Meta boasts just under 4 billion monthly active users among its various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Just under 5 billion people, meanwhile, use Google products, from YouTube and Maps to Gmail and, of course, the search engine itself.
Suffice it to say: if you’re looking to drive awareness for your brand or products, advertising on Google or Meta is the way to do it.
If you’re new to awareness campaign ads, or even if you’ve been running these campaigns for a while, you may be wondering how to optimize your ads for success. In an ideal world, how long should you run awareness campaign ads on Meta and Google?
Read on as we answer that question and more.
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How many weeks should you run awareness campaign ads on Google and Meta?
Opinions differ on this, but most marketers agree that somewhere in the 2–8 week range is sufficient for awareness ads on Google or Meta, with 3–6 weeks being ideal. The amount of weeks you run an awareness campaign can vary depending on the type of campaign, the platform, and your goals.
If you’re looking for quick results, Meta awareness campaigns can be successful in a shorter amount of time. Meta recommends just 7 days as a baseline for an awareness campaign. Google awareness campaigns, on the other hand, typically benefit from a longer duration.
Event-focused campaigns may do better with a shorter time frame, around 2–4 weeks, to drive urgency. Remarketing campaigns, where your aim is to drive people back once they’ve already clicked through to your website or interacted with your campaign, can also perform better with a shorter time frame.
On the other hand, more traditional awareness-level campaigns on Google and Meta, where your goal is to boost awareness, familiarity, and recall, perform best when you let them run a bit longer — about 4-6 weeks or even longer. The same holds true for video campaigns where you want people to have multiple opportunities to see and ideally view your video.
Whether you’re advertising on Google or Meta, giving your awareness campaign enough time to run is important. Thirty days, or about 4 weeks, is a good baseline for either platform — particularly if you are leveraging any of the automation capabilities. These tools use machine learning to optimize performance and budget, but they need time for the algorithm to learn the quirks of your target audience in response to your campaign.
Best practices for setting awareness campaign timelines on Google and Meta
When setting awareness campaign timelines on Google and Meta, it’s good to be aware of the differences between the two platforms. While both Google and Meta offer access to the largest advertising audiences on the planet, they do have some key differences.
For one thing, people can be in a different state of mind when they are using either platform. This is a broad oversimplification, but Google products are typically used when people are seeking information, while people primarily use Meta to be social. So, your awareness ads should be tailored to these different goals.
Both platforms offer different nuances in their targeting options, as well, with Meta still allowing Lookalike Audiences (for now). And, Google offers daily budgeting, while you can set a daily or lifetime budget for Meta awareness campaigns.
Awareness ads on Google or Meta: The bottom line on timelines
When in doubt, a 30-day timeline is a good default setting for awareness-level advertising on either Google Ads or Meta. With time, you’ll learn what works best for your awareness advertising, and how long you need to run a campaign to see results.
For personalized advice on how to improve your campaign performance, contact the advertising experts at Your Marketing People.
