If you run a service business in Oakland or Genesee County and you have a few hundred dollars to put toward advertising, this is the question you actually have: Google or Facebook? Every answer you find online is written by somebody who sells one of them.
I ran both, at the same time, at my own business, with my own money. Here is what happened.
The side-by-side
| Metric | Google Ads | Facebook Ads |
|---|---|---|
| Total spend | $277.63 | $116.65 |
| Times the ad was shown | 4,419 | 13,562 |
| Clicks | 220 | 283 |
| Cost per click | $1.26 | $0.41 |
| Click-through rate | 4.98% | 2.09% |
| Visits recorded on site | 181 | 303 |
| Visits where someone engaged | 36.5% | 10.6% |
| Conversion events | 19 | 4 |
| Cost per conversion event | $14.61 | $29.16 |
Green marks the winner on each row. Sources: Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager for spend and clicks, Google Analytics 4 for on-site behaviour. Roughly the same 90-day window in mid-2026.
Look at the top half of that table and Facebook is the obvious winner. Three times the impressions for less than half the money. More clicks. Clicks that cost a third as much.
Look at the bottom three rows and the whole thing inverts.
If you need work on the calendar in the next 30 days, put your money in Google. Google delivered 19 enquiries at $14.61 each. Facebook delivered 4 at $29.16 each — from a bigger audience, for less spend, with cheaper clicks.
If you’re trying to become the name people recognize in your town, Facebook is the cheaper way to do it — but measure it on how many people saw you, not on leads, or you’ll conclude it failed at a job you never gave it.
Why the cheap clicks lost
It comes down to what the person was doing thirty seconds before they clicked.
Somebody who types “web designer near me” into Google has already admitted to themselves that they have a problem and gone looking for someone to solve it. My ad is the answer to a question they asked. That’s why 36.5% of them engaged with the page instead of bouncing.
Somebody on Facebook was looking at a neighbour’s boat photos. My ad interrupted them. Some of those interruptions are welcome — that’s a real 2.09% who clicked — but they arrive curious rather than committed. Nine out of ten left immediately.
Neither platform is broken. They’re answering different situations, and the gap between $14.61 and $29.16 per enquiry is what that difference in intent costs.
One mistake I made that muddies the comparison
My Google ads pointed at a page built to answer a single question. My Facebook ads pointed at my homepage. That was my error, not Facebook’s, and it cost the Facebook campaign real performance — the same-page comparison is in my landing page beat my homepage 6 to 1. Facebook would have done better with a proper landing page. I don’t think it would have closed the whole gap.
What $394.28 actually bought
Combining both platforms over the 90 days:
- $394.28 spent in total
- 17,981 times an ad of mine appeared in front of somebody in my service area
- 503 clicks
- 23 conversion events, at an average of $17.14 each
I want to be exact about what those 23 events are, because this is where advertising reports mislead people. They are button clicks on “book a call,” contact form submissions, and taps on my phone number. They are not 23 signed clients. They’re 23 moments of genuine interest, which is the honest leading indicator — and roughly $17 to generate one of those is a number I’ll happily keep paying for a service that’s worth four figures.
For a business where the average job is $150, $17 per enquiry is a much harder sell. Which brings us to your situation rather than mine.
How to decide for your business
Start with Google Ads if…
- People search for what you do by name — “furnace repair,” “roof leak,” “towing”
- Your work is urgent, and the person needs somebody today
- One job is worth several hundred dollars or more
- You need enquiries this month, not brand recognition this year
- You’re competing against other local providers who show up in search
Start with Facebook Ads if…
- Your work photographs well — before-and-afters, finished builds, landscaping, remodels
- Nobody knows they need you until they see it done well somewhere else
- You’re new in town and need people to recognize the truck
- Your work is seasonal and you want to plant the idea early
- You want to stay in front of people who already visited your site
A plumber in Flint should be on Google, because burst pipes get searched, not scrolled. A landscaper in Clarkston has a genuine case for Facebook, because a photograph of a finished patio creates demand that didn’t exist before somebody saw it. Most businesses eventually want both, and the order matters more than the choice.
The order I’d actually spend money in
Before either platform gets a dollar, there are cheaper wins sitting on the table. This is the sequence I walk clients through, and it’s the same one I followed myself.
Steps one through four are free or nearly free, and most local businesses skip straight to step five. That’s the actual reason people conclude that “ads don’t work” — not the platform, but everything that wasn’t in place when the traffic arrived.
The full write-ups
I went deeper on each campaign separately, with the complete numbers and what I got wrong:
And if you’d rather just have somebody look at your specific situation and tell you where the money should go, book a 30-minute call. I do the research on your market before we talk. If the honest answer is that you shouldn’t be running ads yet, that’s what you’ll hear — it’s the answer I give more often than not.