As social media continues to take the advertising world by storm, the eternal question remains, which platform is better for advertising: Facebook or Twitter? It’s arguably one of the most discussed questions in digital advertising right now. This article will help you decide which platform is better for achieving your objectives and goals.

One of the most straightforward forms of digital advertising is to promote a website. Whether it is for e-commerce or brand awareness purposes, social media is the holy grail for advertisers that want to reach consumers in a very targeted way. As the two most popular social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter both accommodate advertisers’ need to promote their websites.

We decided to conduct a test in order to compare each platform’s performance. We took the same content, the same pictures, the same budget, and advertised the same website over the same time period. Let’s see the results:

Mechanisms

Websites can be promoted on both platforms simply through a tweet or a post. However, we all know this is not the best way to promote a website as you tend to pay for engagement rather than for a website click. As a result, both platforms created specific campaign objectives where a marketer can promote their website properly. Twitter uses Website Cards while Facebook ad mechanism for that objective is the Clicks to Website ad.

A big difference between the two is that on Facebook you can now create a Clicks to Website ad with multiple images. This is very useful for e-commerce websites as it allows a product to be shown in more detail, or in some situations, multiple products to be shown on a site by having the user swipe or click through the different images.

Results

Facebook achieved 1,370 website clicks, 0.45% website click-through rate, 301,146 impressions, and 1,511 engagements through the campaign’s run time. In terms of targeting on Facebook, the campaign was broken down into two ad sets with same gender, location, age, and behavioural targeting between the two ad sets. The only difference between the two ad sets was that one ad set focused on student-related interest targeting while the other more parent/adult-related interest targeting. If we solely look on the cost itself, the Facebook campaign achieved a Cost per Website Click of $0.44 with a Cost per Engagement of $0.40.

On Twitter the campaign achieved 390 website clicks, 0.30% website click-through rate, 128,526 impressions, and 828 engagements for the duration of the campaign. Targeting was mostly in one campaign, targeting followers of other Twitter pages (both students and parents), as well as Twitter keyword targeting while keeping location and gender targeting the same. Twitter incurred a Cost per Website Click of $1.53 and a Cost per Engagement of $0.72.

To summarize

The results show Facebook having more than 3 times the website clicks as Twitter, as well as a higher website click-through rate at lower costs.

The crucial difference between both platforms is the depth of interest targeting. Facebook has a broader array of options for interest-based targeting compared to Twitter. This means with Facebook a larger number of audiences are targeted for the click to website campaigns. In addition, Facebook has behavioural targeting available in Canada, whereas it’s not available yet in Canada on Twitter. Additionally, Facebook has age-based targeting, which isn’t available in Twitter, allowing the advertiser to narrow down the campaign and target the right people instead of having a broad target range. On the other hand, Twitter’s keyword targeting is a unique perk that is not available on Facebook.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the results of this test are in favour of Facebook as it drove 251.28% more users to the site with 82.49% higher engagement at a 71.24% lower Cost per Website Click than Twitter. This is mainly because the platform provides a higher reach capacity, better interest targeting, and results when it comes to Cost per Website Click and Cost per Engagement. However, don’t cut Twitter short just yet! It’s the platform where you get strong engagement on a personal level and a deeper interest of the business. If you are an advertiser with a low budget and want to focus solely on clicks to a site and increasing visibility with a larger audience Facebook comes out as the winner, according to our test.