Google Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Is Better for a Local Business?
Google Ads is usually the better first choice when people already search for what you sell and need it soon. You pay more per lead, but those people are closer to buying. Facebook ads (run through Meta, which also covers Instagram) win when few people search yet or the product sells on sight. Pick between them on what a paying customer costs.
The averages make Facebook look like the easy winner. In LocaliQ's benchmark data, a lead from Google search costs $66.69 on average and a lead from a Facebook leads campaign costs $27.39. Plenty of owners stop reading there and move their budget. Some of them are right to. Others swap a phone call from someone with a burst pipe for a form fill from someone who was half watching a video, and wonder why the cheaper leads never turn into jobs.
Google search ads show up when someone types a query. You bid on the words, and your ad appears next to the results while that person is actively looking. The intent comes with the click. Your job is to be there, say the right thing and make it easy to call.
Facebook and Instagram ads show up while people scroll, based on who they are and what Meta's system predicts they'll respond to. Nobody asked to see your ad, so the ad itself has to create the interest. Meta's auction rewards that: its help center says an ad that's more relevant to a person could win an auction against ads with higher bids. In practice, the video or image you run does most of the targeting work that keywords do on Google.
| Google search ads | Facebook and Instagram ads | |
|---|---|---|
| How people find you | They search for the problem or the service | They see you in the feed before they were looking |
| What you're paying for | Being there at the moment of the search | Getting attention and creating the want |
| What does the heavy lifting | Keywords, the ad text and a page that matches the search | The video or image, and the offer |
| Typical lead | A call or form from someone ready to talk | A form from someone curious, who often needs follow-up to book |
| Average cost per lead (LocaliQ) | $66.69 | $27.39 (leads campaigns) |
| What limits it | How many people search in your area | How good and how fresh your creative is |
Both run on auctions and both let you target a radius around your business. Either one will also happily spend your money on leads that go nowhere. The difference that matters for a local business is timing. Google meets people at the end of their decision. Facebook meets them at the start, and sometimes before they knew there was a decision to make.
Per click and per lead, Facebook is cheaper in most industries. LocaliQ and WordStream publish benchmarks built from their customers' campaigns. Their search advertising benchmarks put the average Google search click at $5.42, and their Facebook advertising benchmarks put the average click in a Facebook leads campaign at $1.80. Cost per lead tells the same story, and in real estate the gap is huge: $102.51 on Google against $13.74 on Facebook.
Cost per lead is the wrong finish line, though. A lead only matters if it turns into a customer. Search leads often close at a higher rate because the person was already shopping, though how big that gap is depends on your business and on how fast you follow up. So the useful question is how much worse Facebook leads can close before Google becomes the cheaper way to get a customer.
The math takes ten seconds. Divide the Facebook cost per lead by the Google cost per lead. The result is the share of your Google close rate that Facebook leads need to hit for both channels to cost the same per customer.
Take a home improvement company with $3,000 a month. At LocaliQ's averages, Google search brings in about 33 leads at $90.92 each. If one in four of them hires you, that's 8 customers at roughly $364 apiece. The same $3,000 on Facebook buys about 70 leads at $42.95. For Facebook to match $364 per customer, about one in eight of those leads has to hire you, which is 47% of the Google close rate. Your close rates are only an example in that math, so swap in your own.
Once you track close rates by channel, the answer is usually clear. If Facebook leads close at a third of your search rate in home improvement, Google wins. If they close at two thirds of it, each Facebook customer costs about $258 against $364 on Google, roughly 30% less, and Facebook deserves more of the budget. Beauty and personal care flips the usual picture: Google leads average $39.25 and Facebook leads $50.91, so Facebook leads would need to close better than search leads just to tie.
Keep two caveats in mind. These are averages across many markets, and a dense metro area can cost more on either platform. And LocaliQ counts a Google lead as someone who contacts you "by phone, chat, form fill, or email", while the Facebook figures come from campaigns using Meta's leads objective. They measure slightly different things, which is one more reason to judge on customers.
It depends on two things you can answer without spending a dollar. First, do people in your area already search for what you sell? Type your service and town into Google and see whether there are ads and a map pack, or check Google's Keyword Planner for monthly searches. Second, does your product sell on sight? A finished kitchen looks great in a 20-second video, and so does a busy gym floor. Tax resolution and commercial insurance don't.
If the need is urgent and searched, start with Google. Someone with water coming through the ceiling or a car accident claim doesn't scroll Instagram hoping for an answer. They type it and call two or three businesses, and the one that picks up first and sounds competent usually gets the job. Meta can still help later by retargeting people who visited your site, but the first budget belongs in search.
If few people search for what you sell, there isn't much on Google to buy. A premium fitness club is a good example. People rarely search for a specific type of club until they've seen one, but a short video of the courts and classes gets them interested. One club we worked with had never run a paid ad. Its members are worth $3,500 or more over the two to three years they typically stay, and its first six weeks of Meta ads brought in leads at about $15 each. With a $15 lead and a $3,500 member, the club can afford to pay a lot more per lead and still come out well ahead, which leaves plenty of room to spend more. The details are in the fitness club case study.
Businesses that are hard to show on camera and rarely searched, like many B2B services, usually do better starting on Meta with an offer that gives value first, like a checklist or a consult framed around the buyer's problem, because the ad has to start the conversation that search never will.
