Integrate Google Ads and Facebook Ads: 3 Easy Methods

Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the most popular online advertising platforms and marketing tools. While Google Ads follow the pay-per-click advertising paradigm, Facebook Ads follow the social media advertising paradigm. Often both have been treated as separate channels and have been traditionally measured against each other for conversion and efficacy. 

A newer approach of perceiving them as complementary and assistive to each other is emerging. 

E.g. People see your Facebook Ad, and instead of clicking it on Facebook, they search it on Google to know more about your offerings. 

While Facebook Ads help more in brand recognition and social acceptance, Google Ads help in expanding your reach to targeted audiences and closing the actual deals. Organizations mostly use both these channels. 

There is a growing need for Integrating Data from both Google Ads and Facebook Ads, to generate analytics and have deeper insights into how both the channels are faring. Also, to learn on how to use Google Ads and Facebook Ads. 

E.g. You may want to re-target your searching users with what they were searching for or find users that searched other products with similar keywords/needs. 

Understanding Google Ads and Facebook Ads

Google Ads

Google Ads is an Online Advertising Platform that allows any business to showcase personalized ads in multiple formats such as Text Ads, Video Ads, Image Ads. Advertising copy is placed on pages where Google Ads are relevant. Businesses can choose to pay Google basis a flexible model (Pay Per Click or Pay for the advertisement shown).

Given the popularity that Google has, this has become one of the most preferred advertising channels for modern Marketers.

Facebook Ads

Facebook is one of the world’s biggest online social media giant with over 2 billion users around the world, making as the top leading advertisement channel in the world. Studies have shown that Facebook captures for over half of the advertising spends in the US. Facebook ads target users based on multiple factors like activity, demographic information, device information, advertising, and marketing partner-supplied information, etc. 

Facebook Ads are paid ads like Google Ads but show up only on Facebook. These ads can be displayed across various places like:

• Video Feeds
• Facebook Marketplace
• Instagram Newsfeed
• Facebook Newsfeed
• Right-Hand Column
• Messenger Inbox

Facebook Ads are more suitable and preferred for reaching out to consumers who are near the top of the funnel.

A. Manual Method via CSV Exports

Now, lets learn to Integrate Google Ads and Facebook Ads using Manual Method via CSV Export. Here are the steps you can follow to get started:

Step 1: To connect Google Ads and Facebook Ads, login to your Facebook Ads Manager and locate the “Export” button on the top right. 

Note: Choose CSV as the desired file format and click “Export”

Step 2: Similarly, go to your Google Account menu and select the “Export” option. Select “CSV files with images in zip archive” OR “CSV files” as the format desired. You can choose to export data from a particular campaign or all your campaigns. 

Step 3: Import both the above CSVs into your chosen analytics and BI tool or your data warehouse. 

Advantages

• It’s the simplest of methods and provides data in a universally accepted format. 
• It’s quick, with no extra cost. 

Disadvantages

• It’s manual and needs to be repeated again and again, whenever you need the latest data. 
• It could be error-prone. 
• No pre-processing of data is possible, you will need to manually pre-process the data to suit your destination. 

B. Using APIs Provided by Facebook and Google

Facebook provides its “Marketing API” and Google provides its “AdWords API” for exporting data. Integrating Google Ads and Facebook Ads using API, requires you to follow to step-by-step guide as provided:

Step 1: To retrieve the desired data from Google Ads and Facebook Ads, you can write 2 separate programs, one for each.

Step 2: Write a program(s) to perform the pre-processing that your destination tool/service supports. 

Step 3: Finally import the data into your destination. 

Advantages

• Fine-grained control over what you want and how you want it. 
• It’s automated and can be made to run at regular intervals. 
• It can support pre-processing. 

Disadvantages

• Developer resources are required to achieve this, it’s a more complex option. 
• You will need to maintain your programs and tune them for any changes in the source or destination. 
• In the future, if you add 1 more channel, like Instagram or Twitter, you will have to write 1 more program. 

C. Using Hevo 

Now, let’s discuss an easier and efficient approach to Integrate Google Ads and Facebook Ads that does all the hard work and lets you focus on the analytics and reports, instead. 

Hevo is a cloud-based ETL solution, that can move data between 150+ cloud-based sources (including free data sources like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.) and destinations, in a secure and reliable fashion.

Hevo has powerful pre-processing capabilities to make your data easily consumable by your BI and other tools. 

Get Started with Hevo for free

Here are the steps you can follow to get started:

Step 1: Create a new Hevo pipeline, and specify “Facebook Ads”  as the source, by clicking the Facebook Ads icon. 

Step 2: Create another pipeline, and specify “Google Ads” as the source, by clicking the Google Ads icon.

Note: Hevo only needs “view” permissions on your Google AdWords account to pull campaign and reports data. Hevo lends itself easily for “Schema mapping“.

Step 3: You’re done in JUST A FEW CLICKS. Now, Hevo will create live pipelines to integrate data with the destination of your choice, with automatic updates. 

Advantages

• Hevo uses SSL encryption to secure your data in transit and is a time-tested mature solution. 
• Hevo is future-ready – In the future, if you add another popular software-as-a-service offering to your technology stack, Hevo can easily integrate with the new data streams. 
• Hevo automates your data loads to run whenever needed, and manages most schema complexities on its own. 
• Hevo is fault-tolerant and is built to scale. 
• Instead of working on warehousing the data, with Hevo, you work on making your reports better and further the interests of stakeholders in a better way. 

In this article, you learned steps to install and leverage the integration of Google Ads and Facebook Ads using 3 simple methods.

Share your thoughts on integrating in the comments below!