Advertising on Facebook vs Perch

These two are often set against each other as competitors. They are not really competing, and pretending otherwise helps nobody deciding where to put a few hundred pounds. Feed advertising buys attention inside an app. A direct ad space buys a position on a page that somebody else has spent years making worth reading. Both are advertising; almost nothing else about them is the same.

How each one is priced

Facebook advertising is auction-priced. You set a budget and a bid strategy, the system decides which impressions to buy on your behalf, and your cost per result is an outcome you read afterwards. The floor is low — you can start with very little — and the ceiling is whatever you allow. Costs move with competition for the audience you asked for, which means the same campaign can cost differently in December than in February for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

Perch is priced by the day, by the site owner, and published on the sign-up page before you buy. Cost for a month is the daily rate times the days. It does not move because another advertiser arrived.

Who chooses where the ad appears

On Facebook you choose audiences, objectives and broad placement types. You do not choose the individual page, and the system's ability to find people is the product — narrowing it too far works against you. Delivery is decided by the platform, in your interest as it understands it.

On a direct space, the placement is the purchase. You picked the site, you can read it, and the ad sits where the owner pasted the tag. There is no delivery algorithm between you and the position, which is a limitation as much as a feature: if that site's readers are not your customers, no system is going to rescue the buy.

Targeting, and its cost

Facebook's targeting is genuinely powerful and there is no honest way to describe direct buying as a substitute for it. If you need to reach people by interest, behaviour or lookalike modelling across a whole country, that is what it is for.

The mechanism behind it is the part with consequences for a site owner. Measuring what an ad did requires identifying the person who saw it and following them onto your site, which is why the pixel exists and why consent tooling exists alongside it. Buying a day on a page requires none of that. Context does the targeting: the reader is on a page about the thing you sell.

What each one asks of you afterwards

Feed advertising is a practice, not a purchase. Creative fatigues, audiences saturate, and results are best when someone is watching the account regularly. That is fine if you have that person. If you do not, the campaign degrades while continuing to spend.

A direct space asks for a heading, a link and a decision about how many days. There is nothing to optimise daily, which is a real disadvantage if you enjoy optimising and a real advantage if nobody in your business is going to.

If you own the website, they are not alternatives at all

This is the part that gets lost. Facebook's advertising system has no version in which you sell space on your own site — the inventory being sold is theirs. A site owner can spend money there, but cannot earn any. Perch is the other side of that: a way to monetise your website by selling a slot on it at a price you set, to advertisers you approve, with payment landing in your own connected account and a 25% fee stated up front.

When to use which

• Use feed advertising for reach at scale, for testing offers quickly against large audiences, and when you have someone to manage it.
• Use a direct space when the audience you want is concentrated on a handful of sites you can name, when you need a cost you can budget in advance, or when you would rather not add tracking to reach people.
• Use both if the budget stretches. They fail in different ways, which is the best argument for not relying on either alone.

Related: the Instagram comparison, which turns on creative rather than targeting, and how to choose between online ads platforms generally.