Meta Vs Google Ads - 3 Differences Between The Advertising Platforms
When it comes to digital advertising, Google Ads and Meta Ads each excel in distinct areas, offering unique strengths in creative requirements, audience targeting and scalability. Google Ads are intent-driven, capturing users actively searching for solutions, while Meta Ads are discovery-focused, helping brands connect with audiences based on interests and behaviors.
Understanding these differences is key to creating a balanced strategy that leverages each platform effectively across the marketing funnel. Below we’ll break down the key differences between the two platforms. For more information about our Meta and Google ads services, check out our Paid Social and Search Ads page.
Creative Output: When it comes to creative output, Meta Ads and Google Ads differ significantly due to their platforms' unique user experiences, objectives, and ad delivery methods.
Visual vs. Text-Driven Formats
- Meta Ads: In the world of Meta advertising, creative is king. The right visuals and messaging can make or break your campaign's success, which is why prioritizing creative is essential for your Meta ads strategy. This platform thrives on creative that captures attention through compelling images, videos, and carousels. The creative output needs to feel native (this is where user-generated content works great!), visually engaging, and emotionally resonant to stand out in a content-heavy feed. Great creative isn’t just pretty—it’s purposeful. By tapping into emotions, your ads can foster a deeper connection with your audience making it the secret ingredient to turning impressions into conversions.
- Google Ads: While Google Ads offer visual options (e.g., Display Network or YouTube), the core focus for Search Ads is text-based. Creative success often hinges on the precision of headlines, descriptions, and keywords that align with user intent. Google has strict character count restrictions, so make sure the copy fits in the required thresholds. Shopping ads utilize existing product listings that are managed through Google Merchant Center. These ads show specific images of the products already listed on your website, along with the titles and descriptions already there.
Audience Behavior
- Meta Ads: Users typically see ads while passively browsing. As users scroll through their feeds at lightning speed, your creative needs to be able to stop that scroll. Eye-catching visuals, bold headlines, and engaging formats can help you stand out.
- Google Ads: Users are actively searching for specific products. The creative output prioritizes relevance and clarity, addressing the user’s interest directly with minimal distraction.
Testing and Iteration
- Meta Ads: Creative testing often involves experimenting with various formats (static, video, carousel), aesthetic elements (color, font, style), and messaging. By analyzing what works, you can refine your strategy and maximize your impact.
- Google Ads: Testing focuses more on text variations, such as headlines and descriptions, as well as landing page alignment. The creative challenge lies in balancing keyword relevance with compelling copy that drives clicks.
Audience Targeting: When it comes to audience targeting, Google Ads and Meta Ads excel in different parts of the marketing funnel. Understanding these differences can help you leverage each platform effectively. Both platforms offer retargeting, but Google’s intent-driven nature gives it an edge for BOF campaigns, while Meta’s creative versatility makes it great for nurturing leads at the TOF stage.
Top of Funnel: Meta Ads - Focus on Discovery
- Meta Ads are ideal for building brand awareness and reaching new audiences. The platform's extensive targeting options and machine-learning capabilities let you engage users who might not yet know your brand but fit your ideal customer profile. Its visually engaging format helps capture attention and create lasting impressions. Again, this is why the creative is so important as it is typically the first impression a user has of your brand.
Middle and Bottom of Funnel: Google Ads - Focus on Intent
- Google Ads targeting is primarily based on search terms. Advertisers pick specific keywords they would like to bid for, and if a search contains those terms, they will bid for placement. Depending on the campaign type, this can be combined with product information, as well as some audience signals that will adjust the bid higher or lower for the advertiser. These audience signals are made up of multiple factors, including Google created audiences, or remarketing and customer match lists. Because the ads will only show up for relevant searches, Google Ads is a very powerful tool for targeting users with high purchase intent. As such, it is best used as a tool for middle and bottom of the marketing funnel targeting.
Ad Spend and Scalability: When planning a paid media strategy, understanding how ad spend requirements and scalability differ between Meta Ads and Google Ads is crucial. Here’s a quick breakdown to guide your budget allocation.
Ad Spend Requirements
- Meta Ads: Meta Ads typically allow smaller budgets to perform well, especially for Top-of-Funnel (TOF) campaigns. With more specific targeting and creative flexibility, you can achieve strong results even with modest spend. Our lowest recommended spend is $150/day as this typically allows us to allocate enough budget to 3-4 campaigns without spreading it too thin. However, your spend will limit the overall success of your ads so we recommend scaling the campaigns that are performing best. As you begin to scale this will definitely require more frequent creative updates to avoid ad fatigue.
- Google Ads: Since Google Ads charge on a cost per click basis, the actual amount spent can vary from day to day, with any given day spending up to 200% of your daily budget. While there is a possibility you can overspend, the ads will never spend more than 30.4 times your daily budget over the course of 1 month. This means that if your budget was set to $100/day, Google will spend up to $3,040 in any given month. Determining how large of a budget to spend should be based on a few factors. The first factor is how many campaigns you plan to run. If your budget is spread too thin with too many campaigns it can severely limit the effectiveness of your ads. The second factor is search volume. No matter how large your budget is, if the campaign is limited by search volume, the ads will have a very difficult time spending. Typically, we recommend a minimum starting budget of $100, with no more than 2 campaigns at that spend.
Scalability
- Meta Ads: Scaling Meta Ads can transform a high-performing campaign into a significant driver of growth. The platform allows for extreme scalability due to its audience size and superior algorithm, allowing advertisers to spend hundreds of thousands in the account each month and still see promising returns. However, scaling requires strategic planning to maintain performance while increasing budget and reach.
Increase the budget of your top performing campaigns. Best practice is to raise the daily budgets by 15-20% every 48-72 hours to avoid disrupting Meta’s learning phase.
Expand your targeting windows by broadening interest categories or creating larger lookalike audiences (e.g., 5-10%).
Refresh creative and prevent ad fatigue by regularly updating visuals, videos, and copy. Test multiple formats like carousels, Reels, and dynamic ads to keep engagement high.
Duplicate successful ads into new audiences in order to diversify reach.
Leverage Meta’s AI tools like Advantage+ campaigns with specific creative (collections, hero products, etc.) to reach new segmented audiences
- Google Ads: Typically, on Google Ads, your scalability is limited by campaign targeting and campaign type. Because Google Ads are heavily dependent on search terms, there is a limit to how high you can scale your ad spend. If you are finding that your campaigns have struggled to spend, consider adding new keywords for your targeting. One other way to open up campaign targeting is to consider broad match keywords. This allows Google to expand on the keyword you provided, and opens up the possibility of the ads showing up for more searches, but may come at the decline of your ROAS. Google offers multiple campaign types, and campaigns such as Display or Performance Max typically have more room to scale the budget. This is because these ads can show up in places outside of Google's search engine, giving the ads more potential customers for targeting. However, while there can be room to scale up spend, that does not always mean you will see a similar return on the spend. Google Ads spend performance tends to drop off quickly, so it is important to strike a balance between performance and reach.
Overall, Meta and Google ads are quite different in their capabilities and why they also make a great pair. If you want to maximize your advertising strategy, we always recommend advertising on both Meta and Google for the best results. Interested to learn more about how the 2 platforms can grow your business? Let’s chat.