TLDR;
- Stop asking "Google vs. Meta." The right question is "When and for whom?" Google harvests existing demand from people actively searching. Meta creates new demand by showing your products to people who didn't know they needed them.
- Your most important metric isn't ROAS; it's your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Knowing how much a customer is truly worth tells you how much you can afford to spend to acquire them. This article includes an interactive calculator to figure yours out.
- For Google, success comes from nailing search intent. You need to target keywords that show someone is ready to buy, not just browsing. Think "men's black leather chelsea boots size 10" not "men's shoes".
- For Meta, success is about your audience and creative. The algorithm is smart, but you need to feed it the right signals with a proper funnel structure (ToFu, MoFu, BoFu) and ads that stop the scroll.
- Most campaigns fail because of a weak offer or a bad website, not the ad platform. A brilliant ad can't save a confusing product page with no reviews. Get the foundations right before you spend a penny.
I see this question almost every day. "Should my e-commerce brand use Google Ads or Meta Ads?" People treat it like a football match, picking a side and defending it to the death. The truth is, it's the wrong question entirely. It's like asking a builder if they should use a hammer or a screwdriver. The answer is, "Well, what are you trying to build?"
Both platforms can print money for e-commerce brands. We've seen it happen time and time again. I remember one campaign we managed for a subscription box that hit a 1000% return on ad spend using Meta Ads. We've also used Google Ads as part of a strategy that took a client's cost per acquisition from £100 down to just £7. The platform wasn't the magic ingredient. The strategy was.
This isn't about picking a winner. It's about understanding the fundamental difference in how customers behave on each platform and building a data-driven framework to decide where to invest your money and when. Google is for capturing intent. Meta is for creating demand. Forget the "vs." - let's talk about how to use them together to build a proper growth engine for your store.
Why you're probably measuring the wrong thing
Before we even touch the platforms, we need to sort out your maths. Most e-commerce founders are obsessed with Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). They see a 2x ROAS and panic, or a 5x ROAS and think they've cracked it. Tbh, ROAS is a vanity metric. It tells you what's happening *today*, but it tells you nothing about the actual health of your business.
The only number that truly matters is the relationship between your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). In simple terms: how much profit does a customer generate for you over their entire relationship with your brand, and how much did it cost you to get them in the door?
If you know a customer is worth £500 in profit to you over the next two years, would you be scared to spend £100 to acquire them? Of course not. It's a fantastic deal. But if you're only looking at the £50 they spent on their first order, that £100 CAC looks like a disaster. This is the maths that separates the brands that scale from the ones that stall. You need to stop thinking about a single transaction and start thinking about the value of a long-term customer.
Calculating LTV can feel a bit abstract, so I've built a simple calculator below to give you a rough idea. Play around with the numbers for your own business. This is the figure that should guide your entire advertising budget and strategy.
Once you know your LTV, you can work backwards. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to CAC ratio. So, if your LTV is £180, you can afford to spend up to £60 to acquire a new customer and still have a very profitable business. This number, your target CAC, is your new north star. It's the number that tells you if your campaigns on Google, Meta, or any other platform are actually working. Without it, you're just guessing. Knowing this figure is the foundation of any paid advertising strategy built for real business growth.
Google Ads: The Art of Harvesting Intent
Think about the last time you used Google. You probably weren't just browsing; you had a specific question or a problem you needed to solve. "Best waterproof running jacket," "emergency plumber near me," "how to fix a leaky tap." This is the power of Google Ads: you are getting your product in front of people who are *actively searching for a solution* that you provide. You're not interrupting them; you're helping them. This is why it's often the best place for new e-commerce stores to start.
For e-commerce, your main weapons on Google are Shopping Ads and Search Ads (often now combined in Performance Max campaigns). Shopping ads are the product listings with images and prices you see at the top of the search results. Search ads are the text-based ads that appear above the organic results.
The entire game on Google is about understanding and targeting user intent. A person searching for "shoes" has very different intent from someone searching for "size 9 wide-fit brown brogues for wedding". The first person is browsing, the second is ready to buy. Your job is to focus your budget on the second person.
This means your keyword strategy has to be incredibly precise. You need to bid on long-tail keywords (phrases of 3+ words) that show clear commercial intent. Think about the words people use when they're about to spend money:
- -> Product-specific terms: [Brand Name] [Product Model]
- -> "Buy now" terms: buy, discount, deal, sale, coupon
- -> Comparison terms: vs, review, comparison
- -> Local terms: near me, [City Name]
Getting this right can be tricky. It's easy to waste a lot of money on broad keywords that bring in traffic that never converts. To help you visualise this, here's a simple flowchart that breaks down keyword intent.
You must also be ruthless with your negative keywords. This is a list of terms you tell Google *not* to show your ads for. If you sell high-end, premium coffee beans, you want to add "free," "cheap," "instant," and "nespresso pods" to your negative keyword list. This stops you from wasting money on clicks from people who are never going to buy your product. A well-managed Google Ads account often has a negative keyword list that is far longer than its list of targeted keywords. If you're running ads in a competitive market, like many businesses trying to get seen with Google Ads in London, a precise negative keyword strategy is absolutly non-negotiable.
Meta Ads: The Science of Manufacturing Demand
If Google is a library where people go to find specific information, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is a bustling high street or a popular magazine. People aren't there to search for your product. They're there to see what their friends are up to, look at photos, and be entertained. Your job is to interrupt them with something so compelling, so relevant, that they stop scrolling and pay attention.
