Should a local business use Google Ads or Facebook ads?

The choice of Google Ads or Facebook ads for a small business depends on whether your customers go looking for what you sell. If they do, start with Google, which shows your ad while they search. If people only want it once they have seen it, Meta's ads on Facebook and Instagram suit you better. With us, setting up Google Ads costs £350 and Meta ads £350, before VAT.

Take a boiler that dies on a Sunday night in January. The owner of that house types the problem and a postcode into Google, then rings one of the first numbers on the screen. A heating engineer whose ad sits there gets the call. Nobody scrolling Instagram that evening was thinking about boilers, and an ad for a repair would have slid past them.

Meta works the other way round. A salon adding a brow service, or a café starting Sunday brunch in spring, has news for people who have no reason to search for it yet. On Facebook and Instagram you can put a photo of the new thing in front of people who live a few miles away, and some of them book because it looked good on a Tuesday evening. The ad creates the wish to go. Google can only meet a wish that already exists.

Owners get this wrong in both directions. Some trades firms run Meta ads because the clicks are cheap and the posts look smart, then wonder why the phone stays quiet; a cheap click from someone who was not looking for a plumber seldom turns into a booked job. Others put a seasonal offer on Google and find that almost nobody types it, so the ad barely appears.

Some businesses need both, and then the split follows what each part sells. MMACA is a London firm we built a website for. It sells IT consulting and software under the same name as a concierge service. Google Ads takes the consulting and software searches, where a buyer types what they want. Meta takes the concierge side. Both were wired to the site's tracking before the first campaign went live, and between the first month of campaigns and the sixth, MMACA's cost per qualified lead fell by 32%, by its own figures.

We usually start with Google. Our Starter management plan runs one channel, from £280 a month. For most local businesses that channel should be the one where people already ask for the work. Meta comes in on the Standard plan, from £460 a month, once the Google account pays back and there is an offer or a season worth telling people about. The budget for clicks sits on top of our fee, and you set it.

Before either, look at where the ad will land. A click that opens your home page, with the phone number buried in the footer, costs the same as one that opens a page about the job in the ad. We check that page before any money goes to Google or Meta. If the page will not turn visits into enquiries, we fix it before the ads start and quote that work separately.

Our rule of thumb is short. If a customer would type what you sell into Google on the day they need it, start there. If they would only want it after seeing a picture of it, start with Meta. Send us what you sell and the area you cover, and we will say which one we would try first and what the first month would cost.

• Google Ads management for small businesses
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