Google Ads vs. Meta Ads: Which is the Better Choice?
Which online advertising platform is more suitable for your company’s needs: Meta Ads or Google Ads? Even though they both have certain advantages in common, you must consider the differences when selecting how to invest your advertising money.
Comparing Meta Ads with Google Ads
When you browse Facebook or perform a Google search, you likely come across both kinds of advertisements. But how exactly do they work?
These are pay-per-click (PPC) based advertising systems. You participate in an auction when you create an advertisement on either site, bidding for the amount of money you wish to spend on ad space. After that, you will receive a payment each time a person clicks on one of your client’s advertisements.
Paid Social vs. Paid Search
This article mostly focuses on the differences between paid search and paid social, so it can help you determine which option is best suited for a specific customer.
Google Ads: Paid Search Platform
Paid search means that you’ll pay to have your product or service appear on a search engine result page (SERP). Google advertisers bid on keywords, which are specific phrases and words used in search queries input by Google users.
So that their advertising would be displayed alongside search results for those searches. Here’s an example of a sponsored Google search result:
Meta Ads: Paid Social
Facebook advertisements are an excellent example of “paid social,” or social network advertising. Paid social allows people to find companies based on their interests and online activities. Here is an example of a sponsored ad on the Facebook timeline:
Facebook has the most monthly active users (MAUs) of any social network in the world, making it a highly competitive and potentially profitable aspect of the digital advertising strategy of many companies.
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Difference Between Google and Meta Ads
Let’s take a look at the key differences between meta and Google ads:
Budget:
In a Meta Ads campaign, the budget is selected at the ad set level. You can enable Advantage campaign budget, which allows all ad sets within a campaign to share the same budget.
Budgets for Google Ads campaigns are established at the campaign level; budgets for ad groups are not available.
Creativity:
In Meta Ads, your ad creative includes a title, description, major text, and pictures or video. While various headlines, descriptions, and more can be included in a single ad, ad testing is often done by creating several different advertisements.
In contrast, Google Ads uses responsive ads casually. What is meant by responsive ads? According to Google, a responsive advertisement consists of multiple parts. For example, it can consist of up to 15 different headlines and 4 different descriptions.
Purchase intention
In terms of buyer intention, Google Ads always beat Meta Ads. When customers are prepared to make a purchase, do they frequently look up your clients’ products or services online?
For example, when someone wants to buy a coffee machine, they search coffee machine right away. Search advertisements would put that company in front of potential clients at the exact moment they need their services.
On the other hand, the person is unlikely to recall the electronics company they saw on Facebook three months ago. The winner in this case would be Google Ads, without a doubt.
Targeting Options
You have options for targeting (and retargeting) particular audiences with Google and Meta Ads. You can target users based on a variety of criteria, including age, gender, geography, and income level, on both platforms.
However, when it comes to advanced targeting choices, Facebook clearly wins. Facebook’s 2.6 billion monthly active users provide them with an immense amount of data that they use to build audiences based on a wide range of interests and behaviors, in addition to the targeting possibilities discussed above.
Do you want to target youngsters? Check. Do you want to target parents with kids between the ages of five and seven? Check. Do you want to target employed parents that make between $50k and $99k every year and have kids between the ages of 5 and 7? Check.
Which kind of advertising—Meta or Google Ads should you use?
Google and Meta Ads are two highly effective advertising platforms that are suitable for almost any kind of business. It’s also clear that the two platforms need to be seen as complimentary as opposed to competitive. It is true that the two platforms have developed separately over time, but they should operate together rather than against each other.
Using sponsored search and paid social media to their full potential is a highly effective advertising strategy. For maximum ROI and enhanced business growth, it’s important to understand how to use each platform.
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