Google Ads vs Meta Ads
Businesses often have to decide the best place to invest their digital advertising efforts to achieve their goals. The two most popular digital advertising platforms that companies consider utilizing to achieve their marketing goals are Google Ads and Meta Ads. These two online ad platforms offer many similar capabilities and features, but each platform has fundamental and unique differences. In this article, we will dive into the distinct advantages of both Google Ads and Meta Ads. We'll help you determine which platform, or a combination of both, aligns best with your business's advertising objectives.
Google Ads
Google Ads is Google’s online pay-per-click advertising platform where advertisers pay for every click on their ad. Google Ads allows users to create and display ads to increase a business’s visibility across Google’s properties to reach their goals. Here are a few of the unique differences that make Google Ads stand out.
1. Large Potential Audience Reach
Google is the largest online advertising platform with over 246 million unique visitors a month, and approximately 8.5 billion Google searches are processed each day, meaning there is a massive reach available for businesses using Google Ads to find and attract new customers.
2. Range of Ad Formats
The Google Ads platform is designed to help users create a wide variety of ad types through different formats and features. Advertisers can create custom ads by choosing the ad format that will best fit their specific objectives. Google’s ad formats include search ads, image ads, video ads, display ads, shopping ads, responsive search ads, and more. Alongside Google Ad's various formats, the platform allows for additional customization with ad extensions: which allow you to link multiple pages of your website, your phone number, or important information about your business. Therefore, Google ads can be highly customizable to help your business find the best advertising strategy to reach your customers.
3. The Google Ads Auction
Another unique advantage of investing in Google Ads is that your business does not necessarily need a large advertising budget to see positive results in your ad campaigns. The Google Ads platform uses an online auction system that takes into account more than just the advertiser's budget. The Google Ads Auction considers the quality of the ad, the expected impact of the ad, the ad rank, the ad context, and the auction bid. Therefore, your ads can be very effective without a large budget by ensuring your ads are intentionally created and relevant to your business and its offerings.
Meta/Facebook Ads
Meta Ads Manager is an advertising platform designed to help businesses reach customers with engaging ads across a variety of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Meta Ads are paid posts displayed on these apps to promote products or services to help businesses increase online sales, drive in-store traffic, find new customers, build awareness, and more. Here are a few of the unique advantages of investing in Meta Ads.
1. Enhanced Large Audience Targeting
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are three of the world’s largest social media platforms with a combined total of over 7 billion active monthly users. Across these apps and their large number of users, the Meta Ads platform can help connect your business with the customers that are most likely to engage. The platform accomplishes this by having advanced audience targeting that allows you to set specific features of your ideal audience. This will control who your ads appear to and will narrow down your audience to the people most likely to be potential customers to increase your ad engagement.
2. Highly Visual
An advantage to utilizing Meta Ads is that the ad formats are highly visual by engaging users through photos and videos. These ad formats allow the ads to blend seamlessly into the organic content that is posted by users on the apps. Furthermore, Meta Ads can appear integrated throughout the app on users’ feeds, stories, messengers, and the marketplace. This increases the captivity and engagement of the ads as users will see them as they are viewing other posts without feeling “interrupted” in the flow of content.
3. Strong Return on Investments
Meta conducted a study on the return on investment (ROI) of advertising on different media channels using 3,500 Meta Ad campaigns. This study shows that digital ads on Meta technologies drove 52% higher total ROI than the average digital marketing channel. Furthermore, Meta Ads average a lower cost per click rate than other online advertising platforms, thus Meta Ads is ideal for businesses looking to make a return on their investment with a limited budget.
Which Ad Platform is Right For Your Business
After comparing the advantages of both Google Ads and Meta Ads, our digital marketing team has identified some characteristics that would make either platform a good fit for your business based on your marketing goals.
Based on the advantages of the Google Ads platform, this tool may be the best fit for your business if your objectives include reaching a large audience with your ads, having the ability to create a variety of different ad types, or looking to see positive results based on the quality and expected impact of your ads. Google Ads can help connect your business to a large number of new and existing customers who are searching for your offerings. Furthermore, the Google Ads platform is perfect for advertisers who want to test different ad types to find what format appeals best to the target audience. Lastly, you should consider investing in Google Ads if you want your ads to be ranked in an online auction system that takes into account the ad’s quality, expected impact, context, and rank, rather than just the advertiser's budget.
Based on the unique advantages of Meta Ads, this platform may align best with your business if your goals include reaching a specific audience of users on Meta properties, your business has high visual assets that can be used to attract and engage customers, or you are aiming for a high return on investment at a low-cost. Meta Ads allows you to have high control over who your ads are seen by and this can help ensure you are reaching the people who are most likely to become customers. Furthermore, you can easily showcase all your business has to offer through Meta Ads using visual assets if your business is highly visual. Lastly, this ads platform is known for its low-cost and high ROI model, which makes Meta Ads the perfect platform for businesses that need to make their limited advertising budget count.
After reviewing the unique advantages of both advertising platforms, you may realize that your business will benefit from investing in both platforms! It is a common best practice for businesses to leverage the strengths of both Google Ads and Meta Ads. Investing and creating ads on both of these platforms allows these tools to work together to help you achieve all of your unique objectives. Therefore, if your marketing goals align with both platforms’ advantages and you have the resources to invest, you should consider utilizing both advertising platforms.
If you are interested in learning more or getting started with Google Ads, Meta Ads, or both, reach out to our digital advertising team to find out how the JNT Team can assist you!
https://www.jntcompany.com/drive-leads-with-digital-ads
-Claire Clark