Google Ads vs. StackAdapt

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

StackAdapt's programmatic buys are great for a quick awareness campaign to reach the most eyeballs. Solid user segmentation from 3rd party sources that is available almost immediately. The platform is less proficient at converting users, though I've never had sufficient volume to test if this works better for enterprise-level clients with more conversion data

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

• Audience targeting - there are so many options for both B2C and B2B audiences, from browsing behavior audiences to account-based marketing audiences to CRM lists. There's a way to find your ideal audience no matter their industry.
• Pixel setup and management are pretty easy. It uses a universal pixel that you can easily place on your site. We use Google Tag Manager for this. Then, you can create any number of conversion events and easily implement them, also with Google Tag Manager, so we can trust we're getting good tracking.
• It seems many display ad platforms lack optimization tools, but StackAdapt makes it easy to adjust, add, or remove audiences, pause certain website categories, exclude batches of websites, pause individual ads, and really fine-tune the targeting as you see what works and what doesn't.

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

• There has been occasional slopping maintenance of the campaigns, and we have to follow up with questions about spending spikes or significant changes in delivery CPMs.
• Account rep knowledge can sometimes be lacking. When we question our reps about performance, we sometimes get confusing or nonsensical answers.
• The reporting UI is definitely clunky and unintuitive.

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

The platform is easy to use and understand whether it is being used as self-serve or a managed service. The audience targeting is solid, and array of placements is versatile. With these, the level of engagement for video content is usually great

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

It is very user friendly and if any team members need further help, we are able to easily access their customer service team for hands on assistance with an actual human being, not a robot. Their team has been incredibly kind, understanding and thorough. It is really a great all in one tool for a business who relies greatly on advertising campaigns.

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

Support has been exceptional. Our dedicated team is always available and ready to answer any questions that may arise. We receive updates from them on a regular basis and they go above and beyond providing assistance when needed. The team is absolutely one of the bright spots in our relationship with StackAdapt

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

StackAdapt is significantly less expensive than The Trade Desk. StackAdapt doesn't have campaign minimums, unlike The Trade Desk, meaning you can experiment with a lower ad spend to gain client confidence before investing at a larger level. Plus they don't lock you into an annual contract or anything long term. It feels very similar to The Trade Desk but without the high contract.

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

• Excellent traffic from our ads. Traffic exceeded our forecast.
• Excellent management of our budget. We did not spend near as much as we budgeted for the response we received through our test.
• The lead conversion was not expected to be high due to the type of content we deployed, but we received zero conversions, well below anticipated when compared to other ads for the same content.

Incentivized