I wish the transition were as simple as just pulling your best ads from one platform to another. But you need to know that all the campaign components are in place and ready to work as part of your testing and growth strategy.
Account and campaign structure
From Meta. you’re used to segmenting audiences at the ad set level. but in Google Ads. you’ll organize campaigns by search intent. product categories. and performance signals.
- Search: Divide ad groups by brand. competition. and general keyword themes. A brand campaign (users searching directly for your business name) should be separate and distinct.
- Shopping and Max Performance: Group products by margin. best-selling items. bundles. or other criteria based on your own discretion. It’s important that the segmentation aligns with your business goals and funding. For Performance Max. create groups based on topics. categories. and pain points (help with a problem).
- Demand generation: Run separate campaigns for customer acquisition and retargeting. and ensure YouTube Shorts ads are displayed vertically.
Budget and bid management
Budget display is different on Google than on Meta. so choosing the right bid strategy is extremely important.
- The frequency of your budget delivery depends on your daily budget multiplied by 30.4. which is the average number of days in each month.
- Google can spend up to phone number database twice your daily budget in a single day. while still adhering to the set monthly budget limit.
- Smart bidding requires careful experimentation and. at least initially. constant monitoring of automatic spend adjustments. Automatic bids can increase gradually. but they can also increase in leaps and bounds. damaging the learning curve of the algorithms.
Different audiences and targeting
While you target audiences within Meta based on signals based largely on user interests and similarities. Google Ads offers other options.
You can focus on:
- Consumer search behavior and signals of intent (keywords. browsing activity. etc.).
- First-party data from your own database (current customer list…).
- Audience expansion using how do I attract organic traffic to my website? artificial intelligence. which works on different principles than traditional search.
Measuring performance and benefits
If you want to invest in advertising on the Google platform. accept that you will need more patience than on META social networks.
- Search and Shopping drive high-intent conversions. but it can take longer to identify their originators.
- Demand Gen and Performance Max require a learning period before stabilizing.
- Consider using a combined marketing effectiveness ratio (MER) to compare success on Google and Meta.
- Captured conversion lag is a fresh list traditional Google pain point. especially with Smart Bidding. Expect a three to seven day delay in campaign performance data.
- The Shopping and Performance April 2025: SEO and Online Max campaigns you’re likely to try don’t know about view-through conversions.
