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When diving into the world of digital advertising, two giants stand out: Google Ads and Facebook Ads. 

Each offers unique avenues to connect with audiences, but crucially, they operate on fundamentally different philosophies. Not everyone understands these differences, and it can actually be damaging to your account (especially those small budget Google Ads accounts!) if you don’t. 

We most often see this come through as a Meta Advertiser, or Brand operator with Meta experience, who has seen a bit of success on Meta and then assumes the same process, tactics, and philosophies can simply be applied to Google Ads for the same success. This will most likely result in failure and/or frustration. 

Understanding these distinctions is crucial for any marketer aiming to harness their full potential, and I’ve written this to help you learn a little more about the difference so you can manage your brand(s) better.

Let's Talk Demand Capture and Demand Creation First

Before we get into the 7 Ways Google and Meta are different, let's talk expectations as to the platform's ability to generate demand. This is a wierd one, because both platforms have elements of demand creation (generating interest and awareness for a product or service that did not previously exist) and demand capture (lower funnel traffic in which you are simply capturing the existing interest and awareness that already exists).

While Meta does have retargeting (captures existing demand by showing ads to people who have visited your website), it is most often (correctly) viewed as a "demand creation" platform. That is, you get in front of people who didn't know they wanted your widget, and now they know about your widget!

Google Search and Shopping, is at its core a demand capture channel. That is, it captures that existing interest and awareness (in this case, people have to "know" about something to ask Google about it!). There are Demand Creation sides to Google (primarily through YouTube), but for the most part, it's important to understand that Google is limited by its inability to create searches that aren't there!

Crucially, both are important to any marketing business, it's just that they need to be managed and perceived differently than the other in many ways. This is perhaps the biggest difference between the two that plays a part in influencing all the rest, and it is why I wanted to start there!

Finally, I'm no Meta Ads Expert

I want to make sure I state clearly: there are probably ways I’ve missed some detail here or there on specific points in my article about exactly how Meta works best. Totally fair, and please help me learn by replying to me on social media if you get the chance! However, crucially, don’t miss the main point of this post which persists, even if there are differing views on Meta creative or audiences or conversion tracking or whatever: Google Ads and Meta Ads are not the same and should be set up, measured, and managed differently.

That being said, let's get into these 7 specific ways Google and Meta are different.

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The Core Philosophy Differences Of Google and Facebook/Meta & How This Should Impact Your Marketing

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(1) AUDIENCE PURPOSE: Intent vs. Interest

• Google Ads Search Advertising: This platform (let’s limit this to Google Search Ads and Google Shopping Ads for a second) is all about intent. Users actively search for specific information, products, or services, and your ads appear in response to these queries. You're tapping into existing demand, capturing potential customers precisely when they're seeking what you offer.
• Look, the word “intent” makes eyes glaze over a bit, so here’s what we mean. Let’s say a person searches for “iphone case”. This search could have these different intentions (and more, these are just some examples) in searching for this: 
  
  • Intent to Learn - they want to see what cases are available, they’re early in the buying process.
  • Intent to Buy - they’re ready to go, they just want to see what options are out there.
  • Intent to Sell - they want to know what their competition is up to and whether they should start selling iphone cases.
  • Intent to Kill Time - they’re waiting for their kid to finish volleyball practice and are bored. They don’t know if they want to buy a new case or not. 

The reason Shopping and Search is so different, is because it is a person communicating what they are interested in. This is also why CPCs tend to be higher, because the right keywords can help you determine purchase intent, for instance, someone typing in: 

• “iPhone 16 Pro Max case with loop” - is a search from a person who knows very specifically what they want, likely has purchase intent, and is almost certainly further in the funnel than the next example…
• “Phone case” - is a search from a person who could have a million different reasons for typing (or speaking) that into Google. Is why Google smart bidding can be so helpful here. It is literally taking a variety of different signals into the algorithm such as your past searches, browsing history, demographics, etc to determine whether your innocuous search is actually higher intent than it appears to be, and then bidding accordingly. 

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• Facebook Ads: Here, the game is about interest. Users aren't necessarily searching for your product; instead, they're browsing their feeds and engaging with content. In that case, their “intent” is whatever a person goes to social media to do.  Unless they’re on Marketplace, their initial intent is rarely to buy. Heck, they probably got there from brainless finger muscle memory and dopamine addiction. So, with that in mind, your objective is the same as good ole old school marketing: distract them into buying! Draw their attention from that friend’s divorce announcement so they can buy your new off-brand weight loss pill! 

