When people ask me which platform they should advertise on, I usually don’t start by talking about Google or Meta. I start with a much simpler question: “How many bullets you got in the chamber?”
Because here’s the thing — if you go, “Let’s do this for three months” and then you got like four assets, I’m like, “Where’d you get these four assets?” You go, “We shot it a year ago and the guy’s gone now.” I say, “I don’t know if you’re going to last three months.”
Meta is about burnout. So you got to refill and replenish the tank.
This isn’t the kind of thing most agencies lead with. But after managing about $450,000 a month in ad spend, I’ve learned that the platform choice isn’t really about features or audience size. It’s about whether you can actually feed the machine.
The Fox Guarding the Henhouse: What Google Setup Actually Looks Like
Before we even get to platform selection, let’s talk about what I see when businesses come to us after trying to set things up themselves — or worse, letting Google do it for them.
There’s two different types of Google support in my eyes. There’s the offshore ones where they have an agenda to switch everything to auto recommendation. So it doesn’t matter how they get you on the call, eventually the agenda will come up. They say, “Oh, why don’t you go here for a little while? What about this box? You want to check this box?” It’s like, no, dude, I don’t want to check that box. I know what that box does.
If that’s been set up, I think that’s going to have a lot of problems because they have a script and agenda. They’re not looking at your ad account at all. They’re just checking boxes so they can quickly move on.
The onshore ones — it only comes to you when you start spending a lot of money. When you’re at a certain amount and they don’t care anything about auto recommendation, they’re pretty good. They kind of know your business and they kind of know the industry so they can bring you stats.
But to answer the question about the most egregious setup errors: when they cram everything in one campaign, when they try to do it easy — it’s so nuanced. There’s every single knob that’s in there. There’s a YouTube video on why you should turn it on and a YouTube video on why you shouldn’t turn it on. So it’s situational when you can’t just go and follow a script. It doesn’t work. You have to do it slowly and really learn it.
Everything is Broad-ish Now: The Death of Exact Match
People who learned Google Ads management five years ago are still operating under old assumptions. The biggest one? That exact match means exact match.
It doesn’t anymore.
Google has been favoring us moving on from that granular keyword approach. So it’s more theme-based now. You know how back in the days it was exact match, phrase match, broad match? So now everything is broad-ish. Doesn’t matter how you set it.
If you type in something to do with a specific service right now, competitor brands can sneak in, whereas that’s never happened before. Just because they do that service as well. So how crazy is that? Because before you used to have to type in like, “Jeremy Rivera SEO” for that search to show up. But now if it goes “SEO, your local town,” like Jeremy’s stuff could come up too. And they could trigger their ads. So exact match is no longer exact match.
As you probably know about Performance Max, that’s where everything is pushing towards. The good thing that Google has done recently is allowing negative lists again for Performance Max. Before it wasn’t allowed, so it was complete black box for about a year and a half. It’s crazy. It’s just putting money in and you have no idea.
For e-commerce accounts, that’s when you treat the campaign level like the old ad group level. You break down each ROAS group. Do it based on ROAS. Don’t base it on product name or anything — base it on ROAS levels. Because it’s a ROAS game. So you’re telling the machine to learn you want to convert at 4X. If you have one product line that has 1.2X and 8X acceptable, that’s not going to work because it’s too scattered. Law of averages will kill you.
If you’re trying to figure out whether your campaigns are structured correctly for current platform standards, our ROAS calculator can help you understand whether your expectations align with reality.
The Platform Selection Framework: It’s About Your Content Engine
This is where we get back to the bullets in the chamber.
In terms of platforms, what I do is — just say you’re a client, I’m talking to you — what I’ll look at is how good are you on video? What assets have you got? What power, what resources have you got to continually produce assets?
Let’s just say you’re a service business or an e-commerce business. Because Meta is about burnout. So you got to refill and replenish the tank. We’ve got to look at that.
Just say that you are a lawyer business and you don’t want to be in front of camera. You don’t have anyone in your office who wants to be in front of camera. Facebook, Instagram is useless to you. Because you’re probably already tired. So I’m going hard on search, going hardcore on search. Probably 80% Google, once that gets working, then 20% on Bing.
