Google Ads or Facebook Ads? For a local business, the answer isn’t close.

That’s the answer. Here’s why, and here’s the exception, because there is a real one.

The difference in one sentence

Google Ads reaches people who are already looking for what you do. Facebook Ads interrupts people who weren’t looking for anything.

Everything else follows from that.

Someone typing “emergency plumber Manukau” at 9pm has a problem right now and a wallet out. You’re not persuading them to want a plumber. They want a plumber. You’re only competing to be the one they call.

Someone scrolling Facebook at 9pm is looking at their cousin’s holiday photos. Your ad is an interruption. It can still work, but you have to create the want, then hold it long enough to get an action, and that’s a much longer, more expensive job.

For most local services, the want already exists. Nobody scrolls their way into needing a leak fixed, a tooth looked at, or a GST return filed. They need it, they search, they choose. Meet them at the search.

The honest comparison

Intent. Google, comfortably. This is the whole ballgame for services.

Cost per click. Facebook is much cheaper, often a fraction. This is what pulls people in, and it’s a trap. Cheap clicks from people who don’t want anything are more expensive than dear clicks from people who do. The only number that matters is cost per job.

Speed. Both are fast. Google tends to be faster to first enquiry because you’re catching existing demand rather than building it.

Targeting. Facebook, by a mile: age, area, interests, homeowners, life events. Genuinely impressive. Just remember you’re targeting people well, not people who want you.

Visual. Facebook. If your work is dramatic to look at (landscaping, renovations, dog grooming, before-and-after anything) this matters more than the intent gap suggests.

Best for. Google: urgent, searched-for, problem-solving services. Facebook: visual, discretionary, “I’ve been meaning to” services.

When Facebook is genuinely the right call

Three situations. They’re real, and we’ll tell clients to go this way when they fit.

1. Nobody’s searching for what you sell.

Some services have almost no search volume because people don’t know to look. A mobile dog groomer. A meal prep service. A home organiser. A new kind of treatment nobody’s heard of. If nobody types it, Google has nothing to show them. Facebook creates the demand instead. This is the strongest case and it’s a good one.

2. Your work is visually spectacular.

A landscaper’s before-and-after stops a thumb. So does a bathroom renovation, a groom-day transformation, a detailed car. If the photo does the selling, put the photo where people are looking at photos.

3. Google is too expensive in your category.

In some categories the auction is brutal. Lawyers, insurance, some trades in central Auckland. If a click costs $25 and you’re converting one in twenty, that’s $500 a job before you’ve picked up a hammer. Sometimes the maths genuinely doesn’t work and Facebook does. You only know by working out what a customer is worth to you first.

The mistake that costs the most

Not picking wrong. Splitting.

A business with $1,000 a month puts $500 in each. Both campaigns run underfed. Neither gets enough data to learn what’s working, so neither improves. Three months later there are two mediocre campaigns, no clear signal from either, and a conclusion that “ads don’t work for us.”

Ads platforms need volume to optimise. Feed one properly.

Run one channel for ninety days with the whole budget. Learn what it costs you to get a job there. Then decide whether to add the second one, with facts instead of a feeling.

The thing that has to be true before either

Neither works if the place you send people is broken.

We turn down ads work regularly for this reason, and it’s not principle, it’s arithmetic. If your website converts one in fifty visitors and your competitor’s converts one in ten, they can pay five times what you can for the same click and still make money. You will lose that auction forever, and every dollar you spend teaches you nothing except that you’re losing.

Before you spend a cent on either platform:

• Your site loads fast on a phone. Most of this traffic is mobile.
• It’s instantly obvious what you do, where you do it, and how to contact you.
• Your reviews are visible, plural, and recent.
• The contact form goes somewhere a human checks.
• Someone answers. Paid traffic is perishable in a way organic isn’t. You paid for that click by the click, and if it goes to voicemail you paid for a voicemail. Answer fast.

Get those right and modest ad spend works. Get them wrong and no ad spend works.

What we’d actually do with $1,000 a month

Assuming the foundations are sorted:

All of it into Google Search. Not Display, not Performance Max, not the “smart” campaign Google keeps nudging you toward in the interface. Search.

Tight keywords. Your actual services, plus your actual areas. Not “building.” “Deck builder Papakura.”

A big negative keyword list, maintained weekly. This is where the money leaks. You do not want to pay for “plumbing courses,” “plumber jobs,” “how to fix a tap yourself,” or “plumber salary NZ.” Left alone, these will quietly eat a third of your budget.

Send clicks to the matching page. Someone who searched for decks lands on your decks page, not your homepage. This alone often doubles conversion.

Track calls and forms, not clicks. If you can’t tell how many jobs came from the spend, you’re not advertising, you’re donating.

Give it ninety days and judge it on cost per job. Not clicks, not impressions, not the score in the dashboard. What did one customer cost, and is that less than one is worth?

We’ve written the longer version of this in our framework for whether to run Google Ads at all, including when the honest answer is “don’t yet.”

The uncomfortable summary

Facebook is more fun to run. The creative is enjoyable, the clicks are cheap, the numbers in the dashboard look great, and the phone doesn’t necessarily ring.

Google is boring. Fewer clicks, more expensive, less to look at, and it puts you in front of someone who is right now trying to give money to someone who does what you do.