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• Because of this, your ads on social platforms like Meta, target users based on demographics, interests, and behaviors, introducing your offerings and creating demand where it didn't previously exist.
• Think about how crucial the role of creative is going to play here. In marketing that revolves more around distracting a person who has different intent, your creative (especially the beginning hook) is going to be crucial. Video has vaulted into the forefront in Meta precisely because it is so much more impactful in distracting a user from their social feed than still images.

Now, are you ready to get super complex? 

Google Ads technically has its own audience and distraction and interest based marketing channels as well within its platform. This is the start of the massively important argument why Google and Facebook are not the same.

With Meta, you are limited to interest targeting, like we noted above. 

With Google, you could be advertising with intent (search/shopping)
OR, you could be advertising with interest (GDN - Google Display Network, YouTube Advertising, Demand Gen Campaigns, Gmail)

See why this starts to get very complex, very quickly?

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Now let’s talk more about practical management stuff. What will you see in the Platforms and how do they differ in terms of actually pushing buttons?

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(2) Ad Placements:

• Facebook Ads: Ads are integrated within the Facebook ecosystem, appearing in the News Feed, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network of third-party apps and sites.
  
  1. CRUCIALLY, you must grasp here, that even though there are different “placements” they still carry the same targeting we talked about above: interest based targeting.
• Google Ads: Your ads show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) and across the Google Display Network (encompassing a vast array of partner websites with massively different audiences and purposes for being there), YouTube video placements, the Google Discover App, Gmail accounts, Google’s mobile app network (you might want to just exclude the mobile app network in PMax campaigns BTW 😘), and probably other placements I’ve forgotten or that they’re testing.

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• CRUCIALLY: it is difficult to fully understand just how different the Placements make all aspects of marketing here. This is especially true when you look at a PMax campaign that encompasses a wide variety of audiences, purposes, intentions, interests, and all of the above. See how it’s not anything like an Advantage+ campaign simply based on Placements alone? You’re not just solely trying to get in front of a user involved in a social media activity and feed.  You could be reaching a person: 
  
  1. typing in your brand with ultra high purchase intent, 
  2. OR someone visiting a random ultra-right-wing conspiracy site who sees your display ad, 
  3. OR someone who is playing Candy Crush on their phone, 
  4. OR someone who is looking up how to fix their PCV valve on their Honda Pilot (me, that’s me). 
  5. … all of those with the same *%&%^%^$* campaign! Thanks Google…

This alone requires a very different way of thinking about Google Ads, setting up campaigns, bidding, and managing it. 

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(3) Targeting Capabilities:

• Facebook Ads: Offers detailed targeting based on user-provided information and behaviors, such as age, gender, interests, life events, and purchasing habits, allowing for precise audience segmentation.
  
  1. We’ve found that Facebook just seems to have better audience targeting that appears to shine through in their bidding algos.
• Google Ads: Focuses on a wide range of targeting, with varying success levels between them (and this changes all the time with additional Google platform changes). 
  
  1. Keywords have long been Google’s ace in the hole, and an ideal targeting metric because of their ability to target an individual user and communicating their interest and intention at the exact time of their search. Unfortunately, Google continues to dilute this power with automation. 
  2. You can also target on all of the channels with many many targeting options, such as custom intent, user location, user language, device, YouTube channel, YT video, specific placements, generalized groups of placements based on content, and many other ways. 
     
     1. Admittedly, while Google captures user intent effectively, its demographic/interest targeting isn't as granular and/or performance driven as Facebook's. I personally think this is why Google obsessed for years with trying to add a social platform into its mix.
     2. The data Facebook has on people based on their demographics AND social behavior is immensely powerful in interest/audience based bidding, and it is crucial to understand that Google literally does not have access to this level of audience data. 

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(4) Engagement:

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• Facebook Ads: Engages users during their social interactions, necessitating visually appealing and relevant content to capture attention in a non-search environment. 
  
  1. Again, think distraction. You are trying to get people who aren’t there to buy your product, to buy your product. This significantly changes the style of creative and targeting you will use to accomplish this purpose: distract them into purchasing.
• Google Ads: Again, what platform within Google Ads are we talking about here?  It is very very convoluted, and the first step is to stop and recognize that.  Google Search/Shopping engages users actively seeking information, leading to higher intent… but requiring compelling ad copy, and even more importantly, Landing Page copy to stand out among competitors. 
  
