Adobe Advertising Cloud vs. Google Ads

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Advertising Cloud
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
AdobeAdvertising Cloud (formerly Adobe Media Optimizer) is an ad management product and is part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. It delivers a rules-based bidding solution that improves the performance of search engine marketing campaigns and is integrated with Adobe Analytics.N/A
Google Ads
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is Google's pay-per-click online advertising program. With Google Ads users set their budget and choose where their ads appear in search listings, and on partner websites. Google Ads uses cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.
$500
in Ads credit in the first 60 days
Pricing
Adobe Advertising CloudGoogle Ads
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Offer A
$500
in Ads credit in the first 60 days
Offer B
$1500
in Ads credit in the first 60 days
Offer C
$3000
in Ads credit in the first 60 days
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Advertising CloudGoogle Ads
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Advertising CloudGoogle Ads
Features
Adobe Advertising CloudGoogle Ads
Ad Network Integration
Comparison of Ad Network Integration features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Advertising Cloud
6.6
Ratings
11% below category average
Google Ads
-
Ratings
Data Transfer6.80 Ratings00 Ratings
DSP integration6.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad Campaigns
Comparison of Ad Campaigns features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Advertising Cloud
5.8
Ratings
29% below category average
Google Ads
3.8
Ratings
5% below category average
Ad campaign creation7.10 Ratings2.30 Ratings
Ad deployment7.00 Ratings2.30 Ratings
Display advertising4.70 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Ad display and retargeting segmentation5.20 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Sequence targeting5.20 Ratings1.00 Ratings
Contextual advertising00 Ratings2.20 Ratings
Social advertising00 Ratings1.00 Ratings
Ad Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Ad Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Advertising Cloud
6.8
Ratings
13% below category average
Google Ads
6.3
Ratings
19% above category average
Ad dashboards6.20 Ratings2.30 Ratings
Ad performance reports5.90 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Ad conversion tracking7.40 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Ad attribution reporting6.70 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Cross-channel ad management7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad forecasting and optimization7.20 Ratings2.30 Ratings
Ad Auctions
Comparison of Ad Auctions features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Advertising Cloud
-
Ratings
Google Ads
7.0
Ratings
3% above category average
Ad bidding00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe Advertising CloudGoogle Ads
Small Businesses
Google Ad Manager
Google Ad Manager
Score 8.5 out of 10
Serpstat
Serpstat
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk
Score 9.0 out of 10
WordStream
WordStream
Score 6.9 out of 10
Enterprises
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
Score 9.0 out of 10
Adobe Advertising Cloud
Adobe Advertising Cloud
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe Advertising CloudGoogle Ads
Likelihood to Recommend
7.3
(0 ratings)
5.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
1.8
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
3.3
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Advertising CloudGoogle Ads
Likelihood to Recommend
The platform is highly useful for digital ads marketing and campaign management. The platform provides a custom set of templates and tools to your ad production or designer team to create thousand of ads very quickly for your products or brands. To your marketing team, the tool provides full control over campaign strategy in terms of how to present relevant sets of ads to your web and app visitors based on customer behavior, demography, and age group. I could not think about any scenario where this platform is less suitable if you are looking for an advertising platform.
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Clients who are selling products such as dresses, clothes, jewelry, beauty products, etc., generally work well. Also, in some cases, it doesn't fetch a good ROAS for very small business owners. If a client is already doing well in SEO, the probability for it to perform well over Google Ads is always enhanced, and if it doesn't have a good organic reach, Google Ads also suffers.
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Pros
  • Automation - One of Adobe Marketing Cloud’s amazing marketing solutions is Adobe Campaign. This allows users to implement marketing automation to increase their campaign productivity and deliver an amazing customer experience. I can even set up users so they can build individual customer profiles based on the interests, actions, and preferences that are tracked through different marketing channels.
  • A/B Split Testing – Most platforms have this now and most do not know how to even use it. However, the only way for a user to know how their marketing can be improved is to get a clear idea of how it is performing. But if all their data is in separate locations, it’s difficult to know which image, text or video is leading to sales or conversions. Adobe Marketing Cloud helps with keeping all of this clear for everyone on board.
