Google Ads vs. SEOTesting.com

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

SEOTesting.com is great in monitoring the results of implemented SEO optimisations. SEOTesting.com also has extensive content analysis reports that make it really easy to find long hanging fruits for content optimisation. However, I would not recommend SEOTesting.com for rank tracking and it has no tools for technical SEO. But if you pair SEOTesting.com with some other SEO tools of your preference, you get a really valuable toolset with decent pricing.

• 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

• Visualization of data
• Tracking changes to website over time
• Provides p-values for change impacts, helping you to sort out whether your "result" is just random noise

• 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

• SEOTesting.com is NOT all-in-one SEO tool. But what it does, it does really well.
• Rank Tracking requires to fill landing page per keyword. That doesn't make sense as the desired landing page is not always the best ranking landing page for each keyword.
• Dashboards timelines should have some options to select only the desired timeframe. Then it would be sometimes easier to look at only the last two months for example.

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

The account person is quick to respond, though issues reported required support of other teams with no SLA. The data is easily comprehensible and the platform is incredibly versatile. Sometimes scanning problems take weeks to diagnose and fix. The learning curve for SEOTesting.com is minimal

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

SEOTesting.com is a very specific, focused too. It's not "better than" the other tools. It does something they don't do well: gets data from your SEO results out into an easily-read, easily-reported format so you can 1. learn from what's working and what's not 2. show your team what success & failure look like 3. demonstrate to your boss/client the short-run benefits of investing in SEO Search Console has all the data in it. In fact, SEOTesting.com gets its data from Search Console. But you are going to waste your time and your colleagues time if you try to monitor granular, week-by-week progress for different pages in Search Console. SEOTesting is awesome at that. Use Ahrefs and/or Semrush to get ideas on how to improve your website's content and tech SEO. Then make the changes. Then use SEOTesting.com to find out if it worked!

• 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

• I get more results
• I get results faster
• I get data to present the results to client