Most advice on this topic tells you Google Ads is for intent and Facebook Ads is for awareness, and leaves it at that. That's true enough, but it doesn't actually help you decide where to put your money. The choice comes down to how your customers buy, what they already know about your product category, and the market demand.
I spoke with our paid ads specialist, who has managed local lead gen, national campaigns, and e-commerce accounts across a wide range of industries. What follows is shaped by that conversation and by what we've seen work across real businesses with real budgets.
How the Two Platforms Actually Differ
Google Ads works like a net. People are already searching for a solution to their problem, and your ad catches them at that moment. They've got a leaking tap, they type "plumber near me," and your ad shows up. The intent is already there. You're just positioning yourself to capture it.
Facebook Ads (or Meta Ads) work more like a microphone. You're putting your message in front of people while they scroll through their feed. They haven't gone to Facebook looking to buy anything. They might be in the market for what you sell, or they might not even know your product exists yet. Your job is to get their attention and start a conversation.
This difference affects everything downstream: how you write your ads, the kinds of landing pages you need, how long it takes to see results, and what a realistic conversion path looks like.
Where Google Ads Works Best
Google Ads performs well when people already know that a solution to their problem exists. They have a burst pipe, and they know a plumber can fix it. They need a tax return done, and they know an accountant handles it. The search volume is there, the intent is clear, and the buying decision often happens quickly.
The speed advantage is worth mentioning, too. SEO can take months to gain traction in competitive industries. A Google Ads campaign can have your phone ringing the same day you launch it. For businesses where the customer need is urgent, and the category is well understood, speed matters a lot.
We've seen this work consistently for trades, professional services, SaaS products solving known pain points, and e-commerce in established product categories. If people are already searching for what you sell, Google Ads gives you a direct line to them.
The Search Demand Ceiling
The limitation with Google Ads is that your results are capped by how many people are actually searching. There are only so many people looking for an electrician in a given suburb each month, and once you've captured that demand, increasing your budget won't generate more of it.
We've seen this play out with local trades businesses that run suburb-level campaigns. The campaigns perform well, the cost per lead is good, but the volume tops out quickly because the search demand has a hard ceiling. If 30 people a month search for your service in your area, that's all you get.
This is usually the point where businesses start looking at Facebook Ads as an additional channel. The goal shifts from capturing existing demand to generating new demand.
Where Facebook Ads Work Best
Facebook is well-suited to situations where your audience has a problem but hasn't started looking for a solution yet. A good example: a company developed an organic plant-strengthening spray. Gardeners knew their plants were struggling, but they had no idea such a product existed. There was almost no search volume for it on Google, because people don't search for things they don't know about. But running ads to a gardening audience on Facebook, showing before-and-after results, worked well because it introduced the solution directly to people who already had the problem.
Facebook also tends to work well for products and services with longer buying cycles. A plumber who does emergency repairs and a plumber who does full bathroom renovations might be the same business, but the ad strategy should be different. Emergency jobs are immediate and search-driven. Bathroom renovations involve weeks of browsing, comparing, and budgeting. That's a buying process you can enter early through Facebook and stay present throughout.
Channelling Desire
One concept that experienced Facebook advertisers come back to again and again is the idea of channelling existing desire. It comes from Eugene Schwartz's Breakthrough Advertising: people already want something. Your ad's job is to connect your product to that existing want.
How this looks in practice depends on the business. For a fashion brand, the creative is less about clever copy and more about identity. You're showing the audience who they could be. The customer isn't really buying a jacket; they're buying into how that jacket makes them feel. That kind of visual, identity-driven advertising is a natural fit for Facebook and Instagram.
For a service business, the desire might be growth, financial security, or just getting a problem off their plate. You're tapping into existing motivation and positioning your service as the way to act on it.
This is also why Facebook can reach a bigger addressable market than Google for the same business. On Google, you're limited to people actively searching. On Facebook, anyone who carries the underlying desire is a potential customer. The pool is bigger, though converting from it takes more work.
