They do two different jobs and the second one is cheaper.

Facebook interrupts somebody who was not thinking about you and makes him want your product. Google catches him after he has already decided he wants one and is figuring out where to buy it. That second guy is far closer to a card, which is why the return on Google is usually higher and the volume is usually lower. There are only so many people typing "ice fishing rod" this week.

The two also feed each other. Run Facebook long enough and brand searches for your name start climbing, because people who saw the ad go look you up later. If you are not there when they do, somebody else is. Most brands we work with run both, with Meta driving the demand and Google catching it on the way out.

Yes, and it is usually the first thing we turn on.

Your competitors can legally bid on your name. If they are, a searcher who typed your brand specifically gets shown theirs first. You are paying to be outbid on a customer you already earned.

It is also the cheapest traffic in the account by a wide margin, because Google charges less when the ad matches the search closely. And brand search controls what shows up: your best sellers, your current promotion, and a link to the page you want them on instead of whatever Google decided to rank that day.

Shopping is the row of product photos with prices at the top of the results. If you sell physical gear, it is usually the highest returning campaign on the account.

The catch is that it runs off your product feed, not off ad copy. Google reads your titles, descriptions, images, and attributes straight out of your store. Most outdoor brands have feeds written for humans browsing a website, not for a search engine matching a query, so their products quietly never show. Fixing the feed is most of the work, and it is work that keeps paying after it is done.

Ask them for the search terms report from last month.

That report shows every phrase that actually triggered your ads, which is different from the keywords anyone chose. If nobody has been through it recently, you are paying for "how to sharpen a hunting knife" and "used treestands for sale" and every other search that will never end in an order.

The other tell is Performance Max running by itself with no Search campaign beside it. That is the setting an agency picks when nobody is paying attention, because it requires no work and the reporting looks fine.

No. You set the budget and it goes straight to Google. We don't mark it up and we don't take a cut. Nobody here has a reason to talk you into spending more than you should.

Faster than Meta, because the intent is already there. Brand and Shopping campaigns can produce in the first couple of weeks. Non-brand search takes longer, because the first month is spent finding out which searches convert and cutting the ones that do not.

Before any of it means anything, conversion tracking has to be right. A surprising number of accounts we take over are reporting numbers that are not real, and that is the first thing we check. First 30 days of management are free.

Every week, with a written recap the same day so nothing lives only in somebody's memory. You get a dedicated account manager, not a rotating support queue. And new campaign ideas and creative come to you without you asking for them, which is the part most brands tell us was missing at their last agency.