Many businesses are increasingly using Meta ads and Google ads together. By running online ads across both platforms, companies can enhance their brand competitiveness and expand their business scale.
Although Google and Meta ad platforms offer many of the same or similar features, there are fundamental differences in certain functions or settings. When transitioning from one platform to the other, you might encounter some confusion.

Here are the main differences I observed between Meta Ads and Google Ads during the ad setup process, specifically:
Campaign Objectives
Placements
Budget
Creative Assets
Targeting
Reporting
Meta Ads & Google Ads: Campaign Objectives
On both ad platforms, the first step when creating a new campaign is to choose the campaign objective.
In Meta Ads Manager, the campaign type directly corresponds to the marketing campaign objective, with no need for additional settings.

In Google Ads, the campaign objective is optional. This choice will later narrow or limit the range of options available during the setup process. For example, if you select “Brand Awareness and Reach” as your marketing objective, Google Ads will only allow you to choose between Display or Video campaign types in the next step.
In other words, you can only select the campaign type after first choosing the marketing objective.

Meta Ads & Google Ads: Placements
It is a common misconception that Google Ads can only be displayed on Google platforms such as Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, etc. However, Google Ads can also be shown on search partner websites, and video ads can be placed on video partner websites. Additionally, there is the Google Display Network, which consists of millions of websites that have joined Google AdSense.

The main ad placements for Meta include the familiar platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as the Meta Audience Network, which is similar to the Google Display Network and works in a similar way to Google.
Although Google Ads allows you to choose or exclude partner site placements, an increasing number of campaign types (such as Performance Max campaigns) force advertisers to use these placements.
Another key difference is that Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram must be linked to social media accounts. This means that whenever an ad appears in front of an audience, users can click the ad’s call-to-action button, interact with the post, or visit the social media account details.

In contrast, Google Ads only began advertiser verification last year and started displaying business names next to search ads.

Meta Ads & Google Ads: Budgeting
There are some differences in how budgets are set and used in Meta Ads and Google Ads.
Where to Set the Budget?
In Meta Ads campaigns, the budget is set at the ad set level. You can choose to enable Advantage campaign budget, allowing all ad sets within a campaign to share a single budget, eliminating the need to set budgets individually within ad sets.
In Google Ads campaigns, the budget is set at the campaign level, and it cannot be set at the ad group level within any campaign.

What Type of Budget to Use?
Meta Ads can set a daily budget or a lifetime budget, whereas Google Ads campaigns can only use a daily budget (except for video campaigns). The underlying logic is that Google Ads does not recommend frequent budget adjustments, while Meta Ads allows adjustments to the budget for ad sets or campaigns based on their performance.
Why Did Ad Spend Exceed the Budget?
Even if you choose to use a daily budget, both Meta Ads and Google Ads treat the daily budget as an average daily budget rather than a maximum daily budget. Meta Ads can spend up to 25% more than the set daily budget on a given day, but over a week, the spend will not exceed seven times the daily budget. Essentially, the “daily budget” on Meta Ads is more akin to a weekly budget.

Google Ads can spend up to 100% more than the set daily budget on a given day, but over a month, the spend will not exceed 30.4 times the daily budget. Essentially, the “daily budget” on Google Ads functions as a monthly budget.

Meta Ads & Google Ads: Creative
In Meta Ads, ad creatives consist of headlines, descriptions, primary text, and images or videos. You can write multiple headlines, descriptions, and other elements within a single ad, allowing the ad’s intelligent algorithm to randomly combine and display the ad variations.

Adaptability has become the norm in Google Ads. What does adaptability mean? In the world of Google Ads, adaptable ads, or responsive ads, consist of multiple assets that Google can piece together to create hundreds of different combinations for ad display and automatic optimization. For example, responsive search ads can include up to 15 different headlines and four different descriptions.

When it comes to descriptions, the primary text in Meta Ads can be considered equivalent to the descriptions in Google Ads. You can use complete sentences here to provide more detailed information about your product or service.
Meta Ads & Google Ads: Targeting
Here are some differences in targeting options between Meta Ads and Google Ads.
Lookalike Audiences
You may be familiar with the concept of lookalike audiences (Meta Ads terminology) or similar segments (Google Ads terminology). By adding this targeting option to your ad targeting, you can reach new users who exhibit behaviors similar to your existing audience.

Unfortunately, since August 2023, Google Ads no longer supports the similar segments feature. However, lookalike audiences remain very active on Meta Ads and are a common scaling strategy.
Expanding Audience
Google Ads refers to this as “optimized targeting,” while Meta Ads calls it “Advantage Detailed Targeting.” These settings are typically enabled by default and allow the platform to show ads to audiences outside of the specified targeting if they are likely to convert. I recommend advertisers test this feature, as it can sometimes yield good results, but other times it may not perform as well.
Meta Ads & Google Ads: Reporting
Transparency
In Meta Ads, reporting is available at the ad, ad set, or campaign level. This means that if you add multiple audiences to the same ad set, you won’t know the performance of each individual audience, only the overall performance of the ad set. While you can create separate ad sets for each audience, this may lead to issues with budget, reach, and other factors.
Google Ads provides more granular data reporting. If you add multiple keywords, placements, audiences, etc., to the same ad group, you will still see detailed reports on the performance of each targeting element.

Default Attribution Window
When creating a campaign in Meta Ads, the default attribution setting is seven-day click or one-day view. This means that if someone clicks your ad and completes a conversion within seven days, that conversion is attributed to the respective ad. Similarly, if someone views but does not click your ad and then completes a conversion within one day, that ad also gets the attribution.
Google Ads, by default, does not include view-through conversions. However, the default click conversion window in Google Ads Manager is 30 days.
Summary
When evaluating the different features of Google Ads and Meta Ads, consider them as friends rather than enemies. They have similar features but play different roles in marketing campaigns.