Google Ad Manager vs. Meta Business Suite

It is only suited for marketing. Make sure you have analytics on your site to track the people coming, final sales, and conversions because it is at it's best when you can use it to really read and understand the data at hand. Google Ads does everything it needs to in ads, and you don't need to be an expert to begin with it. However, I would not just tell someone to "go create an account" if they know very little about digital ads. Consult with someone first. It can be a little daunting if you were to do that!

Incentivized

Meta Business Suite is great if you are a business that is heavily reliant on paid media performance. It is also a great platform if we are looking to scale paid performance and look to send partnership ads live with existent creators and influencers we are working with.

Incentivized

• Hyper targeting - I love how we can target, analyze, and then hyper target [advertisements] to our audiences to be able to hyper target the audiences that convert best. [Audiences besides] Google understands them, but also demographics, locations, search terms, and more.
• Advanced reporting - Without Google's seemingly endless ways to read and break down reports, we would not be able to best make decisions to maximize ROI.
• Strong conversion algorithm updates - The algorithm has become impressively strong for 'maximized conversions' and 'smart' campaigns. [That's] coming from someone who hated these portions of the algorithm until about 2019 where the updates (and continued updates) have worked incredibly well for these algorithms' purpose.

Incentivized

• Allows you to upload current email lists and drive ads to them more passively than email.
• Audience segmentation tools make it easy to target prospects based on actions taken on specific pages.
• Lookalike tools allow you to build new prospect lists based on common interests of your current clients.
• The ability to test multiple variations of ads against each other and report on them directly from the dashboard simplifies the decision-making process to optimize advertising efforts.

Incentivized

• Sometimes it can bog down and crash. This is rare, but it is processing a lot of steps/changes all at once and it's not expected to be perfect.
• Being able to quickly filter by campaign types would be nice (PPC/Display/Video Pre-roll). Our fix is to run these campaigns in totally separate accounts, so there is no overlapping in reporting/etc. This helps with seeing stats clearly without having to filter constantly.
• It could be visually prettier.

Incentivized

• Reporting, especially as you drill down. For example, it won't show you purchases by region or hour of the day.
• Consistency has been an issue. Top-performing campaigns/ad sets/ads will hit a wall overnight for no apparent reason.
• Cloning ads doesn't work between certain campaign types. It seems like they could make it so that even a partial copy can be made, with other required fields left empty.

Incentivized

I think it's useful for our team and we rely on it to improve our business. It is within our budget also. Although we still will need an approval from the upper-level management team, I don't see any problem with that

Incentivized

We have to continue using this tool in order to be effective on this marketing platform. Though there are several changes I wish we could see, the fact is that we will still need to use this product to provide customers with the information they need.

Incentivized

Love the product and how the GUI is as it is user friendly. When working with the product it is better to have some knowledge of what ad's you want to deploy where so that it is easier to use and move forward.

Incentivized

The main barriers is that Facebook has stitched together so many legacy systems and verifications and whatnot that it's sometimes hard to onboard new people or get all of the accounts to work together. Once it does, it does work very well.

Incentivized

I've only dealt with the API having issues a couple times, but as you can imagine an outage is not something an advertiser would find acceptable, especially during any ecommerce-heavy time of year. The overall platform could use some help with availability when it comes to authentication, as it struggles with consistency in authentication.

Incentivized

There are a lot of shortcomings when it comes to performance. There are pages that I do not expect to have much information to load on the page, yet it takes an incredibly long time (10+ secondes). I have not had experience with the integration slowing other platforms down too much.

Incentivized

I could say a lot about this topic. As an agency, we get a new [representative] to talk to almost every quarter to go over select accounts and the campaigns within. Most of the time, these [educated representatives], don't provide any new feedback, or I just simply [disagree] with their approach. This is not all the time however. I have learned a lot from a rare few, [individuals] that have given me new strategies and access to betas early on. The other side of support, is the [overseas support platform]. [It] is usually not very helpful, but you can [emphasize] issues and they can research [them]. The Google Tag Implementation team is pristine though. When you need them, you need to set an appointment, which is usually 2 weeks out; they are so over-my-head intelligent, I've never had a bad experience with them and whenever I needed them for a fix, they solved it [within] the first call.

Incentivized

I've found the Facebook for Business support to be hit or miss. For billing questions they're timely and helpful. For complex questions about specific services I've often received a longer wait and a less helpful experience. I'm often redirected to their docs, which are often not particularly helpful.

If you don't want to display your feed to your boss before going over scheduled posts for the week, use the Business site and it will be less awkward instantly. Having someone lean over your shoulder is always a bit awkward, you think about how you smell, maybe consider offering them gum because they have bad breath

Incentivized

As I alluded to earlier, you kind of have to be on Google if you want to search marketing. I've tried Bing Ads and I just don't see the same volume or quality. With dwindling targeting abilities on social media sites like Facebook, Google is still tall and mighty and helps us with intent-based targeting rather than just interest-based targeting.

Incentivized

Meta Business Suite is a good paid media option that offers several features for building ad campaigns, which other paid media channels lack. The usability is generally good, but it probably isn't quite as intuitive as Google, as a comparison. LinkedIn is behind all of these platforms, as its ad features are not as advanced. Overall, Meta is highly ranked.

Incentivized

This product is definitely able to run at scale, but it would be wise to have enough eyeballs to oversee it and the tools for keeping the campaigns, adsets, and ads organized could use some improvement. I can also see the UI interfering with usability at greater amounts of scale.

Incentivized

• It has made the data from this accessible for all of my team to see.
• The ability to make changes can be bad - if the team does not agree.
• Getting current results lets us decide what needs to be changed and take their advice to see how things could improve.

Incentivized

• Definitely has a positive ROI with increasing sales, but beware because it's not easy to measure on every stage of the funnel (how much does an ad in the very top of the funnel should be accounted for on a sale?). Attribution is hard sometimes.
• Managing is expensive and time-consuming. So far we haven't been able to find any solution to automate this. We are using automatic rules but you still need to be on top of things (considering how much budget we are spending on this).
• Beware on Facebook suspending your account. As I said before, the suspension was completely unjustified (they ended up activating it again) but don't over-rely on this platform because they just don't care if you spend your money there or elsewhere. They just don't give a damn about the customer (you).

Incentivized