Screengrab "No one ever got fired for telling clients to advertise on Facebook." That's the sarcastic mantra making its way round the digital advertising world right now. But is Facebook actually an efficient vehicle for marketers compared to the other digital ad giant, Google?

A comparison of the two companies from WordStream, a search marketing management company, suggests that Facebook is a much less effective ad medium than Google. (The caveat here is that WordStream is, obviously, rather more dependent on Google than Facebook as a medium.)

Facebook has less reach, and its individual ads are less effective, than old fashioned web advertising, according to WordStream's numbers, which it delivered—naturally—in the form of an infographic.

Most alarming for Facebook: The average click-through rate for an ad on the internet generally is just 0.1 percent. At Facebook, it's even lower: 0.051 percent. Google's CTR is 0.4 percent.

Here's a summary:

Total Reach



Facebook: 51% of all internet users

Google: 90% of all internet users



Q1 Revenues



Facebook: $1.06 billion, down 6.5 percent year on year and down 32 percent sequentially.

Google: $2.9 billion, up 1 percent year on year and up 0.7 percent sequentially.



Click through rates



Facebook: 0.051%

Google: 0.4%

Average: 0.1%

Targeting



Facebook:

Education

Workplace

Likes

Location

Demographics

Google:

Interest

Keywords

Remarketing

Location

Demographics

Formats



Facebook: standard display ad, Sponsored Stories

Google: Text ads, image ads, video text overlay ads, mobile web game ads



“So far, Facebook’s advertising platform hasn’t kept pace with the explosive growth of its social network, and it remains to be seen if CEO Mark Zuckerberg even wants to focus on advertising as a source of revenue. In his 2,500+ word letter to shareholders this month, he mentioned advertising just once,” said Larry Kim, Founder and CTO of WordStream.

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