Google Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Wins for Local Businesses?

Almost everything written on this subject was written for a business that sells to the entire country, and it shows.

The advice assumes there is an endless supply of people typing your product into Google, so the whole question becomes one of style and preference.

Run a business covering Rotherham, Barnsley and a few villages in between and that assumption falls apart quickly.

There is a very different question underneath, it has a definite answer, and you can find it out this afternoon without spending anything.

The difference, briefly

Google advertising is answering. Somebody has a problem, they have gone looking for a solution, and you pay to be one of the options in front of them at that moment. The want already existed; you are competing to be chosen.

Facebook advertising is interrupting, in the polite sense. Nobody opened the app hoping to meet a plasterer. You are paying to appear in a feed and be interesting enough to stop somebody, and Meta decides who to put you in front of based on the outcome you asked its system to go and find. The want may or may not exist yet; you are competing for attention rather than for a decision.

That is the whole conceptual difference and every article says it, so we will not labour it. What almost none of them go on to say is what it means when your customers all live within about fifteen miles of you.

The thing every comparison misses: your town might not search enough

Because Google advertising depends on somebody searching, it inherits a hard limit that Facebook does not have. If forty people a month in your area type the thing you sell, then forty is the entire market for the day, and no budget on earth conjures up a forty-first.

A national retailer never bumps into this, which is why the American articles never mention it. Thousands of people are searching for their thing at any moment, so their only constraint is what they can afford to bid. A one-van business in Wath is in a completely different position: the constraint is the town.

Facebook has no equivalent limit. There are always more people in range who have not seen your ad yet, so you can keep raising the budget and it will keep finding somebody. Whether they wanted a new bathroom is a separate matter, but the audience never runs out.

The practical consequence catches people out in both directions. Businesses with genuine local search demand ignore Google and spend a year interrupting people on Facebook to reach the same customers who were already looking for them.

Businesses with almost no search demand pour money into Google, watch it fail to spend, and conclude that advertising does not work.

How to check before you spend a penny

You do not have to guess at any of this. Google publishes the numbers itself through Keyword Planner, which its own documentation describes as a way to "discover new keywords related to your business and view estimates of the searches they receive and the cost to target them", including estimates of "the number of searches a keyword gets each month". We checked that page on 20 August 2026.

One honest catch before you get excited: Google says you must finish setting up the account, billing details included, to reach the basic features.

You do not have to run an advert, and you can pause everything immediately, but you will be handing over a card.

1. Open Keyword Planner and set the location to the patch you actually serve, not the whole country. Almost nobody bothers with this step, and leaving it at the default makes every number that follows meaningless.
2. Type in what a customer would type, not what you would call it. People search for "boiler not working", not "domestic heating diagnostics".
3. Do the same for each service you would want to advertise, and for the towns individually rather than as a region.
4. Add up the monthly searches for the terms that describe somebody ready to buy, and ignore the browsing ones.
5. Compare that total with how many jobs you actually need. Not with a benchmark, with your own diary.

The answer tends to be obvious once it is in front of you. If the searches comfortably exceed the work you need, Google is the shorter route to it and you should start there.

If they are a trickle, Google will never fill your week no matter how well it is run, and Facebook is where the people are, whether or not they were thinking about you this morning.

Both auctions reward relevance, but they judge it differently

Neither platform simply sells to the highest bidder, which is the other assumption worth demolishing early. On both, a well-made advert costs less to run than a poor one.

Google is unusually direct about it. Its explanation of Ad Rank says that "even if your competition has higher bids than yours, you can still win a higher position at a lower price by using highly relevant keywords and ads". Relevance here means the match between what somebody typed, the advert they see and the page they land on.

Worth clearing up a related myth while we are here, because it costs people money. Google states plainly that "Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction". It is a diagnostic, useful for spotting where you are weak, not a number you are being scored against in real time. Chasing it as a target is a well-worn way to waste an afternoon.

Meta rewards relevance too, but measures it against something else entirely: whether people stop, watch and respond. Same principle, different examiner.

On Google you are being judged on how well you answer a question. On Facebook you are being judged on whether you were worth interrupting somebody for.

Which one suits your trade

The pattern is less about industry than about urgency. The more suddenly somebody needs you, the more they search and the better Google works. The more the purchase is something they could put off forever, the more it has to be put in front of them.

None of that is a rule, and plenty of businesses sit across two rows. It is a starting point for the first campaign rather than a verdict on the next five years.

The difference in what you learn

This one rarely appears in comparisons and it is worth real money, particularly in the first few months.

Google will show you the exact words people typed before they clicked. Not a category or an interest, the actual phrase.

That is market research you would otherwise pay for, and it stays useful long after a campaign ends: it tells you what to call your services, what to put on your website, and what people are worried about before they ring.

Facebook tells you something different but no less useful: which pictures, offers and words made people stop. It cannot tell you what anybody wanted, because they were not looking for anything.

It can tell you exactly what earns attention in your town, which is a harder thing to guess at than most owners expect.

Both are worth having, and neither costs extra. If you want the mechanics of how the Meta side charges you while you are weighing this up, our breakdown of Facebook ad pricing in the UK goes through the auction, the budget rules and the VAT, and the wider view across all the platforms sets the spending side out together.

What we would do with one modest budget

The advice you will usually get is to run both, because both are good. The advice we actually give clients with a few hundred pounds a month is to run one properly.

Split a small budget in half and you get two campaigns starved of data, neither of which ever settles down enough to tell you anything. It feels balanced and it is the slowest possible way to learn which one your business should have been on.

1. Check the searches first, as above. Ten minutes, no cost, and it usually answers the question outright.
2. Put the whole budget behind whichever the check pointed at, and leave it alone for a month.
3. Judge it on what an enquiry cost, not on clicks, likes or impressions.
4. Only then add the second platform, funded by what the first one earned rather than by halving what you already had.

And there is a third option that costs nothing per click at all. If the searches are plentiful in your town, that same demand is sitting there for anyone who ranks well without paying, which is what our local SEO work is for, at £300 a month. It is slower, it compounds, and it pairs naturally with ads while the rankings build.

What it costs to have either one run

Our fee is £300 a month whichever platform the campaign sits on, and it does not change if you run both. The media budget is charged to you directly by Google or Meta with nothing taken out of it on the way through.

Our paid advertising service explains the month to month, and every figure is printed on the packages page where you can read it without asking anybody.

We would also rather talk you out of the wrong platform than take the money for it, which is a large part of why the search-volume check sits near the top of this article rather than buried at the end.

Frequently asked questions

Answer the smaller question first

Google Ads versus Facebook ads sounds like a debate about platforms and it is really a question about your town.

Find out how many people near you are actually looking for what you do, compare it against the work you need, and the choice tends to make itself.

If you would like somebody to run that check with you and say plainly which one we would put your money on, get in touch. We will tell you if the answer is neither.