I ran a Facebook ad campaign at my own business for about three months, aimed at trades and service owners across Oakland and Genesee Counties. Same period, same business, and roughly the same offer I was running on Google. The point was to find out which platform deserved my money, using my money.
Facebook won on every metric a dashboard likes to show you, and lost on the only one that pays the bills.
The numbers
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Total spend | $116.65 |
| Times the ad was shown | 13,562 |
| Individual people reached | 7,055 |
| Average times each person saw it | 1.9 |
| Clicks | 283 |
| Click-through rate | 2.09% |
| Cost per click | $0.41 |
| Visits recorded on my site | 303 |
| Visits where someone engaged | 10.6% |
| Conversion events | 4 |
| Cost per conversion event | $29.16 |
Source: Meta Ads Manager and Google Analytics 4, late April through late July 2026.
For $116.65 I put my business in front of 7,055 real people in my own service area and got 283 of them to click. If the goal had been to make sure local business owners know my name exists, that is a genuinely efficient result.
Then 90% of them left immediately
Only 10.6% of those visits counted as engaged. Nearly nine out of ten people I paid for arrived and left without scrolling, clicking, or staying long enough to register as interested. Over the same window my Google Ads traffic engaged at 36.5% — more than triple the rate.
Four conversion events came out of the whole campaign. At $116.65 spent, each one cost $29.16. My Google campaign produced conversions at $14.61. So the platform with clicks that cost a third as much delivered leads that cost twice as much.
This is the trap in every ad dashboard
Cost per click is the number the platform shows you first and the number that matters least. A cheap click from someone who wasn’t looking for you is worth nothing. An expensive click from someone actively searching for what you sell is worth a lot. Judge a channel on cost per enquiry, and if you can, on cost per job.
Part of this was Facebook. Part of it was me.
I want to be fair to the platform, because I made a mistake that cost this campaign real performance.
My Google ads pointed at a page built to answer one question. My Facebook ads pointed at my homepage. A homepage has to serve everybody — existing clients, curious neighbours, people looking for the phone number — so it commits to nothing in particular. Somebody who taps an ad while half-watching TV needs the next screen to be blindingly obvious, and my homepage wasn’t.
The gap between those two pages turned out to be the biggest single finding of the whole experiment. I broke it down in why my landing page beat my homepage 6 to 1. If you take one thing from this article, take that one.
There’s also a real difference in intent that no landing page fixes. Somebody typing “web designer near me” into Google has already decided they have a problem. Somebody scrolling Facebook was looking at their cousin’s vacation photos ten seconds ago. Both can become customers. They are not in the same frame of mind, and expecting the same conversion rate from both is a mistake.
What Facebook ads are actually good at for a local business
I’m not writing this to tell you to skip Facebook. I’m telling you to hire it for the job it’s good at.
Worth your money on Facebook
- Before-and-after photos of real work — roofs, driveways, remodels, landscaping
- Getting your name recognized in specific towns before people need you
- Seasonal reminders that create demand rather than capture it
- Showing the crew and the trucks, which builds the trust a search ad can’t
- Re-reaching people who already visited your site
Where Google usually wins instead
- Emergencies — burst pipes, no heat, storm damage
- Anyone actively comparing local providers right now
- Specific services people know the name of and search for
- High-ticket jobs where one win pays for months of clicks
- Anything where you need the lead this week, not this quarter
A roofer in Waterford is the clearest example. Facebook is where a stunning before-and-after shot of a finished roof gets seen by two thousand neighbours who don’t need a roof today. Google is where you meet the one who found a leak this morning. Those are different jobs, and the second one closes faster.
What I’m changing
- Point the ads at a real landing page. The single highest-value fix, and it costs nothing but an afternoon.
- Stop judging it on leads. If Facebook’s job is awareness, then reach and cost per thousand impressions are the honest scoreboard — not conversions it was never positioned to produce.
- Use photos of real work. My ads were too wordy for a feed. The businesses that do well on Facebook show something.
- Keep the budget small. $116 over three months bought me a real answer. That’s the right size for a test.
The honest summary
Facebook gave me cheap attention from people who weren’t looking for me. Google gave me expensive attention from people who were. Both of those are useful, but only one of them fills next week’s schedule, and if you only have a few hundred dollars to spend, that distinction decides where it goes.
I put both campaigns side by side in Google Ads vs Facebook Ads for a local business, with the full spend on both and a straight recommendation at the end.
If you’re currently paying for ads and can’t tell whether they’re working, that’s the actual problem and it’s fixable. Book a 30-minute call and we’ll look at your numbers together. If your money would do more sitting in Google Business Profile and reviews instead, I’ll say so.