Big, considered purchases sit in the middle. A homeowner thinking about an $80,000 remodel searches for contractors, but the decision takes weeks or months, and they want to know who'll be in their house. Facebook and Instagram video is where they get to know you. Search is where they land when they're ready, often by typing your company name. If you only run Google, you compete with every other contractor at the last moment. If you only run Meta, a competitor's ad can sit above your name when that homeowner finally searches.
A New York renovation company came to us depending on referrals and lead apps that sell the same lead to several contractors. On Meta, a renovation checklist offer and seven rounds of testing built a $12.7M pipeline from leads who reported budgets over $10,000, at $30.68 per CRM-verified lead.
To check whether search could do better, we ran Google alongside Meta over the same period. Google brought in no form leads and seven phone calls at about $469 each. The budget stayed on Meta.
That result won't hold for every contractor, and Google still wins plenty of other categories. Our read is that renovation searches in a big metro are crowded with lead apps and large companies bidding on the same words, while a good offer on Meta reaches homeowners before any of them start shopping. The full story is in the renovation case study. The useful part for you is how the decision got made: both channels ran at the same time, every lead went into the same CRM, and the money followed the cost of a verified lead.
A home remodeling client shows why cost per lead can mislead on big jobs. Their Meta leads cost $68 each, which looks expensive next to the benchmarks above. About $12,000 in ads turned into $248,000 in signed remodels, roughly $20 of signed work for every ad dollar, because the average job there is worth $80,000 or more. The ads were short videos of the owner on real job sites, and each lead was tied in the CRM to the ad that brought it in. You can read how that account was built in the remodeling case study.
Enough on each channel to learn something, and no less. Both platforms need volume before their automated bidding settles. Meta says ad sets usually leave the learning phase after about 50 results in the week after the last significant edit. Google shows a "Learning" status after bid strategy changes and says you may not want to measure performance until the learning period is over.
A rule of thumb we use for a fair test is about 30 leads a month per channel. Fewer than that and one good or bad week swings the numbers too much to judge. At home improvement averages, 30 Google leads cost about $2,730 a month and 30 Facebook leads about $1,290. So a remodeler with $2,000 a month can't fairly test both. Splitting it gives Google roughly 11 leads and Facebook roughly 23, and neither result means much.
With a small budget, put it all behind one channel, picked with the matrix above, and run it long enough to see cost per customer. Add the second channel once the first is paying for itself. When you do add it, the cheapest place to start is usually retargeting: Meta ads to people who visited your site from Google, or Google's "your data" audiences, which let you show ads again to people who have already interacted with your business, such as past site visitors.
Those are starting points. After 60 to 90 days of tracked results, the split should follow cost per customer, even if that means one channel gets most of the money.
Running both well is mostly a tracking job. A typical path for a remodel or a gym membership looks like this: someone sees a Meta video, does nothing, then searches your name two weeks later and clicks a Google ad. Google's report calls that a Google lead. Meta's report may count it too. If you add up both dashboards, you'll count more leads than you actually got.
The fix is to record the source of every lead in one CRM, ideally with both the first touch and the last click, and mark which ones became customers. Then compare channels on cost per customer from that single record. We plan Meta and Google from one budget for exactly this reason, and the Google Ads and Meta ads pages show how each channel fits into that plan.
A practical sign that Meta is feeding search: branded searches for your company name rise in Google Search Console or your Google Ads search terms after you increase Meta spend. It won't give you an exact number, but it tells you the two channels are helping each other.
When an owner tells us Facebook "only brings junk" or Google "is too expensive", the cause is usually somewhere in the setup. The most common one is judging on cost per lead alone. Facebook wins that contest in most industries, so the numbers worth comparing are cost per booked appointment and cost per customer.
Next comes speed. Someone who fills out a form while scrolling at 9pm has often forgotten about it by morning, and a text and an email within minutes save a lot of leads that would otherwise get written off as bad. On Google, the matching mistake is sending search clicks to the homepage. A person who typed "emergency roof repair" wants a phone number and proof you'll show up, and a page built for that search turns more of the clicks you already paid for into calls.
A few more we run into often:
Per click and per lead, usually yes. LocaliQ's benchmarks put the average Google search lead at $66.69 and the average Facebook leads campaign lead at $27.39. Search leads often close at a higher rate, though, so compare what a paying customer costs on each platform before moving budget.
Pick one and fund it properly. If people search for your service and need it soon, start with Google search. If few people search for it or it sells on sight, start with Facebook and Instagram. Splitting a small budget across both usually leaves too few leads on each to judge either.
Yes, once each can get enough leads to judge, which by our rule of thumb is about 30 a month per channel. Running both works best for considered purchases like remodels, where Meta builds interest and Google catches people when they search. Track every lead in one CRM so the platforms don't both take credit for the same customer.
Yes. Facebook and Instagram ads are both run by Meta from the same Ads Manager, and one campaign can run on both. When people compare Google Ads vs Facebook ads, Facebook usually means Meta's whole ad network, Instagram included.
Give each channel at least a few weeks past its learning period and enough leads to see how many become customers. Cost per lead shows up within a couple of weeks. Cost per customer takes as long as your sales cycle, which can be weeks for a gym and months for a remodel.
If you're still unsure which side of the matrix your business sits on, that's one of the first things we look at in a growth audit. It's a 45-minute call with the people who would run your account. You'll see what a customer costs you today, where money is slipping, and which channel we'd put the next dollar into.
Last updated: 2026-10-16