  1. The Landing Page and Product Offer are far more important in Google Search than what you write in the ad text, this is something not all operators understand. Google Search is capturing the demand of people already interested in you, it’s up to you now to sell them on why they should buy from you, rather than click the back button and go buy from a competitor. This isn’t a targeting issue, it’s a sales issue. 
• But… what about YouTube and Display and App marketing? They will fall more into the distraction based marketing again, but even then, with wildly different tactics employed for various placements. Take YouTube alone: 
  
  1. You may want to set up an awareness YouTube campaign targeted specifically to your competitor’s videos or channels with a strong “here’s why they suck and we don’t” hook. 
  2. But, if you’re thinking about advertising on YouTube Shorts, you’re going to want to lean into entertaining your audience in order to build a following.
  3. Or, you may want to test long-form educational videos to demonstrate your skill as a service provider in YT remarketing campaigns to play the long game to interested people who haven’t yet bought. 

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I cannot express how complex Google as a Platform is in its targeting versus Facebook. This doesn’t mean it is better or worse, it is different. And it must be managed differently. 

With that in mind, let’s go into some key management differences here: 

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(5) Bidding & Budgeting Strategies:

• Facebook Ads: Uses a bidding system based on desired outcomes, such as impressions, clicks, or conversions. You set budgets and bids for your target audience segments. While I am no Facebook expert, I’ve noted a few things over the years in talking to true experts. 

• Google Ads: Search: bidding started primarily by operating on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, where you bid on keywords. Because of this, costs can vary widely based on keyword competitiveness and value. There are many different bidding models in here, and they do carry positive usage in various capacities, but testing is absolutely key and it is not wrong to change up a bidding strategy that doesn’t seem to work anymore for whatever reason. 
  
  1. TROAS - once you have enough conversions you may want to target this based on your efficiency targets. More ideal for Ecommerce.
  2. Target Imp Share - this is a great option (with a Max CPC cap!!!) for more stable keyword campaigns, such as a Brand campaign where costs and impression share doesn’t change much.
  3. Manual CPC - still a great option to start a campaign (or for stable auctions like Brand) where you want more control until you get enough conversions to guide the machine.
  4. TCPA - more ideal for lead gen accounts where you have a general dollar target for an entire conversion, not necessarily the flex that can happen in Ecommerce accounts.
  5. And this doesn’t even go into all the bidding models, OR the different models (like CPM and CPV) in YouTube. I’m telling you, this stuff is way complex and there are weird subtleties to each that if you’re not careful, can cause aggressive over bids.

So with this in mind, here are the major things I see as to the difference between these two that can really harm your Google Ads account if you treat it like Facebook. Please note, all of these will likely vary from account to account, but on the whole here is what we’ve observed over the years:

6. Facebook conversion based bidding is more stable than Google’s. 
   
   1. Once Facebook gets locked into your targets, the campaigns seem to do a decent job of sticking to those. 
   2. With Google you will see your targets hit over a 30 Day period, but vary WILDLY in between… and this is very difficult for Facebook marketers to grasp. They will often see a big change and panic, making a lot of changes trying to “fix” the system, when it actually needs no changes to work better. 
7. Facebook budgeting is more stable than Google’s. 
   
   1. Facebook just seems to be more consistent and stable on the budgeting side. Once you get your budgets to where you want them, there seems to be a relative stability there unless the opportunity itself changes and Facebook sees actual opportunity grow. With this, we’ve often see FB marketers who are comfortable setting very high budget limits to allow the system to naturally grow. 
   2. DO NOT DO THAT WITH GOOOOOOGGLEEE. I can’t stress how much you want to be careful with your daily budgets with Google. Because of the placement opportunities above, especially on more complex campaigns like PMax, high budgets will allow Google to randomly test various things (hey, today let’s run after app placements even though we never have before) and then everyone is panicking because there was a random surge without an associated conversion jump. Google notes in their policies on this double spend that they do this when they see more click or conversion opportunities, but please note that you are not guaranteed to get additional sales along with your additional spend. 
   3. This can make monitoring budgets and having a daily budget strategy in place far more important with Google, since Google Budgets are more like the pirate code than hard and fast rules. 

4. Put more simply: when Facebook gets more aggressive on any given day, it is likely because it sees opportunity for more sales at similar efficiency. When Google gets aggressive on any given day, you may not see a similar efficiency, and in fact could see significantly worse efficiency if Google thinks it sees potential in an untested channel that doesn’t actually work out (i.e., they used your budget for testing something)...

8. Facebook budgets don’t have Google’s &T^$%^* daily double budget thing.
   
   1. With that in mind, make sure you know that not only will Google randomly spend your money, but it can spend up to double your daily budget (yes, it will limit itself to 30.4 of your estimated monthly budget, but… that doesn’t work if you’re changing your daily budgets all the time, AND more importantly, if it double spends on crappy placement testing then you’re losing out on better traffic at the end of the month when Google limits it). 
   2. Yes, this is a stupid rule for Google. 
   3. Keep your budgets closer to what you actually want them to be, if you don’t have the cash to flex with massive budget swings. 
   4. We’ve seen Google ads accounts that could spend $16K/day based on their budgets, but they only wanted to spend $700/day. This is unlikely, but there is the risk that, fully inline with Google policies, this account could have spent $32,000 (the actual monthly budget was around $21K 💀) in one day. This is not worth the risk unless you have cash to burn, keep your daily budgets down!!!!
9. Facebook learning/ramp-up to your targets is faster than Google’s, and their conv limits for ideal smart bidding decisions appear to be lower. 
   
