The Great Ad Showdown: Facebook vs. AdWords — Which One Actually Works?

It was the classic marketing dilemma: where should we spend the ad budget to get the best results? In 2019, a marketing agency faced this very question. They had been running ad campaigns on two giants — Facebook and AdWords — but something wasn’t adding up. Were they investing in the right platform? Were they wasting money on one that wasn’t pulling its weight?

The only way to know for sure? Dig into the data.

The Data Deep-Dive

Imagine this: A full year of advertising data — 365 days’ worth of clicks, conversions, and costs — waiting to reveal its secrets. Every dollar spent, every customer acquired, every campaign performance metric was meticulously recorded.

The goal? To find out which platform delivered more bang for the buck.

The dataset had everything:

• Daily records of ad spend, clicks, and conversions.
• Side-by-side comparisons of Facebook Ads and AdWords performance.
• Cost trends across different months.

But before jumping into conclusions, the data needed a quality check to ensure there were no gaps, missing values, or inconsistencies. Once that was done, the real analysis began.