Facebook vs. Google: A Pay-Per-Click Advertising Campaign Throw Down

When it comes to using online advertising to recruit patients for clinical trials, our most reliable source of study referrals has consistently been Google. While Facebook sometimes yields a lower cost per referral on our patient recruitment campaigns, Google sets the gold standard for delivering consistent results across a wide variety of medical conditions and markets. (Interestingly, Bing has not even been a major player in generating web traffic and potential study referrals in our most recent campaigns.)

Google’s dominance in digital advertising is well-established. In light of its consistent performance on our patient recruitment campaigns, imagine our surprise when we recently saw a Facebook pay-per-click campaign outspend an equivalent Google pay-per-click campaign. For the project in question, we sought patients with fairly severe cases of a somewhat rare gastric condition; we kicked off the online advertising campaign in just one mid-sized market. Understandably, the Google AdWords campaign got off to a slow start, not accruing study referrals until we had added a second market. Meanwhile, the Facebook campaign was blowing through its daily budget. This trend prompted questions among our team.


Facebook outspends Google on a pay-per-click patient recruitment campaign!

We delved into all the data we had at our disposal to try to make sense of this anomaly. We first compared the number of clicks to the study website from the various online campaigns, filtering out visits from web “crawlers” and other automated traffic sources to get a more accurate sense of true web traffic. We compared visitor behavior by referral source to determine whether arriving at the study website from Google versus Facebook affected trends in average visit time, bounce rate, and average number of pages per visit. We put together various reports to better understand recent trends in monthly spend, referral volume, and cost per referral for both Facebook and Google. Lastly, we contacted both Facebook and Google to obtain more information about the campaigns and our accounts.

If you have tried to have a meaningful conversation with Facebook’s help desk, you will sympathize with our plight. Our half-dozen email exchanges read like a broken record, a snippet of song digging deeper and deeper grooves with no forward movement:

Could Facebook help us make sense of the high volume of web traffic accrued in just one mid-sized market? Monthly spending surpassed some of the monthly spending totals we had seen in other campaigns that ran in larger markets.

We got web traffic because people clicked on our ads, Facebook offered helpfully.

Yes, spend accrues when people click on ads. But, could Facebook help us understand how the campaign generated roughly the same spend as the corresponding Google campaign? (Remember this?)

We got more clicks because more people engaged with the ads, came the reply.

When Facebook Global Marketing Solutions reminded us that the marketplace was more competitive during the holiday months, possibly affecting first quarter performance of our search for Midwestern gastric patients, we admitted defeat. There was nothing left to do but adjust our digital advertising budgets accordingly and move on.

Initially, the votes were split within our team regarding how our Facebook pay-per-click advertising campaign could spend at levels that were comparable, even slightly higher, than Google for this particular patient recruitment project. Ultimately, one of our Facebook-savvy account managers identified some recent changes to Facebook’s ad layout that enabled Facebook to display a higher quantity and frequency of ads. This provided the most likely explanation for the campaign’s surprising jump in web traffic. After the initial period of testing and research, the advertising campaigns generated referrals at a more efficient and predictable rate; regardless, the exercise helped us to stay abreast of current conditions in the digital marketplace.

The bottom line is: When it comes to comparing Facebook and Google for pay-per-click advertising, Google just can’t be beat!