  • Social Analytics – when you or your customers are looking to improve their social marketing results, this platform offers Adobe Social, which is a social management platform that allows users to monitor conversations, promote and publish content, and analyze and engage with followers. One of the best parts is that the system automatically attaches tracking codes to users’ social content to identify what content drives engagement. It is a very powerful tool.
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  • Keyword Research - Google Ads has a handy built in tool that helps determine important keywords to target both for Ads & SEO
  • Intuitive Analytics Dashboad - Google Ads makes it fairly simple to see and analyze important metrics on how your ads are running week after week
  • Intuitive Setup - Google Ads makes it easy to figure out how to run ads with little to no training (although training is highly recommended to run effective ads), as their interface is clean and easy to figure out (unlike competing products).
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Cons
  • As with most Adobe products, it can be a little tedious to use and requires a bit of extra training and "googling" around to make sure you are getting things right. It has improved over time within the entire Adobe suite, and I anticipate that this will be true of this as well.
  • Adobe training and learning platforms can include a lot of technical terminology and jargon that makes it difficult for a novice to understand without feeling like they need a whole new education.
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  • Google's heavy dependence on AI makes many of the campaign behavior inscrutable and, often, it performs poorly as a result.
  • Their responsive ads, for example, which are heavily recommended by them, often perform significantly worse than normal text ads.
  • Their support, while relatively quick, becomes useless if you need any deep insight/help.
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Likelihood to Renew
As of this writing, we have just discontinued our use of Adobe Media Optimizer. Other vendors gave us a better rate, a better contract option, and the product is just better than what we had with Adobe at the time. We may revisit Adobe again at the future, but it seems like they have a lot of work to do to catch up with the leader in the space
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As of today Google AdWords leads approximately 90% of paid searches globally. There is practically is no other network that can offer such a relevant and engaging audience at the price. The PPC model is also unique in that no media dollars are wasted, since PPC models ensure brand interaction versus traditional media which has heavy ad avoidance and clutter but still charges a hefty amount for ads.
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Usability
It definitely takes some instruction to get to be able to use the system. One would struggle trying to get it to work without any previous experience with it. If you are famailiar with the interface it is actually quite fast and easy to maneuver around.
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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.
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Support Rating
The reason being that support is extremely hard to reach, after the initial training period was over support became much harder to get from Adobe Media Optimizer's customer service agents which no one wants to deal with and we had to wait a long time for many inquiries to get answered
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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
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
Daily use with advanced account structures. Familiarity with reporting/api and complex setups.
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Implementation Rating
It was difficult initially, but the implementation of the Dynamic Tag Manager was a big help and timesaver.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
It was a step up from Marin in terms of UI. Very similar functionality to Marin. Compared to Kenshoo Search and Google Marketing Platform it was probably not as advanced but offered the benefit of integrating with other products in the Adobe stack like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign.
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Google Ads remains at the top advertising channel within our business for both lead volume and revenue generation, whilst maintaining a reasonable cost per lead (CPL). Both Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads have a much lower CPL, those channels don't contribute as much revenue and lead generation.
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Return on Investment
  • Adobe Media Optimizer delved deeper than other search engines could and actually provided us very useful information regarding how keywords were performing.
  • The tool itself at first was quite useful in speeding our days up in being an all in one solution however it has various bugs that caused us to double-check our work basically costing us more time when using this tool.
  • A large impact I had to how we were tracking our keywords was a bug with Adobe Media Optimizer informing us that we were not using a few keywords when it turns out we actually were and the tool was in fact incorrect in identifying what we actually were using.
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  • Once we got the hang of it and had everything setup, it was a great monthly expense that we could count on ROI from. Either by obtaining new customers or literally staying above our competition in search rankings.
  • We also started consulting on ads for customers and helping them set things up, which created a new revenue stream for us.
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ScreenShots