   1. I am unsure why this is, but it seems like Facebook does a better job with hitting conversion targets right from the start. It just doesn’t need a ton of conversion data to make smarter decisions.
   2. This is not true with Google, I’ve been seeing more studies that talk about having at least 100-150 conversions in a 30 day period for an automated system like PMax to bid well. It’s relatively understood in Google Ads land among the professionals to not start a campaign with smart bidding immediately set to hit your goals, but to give Google time to “learn” before targeting it at your actual CPA or ROAS. 
   3. This also means, by the way, that you will be unprofitable with Google longer in the beginning, so sometimes a “failed” Google Ads account test is simply a Meta Ads marketer who didn’t have the understanding or patience to actually give a campaign or account the time it needed to grow. 

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(6) Campaign Setup and Organization

• Facebook Ads: Since it is limited to social media placements, the primary things to focus on are creative, and user’s place in your purchase cycle (often segmented to remarketing and awareness). Facebook campaign organization can typically be relatively simple, and uniform from account to account... with the differences primarily being creative related.
• Google Ads: Because of the significant variance of ad placements and user interests and intent, one must think through the core marketing audience segments of “bottom funnel (often brand searches and remarketing)” and “upper funnel/awareness”, but must also ponder how to accomplish that across all campaign types. 
  
  1. For instance, rather than think about just setting up two campaigns in Search, one for Brand and one for Non-Brand, a user will want to identify the budget they have and the potential CPC costs to determine if utilizing a completely different campaign type such as Demand Gen or YouTube would be a more efficient way to acquire new customers than simply tossing in some general non-branded keywords. 
  2. We typically find a “playbook” of sorts can be utilized for Facebook, in which a similar campaign setup can be utilized across a variety of accounts, whereas with Google, the playbook is “there is no playbook” and one must ponder all aspects of an account and then develop a campaign organization to setup that has the highest potential to succeed for that specific brand. Sound risky? It is, which IMO is something that also needs to be accepted when beginning Google Ads after having started on Facebook. 

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(7) Creative Setup & Optimization

• Facebook Ads: I am no FB Ads expert, so here is where you can fill in gaps in my knowledge. However my understanding is you typically limit one creative “type” per ad, and then constantly test new ones. Keeping the creative fresh is crucial as audience saturation happens quickly, leading to ad fatigue.
• ‍Google Ads: With Google (at least, the campaign types that use creatives!), you tend to upload multiple images and assets and then Google does testing within that and matches up the best asset to the user at that time.  ‍
  1. There are pros and cons to this, but the key thing to note here is that you are doing WAY less creative swapping out as you do with Facebook/IG.‍
  2. Note, we have found that with YouTube, more of a Facebook style creative testing framework works. The above describes grouped campaign types such as Demand Gen and PMax. 
  3. I also think, even with YouTube though, the “freshness” of the creative isn’t as crucial as with FB. I think this is for the simple reason that you are not showing primarily to one user on their feed like in Meta. You are showing to a nearly endless number of potential users, so the idea of ad fatigue is different than in Facebook Ads. 
  4. I’ll say it again, I’m no Meta Ads expert, but based on a number of things such as audience size and budget, you may need to change out your Meta Ads on a weekly basis, Google/YouTube you’re thinking more in terms of a monthly or even quarterly basis (again, averaged together and with a lot of caveats). 

In Conclusion

In conclusion, navigating the digital advertising landscape requires a deep understanding of both Google Ads and Facebook Ads, as each platform operates on distinct philosophies that directly impact campaign strategy and management. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the differences between the two platforms, but hopefully it has given you a new appreciation and respect for the need to treat these platforms very differently in your setup and management practices.

Google Ads excels in capturing high-intent users with its search and shopping capabilities, but is incredibly complex in platform, intent, audience, and more, while Facebook Ads thrives on engaging users through creative, interest-based targeting in a far more stable social environment. 

Recognizing these differences—not only in audience behavior but also in bidding, budgeting, and overall campaign dynamics—is essential to avoid missteps that could undermine your marketing success. By tailoring your approach to the unique strengths and challenges of each platform, you can maximize efficiency, minimize risks, and ultimately drive better results for your brand.

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