My First Google Ads and Meta Ads Experiments: What I Learned From Both
Published 3 min read
I've now had the opportunity to work with both Google Ads and Meta Ads in practice projects. The platforms are both used for advertising, but the experience of working with them is quite different.
Google Search begins with something very important: a person's search. Meta works differently. People aren't necessarily opening Instagram or Facebook because they want to search for a rental property or another product at that exact moment.
That difference changed the way I started thinking about campaigns.
Search intent vs audience discovery
With Google Search, the user is already expressing some kind of intent through a search query. That means keywords and search terms become important parts of the campaign.
With Meta, the platform has much more responsibility for finding people within the audience who are likely to respond. That makes creative and audience signals particularly interesting.
My two experiments made this difference much easier to understand than simply reading about it.
The numbers were also very different
My Google campaign recorded 932 impressions and 58 clicks. My Meta campaign recorded 10,158 impressions and 168 unique clicks.
| Metric | Google Ads | Meta Ads |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign type | Search | Social |
| Objective | Lead generation | Lead generation |
| Location | Gurugram | Gurugram |
| Spend | ~₹939 | ₹1,355.91 |
| Impressions | 932 | 10,158 |
| Clicks | 58 | 168 unique clicks |
| Leads / conversions | 3 verified forms, 6 reported conversions | 57 reported leads |
| CTR | 6.22% | Not recorded |
| CPC | ₹16.20 | Not recorded |
| CPL | Not calculated, conversions unverified | ₹23.79 |
The campaigns were not identical, so these numbers should not be treated as a controlled comparison. They had different platforms, budgets, campaign structures, audiences and environments.
The purpose of putting them next to each other is not to declare a winner. It's to understand how differently two advertising systems can behave.
Google taught me more about intent and tracking
The Google campaign made me pay much more attention to search intent and conversion measurement.
The most important issue I encountered was the difference between the six conversions reported in Google Ads and the three form submissions I could personally verify. That forced me to investigate tracking, which I wrote about in my first Google Ads campaign.
It was a useful experience because I realized that campaign optimization depends on having reasonably trustworthy data.
Meta taught me more about creative delivery
The Meta experiment gave me a different lesson. I saw how creative delivery can affect what gets attention and where the budget goes.
The image creative generated the leads in my experiment, while the video did not. The original 3 BHK creative also did not receive the delivery I expected. That made me think more carefully about how I would structure future creative tests, as described in my first Meta Ads campaign.
What I take from both
I don't think the lesson is that one platform is better. The more useful lesson for me is that they require different ways of thinking.
Google made me think more about:
Search → Intent → Click → Landing page → Conversion → Tracking
Meta made me think more about:
Audience → Creative → Delivery → Engagement → Lead
In reality, both involve all of these things. But the emphasis can feel different when you're actually managing the campaign.
I'm building my career in performance marketing, with a focus on Google Ads, Meta Ads, analytics and conversion tracking. This website documents the projects I work on while learning, including what worked, what didn't, and what I would test next.