Google gives you answers, Facebook gives you hope.

As I wrote in a previous article,The Death of ROAS in E-Commerce, the landscape and the management style, for media buyers has shifted over the past few years.

As consumers, we now live behind an endless array of digital stimuli: small screens, big screens, medium screens, billboards, leaflets, pamphlets, mail, TV, real news, fake news, protests and whatever else happens to be yelling at us on any given day.

In this chaos, advertisers are now being asked to put their “trust” in ad engines and algorithms to cut through the noise and find the right audience. Which begs the question: has Facebook’s automation finally reached a point where debating the “right” or “wrong” campaign structure is pointless?

The nuances of Google vs Facebook

Both engines are fundamentally built quite differently - each favors its own operating style. As Alex calls it, it’s a ‘left brain, right brainthing’. It’s generally easier to teach a Google specialist how to run Facebook campaigns than the other way around - much like “it’s easier to teach a physics guy finance than a finance guy physics” (J. Simmons).

Why? Google campaigns demand robust attention to keyword analysis, disciplined ad group structures, branded vs non-branded segmentation, negative keyword mapping, auction analysis, and a dozen other important nuances. Because Google’s auctions are public, you can see exactly how much to spend to achieve a certain target impression share or click share, down to the keyword. Add in multiple ad formats - Search, Shopping, YouTube - and the best operators are the ones who can build compact, efficient structures that capture cold traffic while efficiently converting high-intent users, all without overstepping into branded territory.

Facebook is less complex. Being purely display, there’s no way to target exact queries or terms - you simply plug in a few audience signals (if that), adjust some levers, and then hand the ship over to the algorithm with the hope it doesn’t crash. In the past 3–4 years, the biggest shift here has been the rise of creative strategy as the core driver of performance, which I’ve discussed many times. Today, top media buyers spend 75%+ of their time analyzing creative performance, because the structural options for prospecting campaigns are now largely standardized.

Five years ago, success on Facebook hinged on campaign structure, audience testing, lookalikes, messaging and targeting options. As Zuckerberg emphasised in his last interview,this methodology is slowly becoming obsolete. However, after hundreds of runs in the hamster wheel, as media buyers, we see the same patterns and conclusions across almost all start-ups looking to ‘turn the engines on’ for the first time. Here’s the conclusion we draw almost every time…

Knowing when it’s time to draw the line

As I mentioned earlier, Google makes it far easier to gauge where you stand relative to the competition - how much you need to invest to compete, and what pockets of success or failure are emerging from the campaigns. You can then decide, as a founder, where to double down and roll the dice. So at least there’s some ‘knowing’ in the process. Facebook is far cloudier on the surface, with a lot less visibility or control and with that in mind we see brands often going through similar narratives, irrespective of their category.

So, this begs an important question: where are these brands making the biggest leaps on Facebook?

The leap from zero to one is often steep. These are the brands that go from spending nothing to a few hundred dollars a day, running their first one or two rounds of creative iterations. As the journey continues, those leaps get smaller. You start spotting patterns in the data, your top-performing creatives begin to stand out with their CPA benchmarks, and you form a clear picture of where you’ll likely sit in the next stage of your ads journey, regardless of your prospecting ad structure.

As long as you’ve dedicated enough time to creative and secured a strong hold on new customers for at least a couple of ‘consideration cycles’ (the typical gap between when someone first sees your ad and when they purchase) you should be pragmatic and come to a conclusion. By this point, the data’s telling you where you really stand.

After you know your numbers, the game changes, and you have two doors. Behinddoor number one - you’re no longer chasing efficiency, you’re fighting for scale. That’s one of the last and most important leaps, if the unit economics make sense, is ‘how much can I spend without losing incrementality?’ (a founders favorite word). That’s a good position to be in, because at least you’re invited to the dance.

But what’s behind door number two? There lies an unfortunate conclusion: What if the numbers don’t work? This is a question founders often refuse to hear, and I’ve been guilty of the same. When you’ve invested months if not years into a product to suddenly find out the largest prospecting channel can’t make the unit economics work for you as a business, it’s hard to accept.

‘But there’s 50 million people in my target audience? The market’s huge and our customers love our product. There must be a way?’ Sound familiar?

Facebook is Facebook. They give you a platform and a vehicle to push your product onto the World, accompanied by a simple instruction manual and a few best practices. They won’t guarantee success, they won’t guarantee perfect targeting, and they certainly won’t hold your hand and tell you what you need to do if things go haywire. So if after dozens of creative iterations, campaign structures and agencies, if the numbers aren’t working, maybe it’s time to think outside the box? In some cases, that may be just what’s needed.