Bing’s search volume — I know people are glad that Bing’s coming back into the game and all that, but on ads dude, it’s so little. So little interest. And the thing with the client is that you still got to set up all the tagging, tracking, everything else. And the reporting.
In terms of, just say you have something a bit more novel and you don’t mind promoting it or you don’t mind getting some UGC stuff, then a lot of that money is gonna go on Facebook, Instagram.
The reality of social media ads is that they’re hungry. They consume creative assets at a rate that most businesses aren’t prepared for.
What Most Agencies Won’t Tell You About Display Ads
Since I started seven years ago, I only believe display ads for remarketing.
There’s too many spammy sites. Back then there was a link where you can exclude all like spammy sites. Now you can still do it, but Google has made you jump through many hoops. And people still put out these 20,000 website links so you can quickly exclude and all that, but there’s a trick to it. So it’s not an instant button anymore. And you definitely want to exclude those sites because they’re spammy, they’re useless.
So definitely display is remarketing only. Best practice: have an offer on display just like social media ads — have an offer on there to get them back or some type of percentage off, cart abandonment.
In terms of audience, I think people are too focused on overlapping keywords with this and that audience. The stuff doesn’t work — it all gets expanded. So all you’re doing is giving Google initial signal. And then Google can do whatever they want. Same as Meta these days.
When we’re doing Google ads, what you want to do is you want to hit display, you want to hit YouTube, and you want to hit the discovery feed, but with very little money because the diminishing returns is very early on those platforms.
If that makes sense. So you should hit it because people will be visible. “Oh, cool. There’s a guy on video again. Oh, okay. There’s a guy on discovery feed. Oh, I see him on a news site. Okay. So he must be doing pretty well.” But all you’re doing is like $10, $20 display remarketing. I think there’s value in that for sure.
A Real Example: The Children’s Modeling Agency
Bubble.com Casting is a huge children’s modeling agency in Australia. It’s the biggest in Australia. I was lucky to get that — it was through a referral. I think that is a perfect example of being floored with the distribution of the budget between Google and Meta.
When they’re doing search — search is a staple. People go, “Well, how to get my kids into modeling” or “modeling photo shoots” or whatever. And that’s on the search side, the bottom funnel, they’re ready to go.
But then there’s the Meta side where you’re showing proof of people who’ve been successful in modeling in the past, which is massive. So when they have their drawers and their lead magnets, their competitions, their model searches — that’s all demand gen on the Meta side. So that kind of has to move around.
This is where having a proper landing page strategy becomes critical. You’re sending traffic from two completely different platforms with two different mindsets. The search traffic knows what they want. The Meta traffic needs more convincing.
The Cost Reality Nobody Wants to Hear
When it comes to service businesses, you really want to look for things that’s a bit weird. So you don’t want to just look for the chiropractors and the physios, contractors and the lawyers, because that’s very competitive. Whether your using local SEO services or PPC, the fight is intense! It’s $30 a click. People always get a heart attack when they hear it.
Tow truck: $200 a click. Credit cards: $150 a click. Emergency plumbing.
This is why platform selection matters so much. If you’re in a high-CPC industry and you’re trying to make Google Search work with a $3,000 monthly budget, you’re going to burn through that in days. This is where understanding your metrics through tools like the CPC calculator becomes essential before you even start.
What This Means for Your Business
I probably wouldn’t segment campaigns down to that granular level anymore like we used to. But if you do have e-commerce accounts, that’s when you treat the campaign level like the old ad group level.
Depends how much money businesses have. If they have a good amount of budget, I will still go search. If they don’t, you probably have to rely on PMAX for a while.
The honest truth is this: ads is about intensity. When your clients are doing ads, the stakes feel higher. They’re more demanding. You have to be hovering around the computer kind of thing. Things go wrong and things have to be fixed straight away.
That’s the nature of the game. It’s not SEO where you can set things in motion and let them build over time. It’s constant, it’s reactive, and it requires both the right platform choice and the content engine to support it.
So before you ask me “Should we be on Google or Meta?” — answer this first: How many bullets you got in the chamber?
Because if you don’t have a good answer to that question, the platform choice doesn’t really matter. You’re going to struggle either way.
