Google Ads and Meta Ads are two online advertising platforms widely used by digital marketing professionals around the world. Both offer great advantages such as the ease of creating campaigns, the possibility of advertising at a very affordable price, and the huge audience that both tools reach.
The differences between Google Ads and Meta Ads in terms of analytics or creative management make them ideal for different objectives.
Although both have many similar features and capabilities, they also have some differences. That’s why it’s important to know them in order to choose between one or the other when necessary.
Differences between Google Ads and Meta Ads
-Campaign objectives: On both platforms, when creating a campaign, we must select its objective. In Meta Ads, the objective will determine the type of campaign we will run, while in Google Ads it is optional and not highly recommended, as it limits the campaign configuration options.
-Audiences: Now that Google Ads has removed the “similar audiences” option, creating an audience to target the ad is much easier in Meta Ads. This platform still makes it easy to create an audience based on the data from another page whose users behave similarly to our target audience.
-Creativity: Regarding ad creativity, Meta Ads is much more limited, as it only offers title, description, text, and images or video. Although it allows for several texts or images, the variations are minimal. Google Ads, on the other hand, can randomly combine the different parts of an ad. In fact, it allows the user to enter up to 15 title variations and 4 different descriptions, making it easy to create thousands of different combinations.
-Platforms and placement: A common mistake with Google Ads is to think that ads are only shown on the search engine and Google platforms (Gmail, YouTube, etc.). The truth is that ads also appear on millions of websites that are part of the Google Display Network (Google Adsense).
For its part, Meta has Meta Audience Network, which works similarly. In both cases, it is important to select on which platforms and in which positions the ads will be shown. The main difference is that Meta Ads ads show a link to the advertiser’s profile or website. This allows users to interact with the ad content or visit the advertiser’s profile, something that Google does not yet allow.
Other aspects to consider
-Budget: Budgets are set at different levels. In Google Ads, they are set at the campaign level, while in Meta Ads they can be set at the ad level and allow sharing the same budget for a group of ads, something that is not possible with Google’s tool.
On the other hand, both platforms use the budget differently. Google Ads uses a “monthly budget,” while Meta Ads does so weekly, meaning it will not exceed the daily budget more than 7 times a week.
-Analytics: Meta Ads offers less transparency when analyzing campaign results. For example, if we have added several audiences to a single ad, we cannot know how each one performed. In contrast, Google Ads offers much more granular information, differentiating each audience, each keyword, or each placement within an ad group.
