Not sure whether to use Google, Facebook or LinkedIn ads for your business? Curious how they compare on their average cost per lead, cost per click (CPC) and click thru rate (CTR)?

This post will help you determine which is best for your business and budget.

First off, I want to point out that whether your business is B2B or B2C, all three of these marketing platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google, are great. There are lots of stats out there that claim LinkedIn is tops for business to business leads and that might be all well and true, but Facebook and Google work very well too. The only real tried and true method to find out which truly works best for your business is to test each and compare. But before you launch into that, we have lots of great data to share with you which will help you choose the best platform to suite your needs.

Here is an overall breakdown and comparison we have made for Google, Facebook and LinkedIn:

Average CPC – Cost per Click 

Google avg CPC Search $2.69  Display $0.63    –    Facebook avg CPC $1.72     –   LinkedIn avg CPC $5.74

Average CTR – Click thru Rate

Google Search 3.17% Display 0.47%     –     Facebook avg CTR  .90%    –    LinkedIn avg CTR

Average Conversion Rate –

Google Search 3.75%  Display 0.77%   –  Facebook 9.21%      –      LinkedIn  6.1%

Average Lead Cost –

Google Search $48.96  Display $75.51   –  Facebook $18.68      –      LinkedIn  $90

*Google ad data & Facebook ad data is supplied from Wordstream benchmark data and Linkedin data is from Hubspot.

Assumptions & Questions –

OK, so this data is wonderful and definitely provides us with lots of necessary ammo to help us with budgeting and planning for our potential ad campaigns and deciding which platform may be best. Of course this data does not tell us which platform is best for business to consumer (B2C) or business to business (B2B), or which one gets the highest quality leads. I think that we can assume that LinkedIn will most likely be the best ad platform for business to business (B2B) leads due to its professional composition and that Facebook best for business to consumer (B2C) due to it’s audience. We can offer some surveys that support this, but again one really has to test these platforms to see what works best of course. After all, some e-commerce companies might find Google ads to work much better for them than Facebook. This is why measurement is such a crucial component of your ad campaigns.

Ideas –  1+1=3

Another thing to consider and test as you are rolling out and testing these different ad platforms is that they might work best in tandem. For example, you might discover that say LinkedIn might work well and better for your business purposes than Facebook, but that using the two together might in fact work the best. For example, you might want to test using Facebook for top of the funnel marketing purposes to reach and expand your audience & brand awareness, and use LinkedIn as well to retarget ads at the audience that visits your site from the Facebook ads.