This is a completely different ball game. You're not harvesting existing demand; you're creating it from scratch. This makes it incredibly powerful for brands with visual products, innovative products people don't know exist yet, or products that appeal to specific lifestyles and interests.
The first mistake people make on Meta is with their campaign objective. They see the "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" objectives and think, "That's what I need!" Wrong. You've just told Facebook's powerful algorithm to find you the cheapest possible impressions. It will dutifully go and find people within your audience who are least likely to click, engage, or buy anything, because their attention is cheap. You are literally paying to reach non-customers. For almost any e-commerce brand, you should be using the "Sales" objective and optimising for conversions like "Add to Cart" or "Purchase". Let the algorithm find you people who actually buy things.
The second, and most important, part is audience targeting. Meta's power lies in its data. You can target people based on their interests, behaviours, demographics, and much more. The key is to structure your campaigns in a logical funnel.
Your best audiences, especially at the start, will be your retargeting (MoFu/BoFu) and Lookalike audiences (ToFu). A Lookalike audience is where Meta takes a source audience you provide (like a list of your past customers) and finds millions of other users who share similar characteristics. This is insanely powerful. You're essentially cloning your best customers. As you gather more data, you should test lookalikes based on higher-intent actions, like people who have added to cart or initiated checkout.
The creative is the other half of the equation on Meta. Because you're interrupting people, your ad has to earn their attention in the first three seconds. This means high-quality images and, more importantly, video. User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos—which look like they were filmed by a real customer on their phone—often outperform slick, high-budget productions because they feel more authentic and native to the platform. One campaign we worked on for an app generated over 45,000 signups at under £2 each by heavily relying on this style of creative across Meta and TikTok.
Meta is where we've seen some absolutly staggering results for e-commerce clients when the product, offer and creative align.
The Framework: A Data-Driven Decision Tree
So, how do you decide where to put your first £1,000? Or your next £10,000? It depends on your business stage, your product, and your goals. This isn't a one-size-fits-all answer. Below is a decision tree to guide your thinking. Find the scenario that best fits your brand.
It's Probably Not the Platform, It's Your Offer
I have to be brutally honest here. You can have the most perfectly structured ad account in the world, but if your offer is weak or your website is terrible, you will fail. I've seen more money wasted because of a poor landing page than because of bad keyword targeting. The ad platform is just the delivery truck; you're responsible for the package it's carrying.
Before you blame Google or Meta, look at your own house:
- The Offer: Is it compelling? Why should someone buy from *you* right now? Free shipping, a welcome discount, a bundle deal, a strong guarantee – these aren't just extras; they are critical parts of your marketing. A simple product with a killer offer will always beat a great product with a boring one. In our experience, many campaigns where businesses find their UK ads are not converting can trace the root cause back to a misaligned or weak offer for the target audience.
- The Website: Does your site inspire trust? When a visitor lands on your product page, do they feel comfortable pulling out their credit card? High-quality product photos (and video!), clear and persuasive descriptions, customer reviews, trust badges (like secure payment logos), and an easy-to-find contact page are non-negotiable. I once reviewed a store for handcrafted jewellery. The ads were getting clicks, but no one was buying. The reason was simple: the product photos were dark, there were no descriptions, and the site looked untrustworthy. Fixing the website is always priority number one.
Don't spend a single pound on ads until these two elements are solid. Otherwise, you're just paying to show people a leaky bucket.
Your E-commerce Ads Action Plan
To pull this all together, here's a table outlining a simplified, actionable plan based on your business stage. This is the main advice I have for you:
| Stage | Primary Goal | Recommended Platform Focus | Key Tactics | Core Metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch (0-100 orders) | Validate Product & Get Initial Sales | 80% Google / 20% Meta | Google Shopping on transactional keywords. Meta for retargeting website visitors and cart abandoners. | Cost Per Purchase (CPP) |
| Growth (100-1000 orders) | Scale & Build Audiences | 50% Google / 50% Meta | Expand Google to commercial intent keywords. Build Meta ToFu campaigns with purchase Lookalikes. Optimise MoFu/BoFu. | Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) |
| Maturity (1000+ orders) | Maximise Profitability & LTV | 40% Google / 60% Meta | Defend branded search on Google. Heavily invest in Meta for new customer acquisition and retention (upselling past purchasers). Test new creatives constantly. | LTV:CAC Ratio |
When You Need an Expert Eye
As you can see, this stuff can get complicated fast. This framework will get you 80% of the way there, but that last 20% is where real, sustained growth happens. It's about constant testing, deep data analysis, and understanding the nuances of each platform as they change week by week. It's about knowing when to kill a failing ad set and when to give it more time to learn. It's about spotting opportunities in your data that an automated system might miss.
Running ads is not a 'set it and forget it' task. It's a full-time specialism. If you're busy running your e-commerce business—managing inventory, dealing with customer service, developing new products—you likely don't have the time to become a world-class advertising expert as well. And that's okay.
If you've hit a plateau, you're not sure why your ads aren't performing, or you simply want to hand over the reins to a team that lives and breathes this stuff every single day, it might be time to get some help. We offer a completely free, no-obligation consultation where we'll go through your ad accounts and your wider strategy to identify your biggest opportunities for growth. It's a chance to get a second opinion and a clear, actionable plan. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to schedule one.
