Should you be running Google ads, or is Meta enough?

Every few months a fresh wave of content announces that Google is finished. Nobody shops there anymore, the argument goes, it is all AI assistants and short video now.

Then you look up a pair of shoes and buy the first thing in the shopping row.

We have heard this before. When short video first took off, the same voices said Meta was over. Years later Meta is still the most reliable place to find a customer who has never heard of you. Marketers like a hot take, and hot takes rarely survive contact with an actual account.

The real question is not whether Google still works. It is what job Google does that Meta cannot, and whether your store is at the point where adding it makes sense.

What each platform is actually for

The clearest way to hold these two apart is to think about the state of mind of the person seeing your ad.

On Meta, somebody is scrolling to pass time or see what their friends are doing. You interrupt them. You place your product in front of someone who was not looking for it, and if the creative is good, you create demand that did not exist a second earlier. That interruption is exactly why Meta remains the strongest place to find brand new customers.

On Google, somebody has already decided they want something. They are typing it into a search box. You are not creating the demand, you are competing to capture it.

This is why return on spend usually looks better on Google. Not because Google is the better platform, but because harvesting existing intent is an easier job than manufacturing new intent. Judge the two channels purely on their own reported return and you will conclude you should move everything to Google, then quietly run out of new customers.

For most of the stores we work with, the split lands somewhere around seventy percent Meta and thirty percent Google. Sometimes eighty twenty. Google is rarely the number one channel. It is very often the missing thirty percent.

Where Google earns its place

Google does three useful things at once. It captures high intent. It retargets well, so someone who first met you in a feed can be met again the moment they start searching your category. And it defends your own name, which matters more than founders expect. That last one gets skipped most often. If somebody searches your brand directly, they are as far down the funnel as a person can get, and you want to be the first thing they see.

The two campaigns to start with

You do not need to learn the whole platform. Two campaign types cover the ground.

The first is a branded search campaign. You bid on your own brand name. It is inexpensive, it converts well because the intent is already there, and it gives your account a base of healthy performance to build on. Search campaigns are mostly text, with the option to include some imagery.

The second is a Performance Max campaign, and this is where the conversions come from. Performance Max bundles Google's placements into a single campaign and lets Google allocate spend toward whatever is working. You get shopping, where your product appears in that row of images at the top of a search result, which is a genuinely valuable position. You get search. You get display, the banner inventory you see while reading the news. And if you feed it video, some exposure on YouTube.

Because it connects to your product catalog, it also refreshes itself as your products change, which is part of why it takes less hands-on work than a Meta account.

Google runs on a slower clock

This is the part that trips people up when they come from Meta.

On Meta, you want a campaign generating roughly fifty purchases in a seven day window before the algorithm can really optimize, and you check in often because creative moves fast.

Google wants thirty days. Strategic changes should be made on thirty days of data, not seven. That single difference changes the whole rhythm of managing it. Check in once a week. Make changes about once a month.

It is a lighter platform to own for exactly that reason. You are not producing creative every week to interrupt strangers. You are showing a connected catalog to people who are already looking.

What a reasonable starting budget looks like

Meta has a floor. Below a certain daily spend the algorithm never gets enough signal and the exercise is a waste.

Google is more forgiving. On a seventy thirty split you can start Google around twenty dollars a day and get a real read, and most stores want to raise it after a few weeks.

Where YouTube fits, and where it does not

YouTube comes up constantly, so it is worth being direct.

There is such a thing as a dedicated YouTube campaign, and it is generally not advisable for a store spending modestly. The brands competing seriously for that inventory are spending heavily, because YouTube is a brand awareness placement. Nobody wins a purchase in a fifteen second pre-roll ad that gets skipped.

If you have video, put it into Performance Max and let Google place some of it on YouTube. That is enough exposure. And if you genuinely have strong YouTube content, the better move is sending your existing audience to it through email and social rather than buying reach.

A simple run sheet

If you want the repeatable version, this is the order:

1. Confirm Meta is stable first. Google complements an acquisition engine, it does not replace one.
2. Make sure your product catalog and product feed are clean, since Performance Max depends on them.
3. Launch a branded search campaign on a small budget to protect your own name.
4. Launch one Performance Max campaign optimized for purchases, not clicks or traffic.
5. Add video assets if you have them, and accept that YouTube exposure will be a small slice.
6. Set the budget near thirty percent of your total, starting around twenty dollars a day.
7. Check in weekly. Make changes monthly, on thirty days of data.
8. Watch new customer volume alongside return on spend, so a strong Google number does not quietly hide a shrinking top of funnel.

The point of all of it

Google is not going to be the channel that transforms your business, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. It is also not dead, and the people saying so are selling something too.

It is a specific tool for a specific job: being present when somebody has already decided they want what you sell. Layered on an acquisition engine that already works, it makes the system steadier. Used instead of one, it just harvests demand you were not creating.

Right order, right tools, one at a time. That is the whole idea behind Growth Made Simple.