Search vs. Scroll: Differences between Google Ads & Meta Ads

Google Ads or Meta Ads—which platform gives you the most bang for your buck?

This is one of the most common questions I hear from small business owners.

And the truth is, both platforms excel in different ways, depending on your goals, industry, products/services, target audience, and budget.

By the end of this post, you'll know which platform suits your business goals and how to combine their strengths.

1. Customer Acquisition

The biggest difference between Google Ads and Meta Ads lies in the type of audience they attract—and this shapes everything from campaign strategy to ad copy.

When people use Google, they’re searching for solutions, answers, or products.

Their intent is high—they already know what they want, making them a warm audience. 

Google Ads is all about showing up at the right moment with the right message.

This leads to highly targeted clicks, often closer to the point of conversion.

Meta, on the other hand, connects with people scrolling through their feeds for entertainment.

These users typically aren’t actively looking for what you’re offering—they’re a cold audience.

Meta Ads rely on "interruption marketing" to grab their attention, stop their scroll, and persuade them to consider your product or service.

Meta Ads can target warm audiences, but it takes time.

First, you collect enough data from cold audience campaigns, then you retarget those who’ve shown interest, engaged with your content, or visited your website.

Remarketing becomes a powerful follow-up strategy on Meta, taking users from casual interest to committed action after they’ve interacted with your brand.

2. Reach

Reach is another critical difference between Google Ads and Meta Ads, with both platforms offering unique ways to connect with your audience.

Google handles 8.5 billion searches per day, making it the go-to platform for reaching people actively looking for solutions.

With Google Ads’ PPC (Pay Per Click) model, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

This ensures that your budget is spent on users who show intent by actively engaging with your content.

In contrast, Meta connects you with its vast user base of 2.9 billion monthly users—most of whom are scrolling for entertainment.

On Meta, you pay based on CPM (Cost Per Mille) or impressions, meaning you’re charged every time your ad is shown, regardless of whether a user engages with it.

This model emphasizes exposure, aiming to build awareness or drive interest through repeated views.

In short, Google excels in hyper-focused reach to actively engaged users, while Meta blankets a broad audience with repeated impressions that build awareness and curiosity.

3. ROAS

When it comes to ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), both Google Ads and Meta Ads can deliver impressive results—but the dynamics of how they do so differ significantly.

Google is a highly competitive platform with advertisers vying for limited keyword inventory.

This competition drives costs up, and Google recently implemented a minimum bid for each keyword, meaning you’re charged even if you're the only advertiser targeting that specific term.

However, this system reflects Google’s ability to connect you with high-intent users—people actively searching for products or services—who are more likely to convert.

This means you’ll pay more for clicks, but those clicks are typically more valuable, often resulting in a higher ROAS for many businesses.

On Meta, users aren’t actively looking to buy but are instead engaged in scrolling and entertainment.

This results in lower conversion intent initially, but Meta’s algorithm excels at using data to find audiences likely to respond to your ads.

In some industries or for certain products, Meta Ads can outperform Google in terms of ROAS by effectively engaging a wider audience at a lower cost per impression or click.

Whether Google’s higher ROAS or Meta’s potential for creative storytelling suits your business better depends on your ability to match platform strengths with your product type and budget.

4. Targeting

Google and Meta offer vastly different targeting capabilities, each leveraging their unique strengths to connect with audiences effectively.

Google initially built its reputation on search ads, but its advertising ecosystem has significantly expanded.

Today, you can run various types of campaigns, including:

• Search Ads: Text-based ads triggered by specific keywords.

• Display Ads: Image and banner ads that appear across the Google Display Network, reaching 90% of internet users.

• Shopping Ads: Product-specific ads, complete with images, pricing, and reviews, shown in search results for product-related queries.

• YouTube Ads: Video ads appearing before, during, or after content on YouTube, or even as standalone campaigns targeting engaged video audiences.

• Performance Max Campaigns: A recent addition that combines multiple ad formats (search, display, shopping, YouTube, etc.) under a single campaign, using AI to optimize placements for conversions.

Google’s targeting combines keyword relevance with demographic and behavioral data, giving you a powerful way to reach users with high intent across a variety of formats.

On Meta, targeting has traditionally been done manually, using detailed interest and behavior-based segments to pinpoint specific audiences.

However, the landscape is evolving.

As you already know and Advantage+ Campaigns are taking targeting away from the advertiser in favor of automation with AI and machine learning to automatically optimize targeting.

This why Messaging Matters More Than Ever!

With both platforms increasingly leaning on AI to refine audience targeting, the focus shifts to the messaging—your ad copy and media need to resonate deeply with your audience.

The better your messaging, the more likely your ads will capture attention and drive conversions, regardless of how the platforms optimize targeting.

5. Insights

Both Google and Meta provide analytics and reporting tools to help advertisers track performance, but they share a significant challenge: accurate attribution.

Google’s data-driven attribution model typically provides more nuanced insights because it evaluates all the touchpoints leading to a conversion and assigns credit proportionally.

However, this precision isn’t perfect and can become clouded by cross-device activity and privacy constraints.

Meta has a reputation for attributing as many conversions as possible to its ads.

While this may create an optimistic view of performance, it often exaggerates the true impact of campaigns.

Advertisers must critically analyze these numbers rather than taking them at face value.

While both platforms offer robust reporting dashboards, they are often limited in capturing the full customer journey accurately.

Recent privacy policies like GDPR, CCPA, and iOS updates have added to these limitations, making it harder to track and attribute conversions.

To tackle these challenges, both platforms have adopted server-side tracking (like Google's Conversion API and Meta's Conversions API).

While effective, implementing these tools requires technical expertise, making it critical for businesses to invest in proper integration.

Conclusion

Google Ads and Meta Ads each bring unique strengths and challenges to your marketing strategy.

Google dominates in capturing high-intent audiences, offering precision targeting and reliable (though expensive) returns on ad spend.

Meta excels at mass reach and creative storytelling.

Success isn’t about choosing one over the other but about understanding their differences and strategically integrating them.

Testing both platforms is essential for discovering the best fit for your goals, industry, and audience.

Are your ads set up to leverage both Google and Meta to their fullest potential?

Whether you're scaling an e-commerce store or promoting local services, aligning the right platform with your goals is critical.