Why Facebook Ads Need a Funnel (and Google Ads Often Don't)
On Google, the path is fairly straightforward. Someone searches, clicks your ad, lands on your page, and either converts or moves on. Most of the time, you get one shot.
Facebook works differently. When someone clicks your ad, the pixel fires, and now you can retarget them. You can follow up with case studies, testimonials, more detailed information, or a different angle on the same offer. You get multiple chances to close the sale over days or weeks.
But that means you need to plan for what happens after the first click. E-commerce is often simple enough: product page to checkout. But if you're selling something that costs $5,000 or $12,000, you'll probably need email sequences, retargeting ads, and content that builds trust over time. A lot of businesses try Facebook, skip this part, and conclude that the platform doesn't work. The platform worked fine. The follow-up didn't exist.
How the Two Platforms Strengthen Each Other
Something that doesn't get enough attention is how Facebook Ads and Google Ads compound each other's results when you run them together.
When you run Facebook campaigns, you put your brand in front of a lot of people. Many of them won't click right away. But later, when they're ready to act, they go to Google and search for your brand by name. That branded search activity shows up in Google Ads reports and sends positive signals that benefit your organic rankings.
We see this consistently in accounts: turning on Meta campaigns causes branded search queries to start climbing in Google Ads data. Businesses running SEO alongside both paid channels often see their organic results improve faster than expected, because the behaviours that paid ads generate (brand searches, higher click-through rates, repeat visits) are the same signals that search algorithms reward.
The bookkeeping and accounting firm we work with has never needed Facebook Ads for lead generation. Google search volume in their category is large enough to meet their goals on its own. But for businesses that have tapped out their search demand, adding Facebook creates this compounding loop that lifts performance across all channels.
Common Mistakes on Both Platforms
On Google Ads, the issues we see most often when auditing accounts include: neglecting negative keywords, bidding on terms that are too competitive for the budget, overspending on branded terms that would convert organically anyway, and optimising for the wrong conversion events. Google will happily take your money and suggest you spend more. That's their business model. They're not going to flag that your campaign is unprofitable.
On Facebook, the most common problem is a shallow understanding of the target audience. If you don't know what your customers actually care about, what language they use, and what stage of the buying process they're in, your creative and copy will fall flat. The second-largest issue is a weak back-end sales process. You can generate a high volume of leads through Meta, but if nobody follows up promptly or knows how to handle leads that aren't ready to buy today, that spend goes to waste. This applies equally to Google leads, for what it's worth.
In both cases, it starts with understanding your numbers. What can you afford to pay per lead? What's the lifetime value of a customer? What close rate does your sales team run at? Without those figures, you can't evaluate whether a campaign is actually working or not.
Budget Expectations
Across both platforms and most industries, the realistic minimum to get useful data and results is around $50 to $100 per day. That's roughly $1,500 to $3,000 per month in ad spend before management fees.
If you can only afford to run one platform properly, pick the one that matches your situation. Spreading a small budget across both usually means neither gets enough spend to optimise effectively.
Keep in mind that cost per click varies enormously by industry. In legal services, a single click can cost $50 to $200, but a single case can be worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. For an e-commerce business selling boat propellers, clicks are cheap, but the product price is low, so you need much more volume to hit the same revenue. Understanding this ratio between click cost and customer value clarifies the budget decision.
Making the Decision
Start with one question: Is there existing search demand for what you sell? If people are already searching on Google for your product or service, Google Ads is probably your fastest route to revenue.
If search demand is limited or you've already maxed it out, Facebook Ads let you reach people earlier in the buying process and build demand that doesn't yet exist in search.
If you have the budget for both, run both. The cross-channel effect is real, and businesses that use both platforms tend to outperform those that run just one.
And if you've tried either platform and it hasn't worked, it's worth getting a second opinion before writing it off. We've taken over plenty of Google Ads accounts where a few changes to keyword targeting, negative keywords, and conversion tracking turned an unprofitable campaign into a strong one. The platform usually isn't the problem. How it's being used is.
Whatever stage you're at, the useful starting point is the same: understand your market, know your numbers, and build a strategy around how your customers actually buy. The platform decision follows from there.