretty hard in this process. Another con with Facebook is that ads just don’t last nearly as long as they do with other platforms. So with YouTube, you could run a winning ad for months, maybe even a year or more. With Facebook, you might have a winning ad that might last you like two months. And then you’ve gotta go figure out how to iterate on that ad or come up with a new one or do something to keep it fresh because people just ads just get saturated and get burnt out a lot faster on Facebook.

The last big con and just something that makes me so frustrated after spending so much money and so much time on Facebook are that Facebook probably has the worst support of any company that I’ve ever worked with for advertisers. So you have to keep in mind if you are not spending millions of dollars a month, you are peanuts to Facebook. And so to be an agency or to be a business that actually gets a good rep at Facebook that knows what they’re talking about and all of that stuff, you have to be spending probably at least two or $3 million a month in order to be starting to get into that program of like platinum partnerships and platinum agencies and all of that stuff. If you’re spending less than that, you’ve probably heard of people that just woke up one day, their ad account was shut down, they had no reason why they couldn’t get ahold of anybody at Facebook and that was it.

That’s just how it goes with Facebook and it’s extremely frustrating. All right, so now let’s jump into TikTok ads. Let’s talk about the pros and cons of that and then I will tell you which one of these platforms we decide to stick with and which ones we decide to scratch for our clients. Huge pro with TikTok, it is the fastest social media app growing out there. So they have over a billion users and there are more and more people getting on the platform, all demographics. It is no longer young people dancing on TikTok now. They have people from all demographics. Everybody is going on to TikTok, everybody’s consuming content there. And the content on TikTok is extremely engaging. So people who are on TikTok love being on TikTok and they spend a lot of time there. So it’s really great to be on this up-and-coming platform.

We saw this boom when Facebook ads first came out and it was a huge thing for them. It was way cheaper to run ads and it was way easier cause there were less people advertising. That same thing is happening on TikTok right now. So it is generally ad little cheaper to advertise there. There’s this huge boom going on there, more and more people getting onto the platform and it’s a great place to jump in on the wave that is starting to come up. One of the big things that we saw when we were looking at TikTok and starting to test it out is it’s really great if you’re selling widgets and things that you can actually show that are like a toy. So they have all these trends like TikTok made me buy it, must-haves unboxing. Amazon finds all of this stuff where people are sharing really cool things that they find online and creating these really engaging videos to get other people to want to buy it.

And so if you have a product that you can demonstrate in a very visual way, you can actually just show people. TikTok is an incredible place to get people to actually understand what you have to sell and be able to go out and sell it. Another big pro is that TikTok is this new platform, unlike Facebook, they have actually some pretty decent support they can get a hold of. So there are people you can get a hold of that are agency reps. You can talk to agencies who actually have contacts over at TikTok that they can talk to, and they’re trying to help advertisers improve what they can do and get better results because they wanna get more people to the platform. They’re trying to take away dollars from Facebook and Instagram and Google, and they’re trying to move that over to TikTok.

So they’re actually investing in trying to help get advertisers set up, which is really great if you are a small business or an advertiser who wants to jump on TikTok. Now, some of the cons that we found with TikTok is that people on TikTok are in such a dopamine rush mode that you really have to change and adjust your funnel and how you structure things to get somebody with that mindset that they’re coming from off of TikTok. So for example, we run VSL-like video sales letters or short webinars on YouTube and Facebook. And when we try to take that over to TikTok, we get a bunch of people to sign up but nobody shows up. Why? Cuz they’re just in dopamine rush mode. And so what we need to do is adjust the front of our funnel to basically be more short dopamine hits that people can get so that we can eventually get people over to our offer.

We can’t just take the funnels that we’re running on YouTube and Facebook and throw ’em right on TikTok without some adjustments because people, again, thinking about someone on YouTube who is just sitting there consuming educational content and they’re watching 10, 15-minute videos moving to TikTok where someone’s watching a 15, 32nd video, that mindset of somebody is super different. And so we have to adjust the funnel, which takes a lot of work to actually get all of this setup. The next thing that we saw with TikTok when we started testing this out as you need a lot of creatives to scale TikTok. So Facebook, you might need five copies, you might need five or 10 images, you need a couple of headlines, and you can start testing YouTube. We can usually get started with like five or six videos. TikTok, I was at a conference and I was listening to Nick Shackleford and they were talking about their TikTok launch strategy.

