Do People Search For You, Or Not?
Everything else in this comparison is detail. The question is whether your customer, at the moment they decide they want what you sell, types it into Google.
When a hot water system fails at 6am, they search. When the power goes out, they search. When they lock themselves out, they search. That is captured demand, and Google Ads exists to stand in front of it. You are not persuading anyone, you are being present and credible at the exact second of need.
But nobody Googles "should I renovate the bathroom" the evening the thought first occurs. Nobody searches "childcare centre" before they have decided to start looking. Nobody types "should I get solar" at the moment a neighbour's panels catch their eye. Those decisions form slowly, and they form while people are scrolling. That is created demand, and it is what Meta is for.
How They Actually Compare.
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | Google Ads (Search) | |
|---|---|---|
| Demand | Creates it — reaches people who were not looking | Captures it — reaches people already searching |
| Intent per lead | Lower. They were interested, not ready. | Higher. They have a problem right now. |
| Cost per lead | Usually lower | Usually higher |
| Lead volume at the same budget | Higher | Capped by how many people search in your area |
| What drives performance | Creative. The hook is most of it. | Keywords, negatives and the landing page |
| Ongoing work | New creative every few weeks as audiences fatigue | Search term review, negative keywords, bid management |
| Follow-up speed needed | Critical — minutes, not hours | Important, but intent buys you some slack |
| Setup time | Days | Days |
| Geographic ceiling | Effectively none | Hard ceiling: you cannot buy searches that nobody makes |
| Best for | Renovations, solar, childcare, cosmetic, landscaping, pest plans | Emergency trades, plumbing, electrical, locksmiths, towing, repairs |
The row people underestimate is the geographic ceiling. In a suburb of 30,000 people there is a finite number of monthly searches for "emergency electrician". Once you are capturing them, Google has nothing left to sell you and growth has to come from somewhere else. Meta has no equivalent ceiling, which is why businesses that start on Google usually add Meta when they want to grow rather than when Google stops working.
Running Both Too Early.
The common mistake is splitting a small budget across two platforms so neither gets enough data. One channel with the whole budget behind it will beat two channels with half each almost every time, because both platforms need conversion volume to optimise and neither gets it when the budget is halved.
A workable sequence for most service businesses looks like this:
- Pick the channel that matches your urgency profile using the question at the top of this page.
- Run it for 60 to 90 days, with real creative and fast follow-up, until you know your cost per booked job rather than your cost per lead.
- Fix the follow-up before adding a second channel. Doubling lead volume into a broken follow-up process doubles the waste, not the revenue.
- Then add the second channel, funded by the results of the first rather than by splitting the original budget.
We manage either channel for $1,250 a month, or both together for $1,850. The fact that both costs roughly the same as one-and-a-half is deliberate; it should never be the reason you start both on day one.
Both Channels Fail At The Same Point.
Whichever you pick, the lead arrives as a name and a phone number, and then something has to happen. This is where most campaigns quietly fail, and it is not a platform problem.
We took over an account for a Melbourne renovation builder whose previous agency had generated roughly a thousand leads across twelve months on about $12,000 of spend. Five jobs. The ads were working; the follow-up was not. In the first month after we took over, with fewer leads and every one of them called quickly, six jobs were booked.
So before you spend a month deciding between platforms, be honest about what happens in your business when a lead arrives at 2pm on a Wednesday while you are on a job. If the answer is "it waits", that is the thing to fix first. That is the part we handle on the Full Funnel plan.