Should Every E-commerce Brand Run Google Ads?

Everyone should run Google Ads eventually. Almost nobody should run it first. If you are under 20k a month on Meta, Google is usually not worth your attention yet.

The threshold

If you are spending under 20k per month on Meta, adding Google Ads is usually the wrong next move. Not because Google is a bad channel, but because of what Google actually does in an e-commerce funnel.

This is a rule of thumb, not a law. Some businesses genuinely perform better on Google than on Meta. Check whether you are one of them rather than assuming it.

Visual content is what converts in e-commerce

For e-commerce specifically, the thing that makes someone want a product is seeing it. The texture, the scale, the person using it, the before and after. That is a visual job, and Meta is built for visual discovery at scale.

Google is a text and intent channel first. It is exceptional at catching someone who already knows what they want. It is far weaker at making someone want something they had not considered.

Google harvests demand it did not create

Google sits middle to bottom of funnel for e-commerce brands. Someone searches your brand name, or a product category they are already shopping for, and Google puts you in front of them.

That is genuinely valuable. But notice what it depends on. Something has to have created that demand first.

The trap: if nothing is creating demand, Google has nothing to harvest. You end up paying to catch people who were already coming to you, then calling it incremental revenue.

That is how brands end up with a Google account showing a beautiful ROAS that adds almost nothing to the actual business. The channel is not lying. It is just taking credit for demand that Meta, or your organic, or your email list created.

What the right order looks like

Scale Meta first until it is genuinely working and you are spending meaningfully. At that point you are creating real demand, and a lot of it is leaking away into searches that a competitor is currently catching.

Now Google becomes one of the strongest channels you have. Brand search protects what you built. Shopping and Performance Max catch the category demand your creative generated. The same budget does far more work than it would have done a year earlier.

The summary

Google is a very useful platform and everyone should run it. The question is never whether, it is when. Under 20k a month on Meta, the answer is almost always not yet.