They start with over 50 ads to run on TikTok and they plan to create another 30 to 50 ads every single month. That’s an insane amount of creatives to have to keep up with. I was talking with another guy who’s scaling a bunch of TikTok ads in a group that I’m in, and they were saying that they will be changing out their ads every two to three days because they’ve seen that just things on TikTok burn out so fast. So if you’re trying to be running ads on TikTok, you need to be building the infrastructure to be able to keep up with this creative demand because TikTok more than any other platform is just eating up ads. So one of the other cons that we ran into with TikTok was just limited targeting options on the platform. So think about YouTube and Google. I mean you’ve got all of the data that Google has about people searching on Google and YouTube and all of that stuff.

You can imagine how valuable that would be. Facebook has tons of targeting options that they developed over the years. They’ve been removing some like Google. So again, all platforms are kind of going that way. TikTok just didn’t have a lot of targeting options while we were testing it. And so I’m saying that now as I’m recording this, I know that they’re adding more targeting options, more features because again if they’re a new platform, they’re trying to suck up advertising dollars from other platforms. So what they’re doing is they’re adding more features, they’re adding more capabilities, they’re adding more targeting. But when we were getting in there testing it, we just didn’t find a whole lot of ways that we could start doing test targeting with like different targeting options. We really just had to focus on creatives. So how did we decide which platforms to go after we looked at all of these things, we looked at all the pros and cons.

We did. We spent so much money on Facebook. We’ve been getting into YouTube for the last 18 months now. And then we started running on TikTok. We tested out a few clients there and what we came to the decision of is, Hey, we’re just gonna focus on Facebook and YouTube for our clients. We’re not gonna be running TikTok ads at all. Now, a big part of me saying that is like, we run products for people who sell information products, educational companies, high ticket offers, stuff like that. And so it was harder for us to make TikTok e-style ads around these types of products. If we were an e-com agency, I would for sure be considering TikTok. But just based on the businesses that we work with, we decided that we’re not gonna run TikTok ads at all. All we’re gonna focus on is Facebook and YouTube. I think Facebook has still worked for us really well. It’s still the bread and butter, but it’s been a tougher platform to make work just with the compliance issues and stuff like that. We don’t wanna be dependent on one platform.

So pretty much for all of our clients, we’re getting them up and running on YouTube, and we’re getting them up and running on Facebook so that they have money and traffic and new clients coming from both platforms. One of the secrets to figuring out which one of these is best for you is to go look at other companies in your space. So if you have competitors, which you definitely do, go look at where they’re running ads and look at the people who have been running ads the longest and are spending the most money because that will tell you what’s working in your space and seeing other competitors. Spending a ton of money on platforms is actually a good thing. It’s not a bad thing that you wanna stay away from that business model, that funnel type, whatever it is, is working on this platform. So if you can find your differentiation factor and you can go out there and get your business promoting with a similar model, but promoting what’s different about you and get good creatives and all of that stuff, then you can make that work.

So what we always do, again, is get started on one platform. This is something I talk about a lot. Like always get started on one platform, get that up and going, but you don’t wanna be dependent on one platform. So then go with two. So again, for an info product, we’re really focused on Facebook and YouTube. If I was in e-commerce, I would probably be looking at Facebook and TikTok or TikTok and YouTube, whichever one that is, depending on what resources I have, and what business model I’m in, all of that stuff would help me decide what I wanna be going after. So I hope you found this full breakdown, really helpful. That’s my whole breakdown between YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and all these big platforms out there. Now I hope you got a ton of value from this video, but I do actually want to tell you a little secret. This video right here actually shows you my content strategy that I’m using to make over $35,000 a month with less than a thousand followers. So if you just click on this video right here, that will give you the other side of the traffic equation that you can start using to make more money in your business.