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Both Ground attack directives and Strategic bombing directives allow you to attack ports. From what I understand from the manual ground attack on ports seems to cause disruption , interdiction and damage to freight, while strategic bombing basically causes structural damage to the port. But which one to choose? I'm currently about 20 turns into the full 1943-1945 and as I'm playing the Allies ports in Italy are a big focus for me. I want to stop Axis supplies coming into the ports. Yet both ground attack on ports and strategic bombing on ports seem potentially effective. I'm confused.

The easiest way to shut down a port is to do naval interdiction missions on the water hexes adjacent to the port/s you want to shut down. If all water routes have enemy interdiction levels two higher than friendly interdiction levels the port can't import/export anything no matter how little damage the port has.

This is easier than directly target the port because it is very hard to do 100% damage to factories partly because of fog of war and partly because of repairs (ports size 1-3 repair 9% per turn, ports 4-6 6%).

An alternative to doing naval interdiction missions is to move amphibious hq's so that they are adjacent to or in all water hexes next to a port which will block all cargoship and troopship movement.

There is still some utility in directly bombing ports because damaged ports produce less friendly interdiction and ports with 5% or more damage only operate at 1/2 of tonnage capacity.

The difference between tactical vs strategic bombing is the size of raids and their frequency. Generally ordering tactical bombing of ports/railyards will result in more damge but higher losses/fatigue.