Google Ads vs. MatchCraft AdVantage

Google Ads is a useful advertising tool to build brand exposure and generate lead volumes for your chosen product. Whilst it can be costly at times due to competitor bidding strategies and requires constant monitoring to ensure campaigns perform as expected, it typically provides the desired quality and quantity of leads for custom budgets.

Incentivized

If you have multiple campaigns running at the same time, you need your campaign setups to be quick and easy, or you have multiple users managing campaigns, then MatchCraft Advantage is right for you. It also performs well with both small and large budgets. If you want to do re-targeting but don't want/know how to implement the tag, MatchCraft has built-in features for that. However if you want to run video campaigns and campaigns in specific mobile apps, then for now MatchCraft will not work for you

Incentivized

• Automated targeting via Smart Shopping campaign. It's one of the best campaign types in Google Ads. In the beginning, you may see lower revenue and ROAS, but once you give some meaningful time to your campaign, it is most likely to perform well.
• Smart bidding strategies: Google Ads has developed some really great bidding strategies such as maximizing conversion and maximizing conversion with ROAS settings. Based on one's requirement and their goal with revenue and target ROAS, they can choose the appropriate bidding strategy.
• Reporting: A business owner and advertising must know about their audiences, how their campaigns have been performing, what's working and what's not, and for that reason, powerful, effective reporting is needed, and Google Ads provides rich details reporting that covers almost every aspect of a business.

Incentivized

• Automated bid adjustments for PPC campaigns. Manual bid strategies can be tedious to manage. MatchCraft's bidding system helps improve click throughs while keeping the click costs pretty low.
• The report generation features of the platform MatchCraft platform are easy to use and provide actionable data from campaigns. PDF reports require only a few clicks and there is also an interactive dashboard that gives all the key metrics in a graphical format. Both features are customizable.
• User management is a breeze in the MatchCraft platform. You can add, edit, activate, deactivate, and change the permissions as needed.

Incentivized

• If you don't know what you're doing, it will be a costly mistake. You need to target ads, and it is difficult the first time to do that.
• There isn't a feature to run an add for a couple set date spans, just hours you want to run them or a single date span.

Incentivized

• Not all Google/Bing features are available through the MatchCraft platform. Since they are limited to what is available in the API some features like video campaign management and specific app targeting are missing.
• Customized report scheduling is not yet available for each campaign and the automated reports can only be sent to one email address. Additional recipients have to be sent their's manually.
• Reports can take a little time to be generated. Not more than 1 minute but it can slow you down if you have multiple reports to send.

Incentivized

I think Google Ads is good for getting your company out there and becoming more visible to potential customers in general. However, for specific product launches, social media advertising might be a better fit. Also, our user base is younger so social media is a better channel for our target audience.

Incentivized

This is more of a subjective rating, because I think it can be increased with how much our ad spend is. The more of an ad spend, the more visibility we can get, and therefore all features can climb. With an overall larger presence the usability is that where we can get messages out quick, and that's the main thing we try to do with our campaigns.

Incentivized

We have not yet had an account rep who hasn't tried to bully me or other employees to raise our budgets. At the same time, several years ago, one attempted to help refine our ads and ended up changing the ads to be something we were not affiliated with

Incentivized

Daily use with advanced account structures. Familiarity with reporting/api and complex setups.

Our agency invests heavily in Google Ads (particularly paid search advertising) on behalf of our clients relative to competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo because Google is the top search engine in the world. Google collects the most search data which enables the company to improve its AI to drive better performance for agencies and brands. As such, our paid search and app install campaigns always start with Google. If a client has a large budget, we will allocate media dollars to other search engines, but in some cases, the entire search budget goes to Google because we see the best returns.

Incentivized

The interface on MatchCraft is much easier to get started with than the native PPC provider interfaces. MatchCraft finds ways of maximizing ROI within current spend target rather than recommending 'increased budget' as the fix for all issues. the reporting dashboard is also easier to use and report generation takes only a few clicks. The main downside is that MatchCraft is limited to what the PPC providers allow through the APIs

Incentivized

• Google Ads is often one of our highest ROI channels, especially when you factor in branded ads.
• Depending on the stage your business is in, search ads can be really powerful from an ROI perspective, providing an investment with a very high spend cap.
• If you do not manage the campaigns well though, you can quickly spend a lot of money on nothing. So make sure someone is keeping an eye on your account.

Incentivized

• It has allowed the company to handle a higher volume of campaigns at the same time.
• Click costs have been reduced across almost all campaigns while click rates have increased.
• Budget management (under/overspending) has been improved.

Incentivized