Is billboard advertising better than Facebook and Google ads?

I get asked this a lot, usually by someone who has been running performance ads for two years and has watched their cost per acquisition climb every quarter. Which is, in itself, the answer.

What each one is actually for

A performance ad is a harvesting tool. It finds people who are already somewhere near a decision and closes them efficiently. It is superb at that. What it cannot do is create the demand it harvests — and when you have harvested the easy demand, the cost of the next customer goes up. That is not a targeting problem you can optimise your way out of.

Out-of-home does the unglamorous part: making a name familiar to a large number of people who were not looking for you. Familiarity is what makes somebody click the ad rather than scroll past it, and trust the shop rather than the cheaper unknown.

The measurement trap

Here is where sensible marketers go wrong. They measure the billboard with the tools they use for the ads — last click, cost per acquisition — find nothing, and conclude it did not work.

But nobody clicks a billboard. What they do is search your name three days later, or walk in, or finally notice the ad they had been scrolling past for a month. All of which is attributed to something else.