If you install air conditioning, fix roofs, do bathrooms or run a plumbing business, this is usually the first advertising decision you make, and it gets made on gut feel far more often than it should.
The two platforms are not really competing. They do different jobs, and which one is cheaper depends almost entirely on whether the customer already knows they have a problem.
The difference in one line
Google catches people who are already looking. Meta interrupts people who are not.
That single distinction explains nearly every difference in cost, quality and timing between the two, and it is the thing to hold on to when a sales rep is quoting you numbers.
Where Google wins
Somebody whose hot water system failed this morning is typing hot water repair and a suburb name into their phone right now. They have the problem, they want it solved today, and they are comparing whoever appears. There is no persuasion required.
For urgent and breakdown work, Google is very hard to beat. The click costs more than the equivalent click on Meta, often several times more, but the person on the other end of it is much further along. Paying four times as much for a click that converts ten times as often is a good trade.
The catch is that demand is capped. Only so many people search for emergency plumber in Bayside each month, and once you are capturing that demand, more budget does not create more of it. You can buy a bigger share of a fixed pool, and then you are done.
- Emergency and breakdown work, where the search already exists
- Specific high value jobs people research before buying, like ducted heating or a bathroom renovation
- Suburbs where you want to be visible the moment somebody looks
- Any job where the customer knows the name of what they need
Where Meta wins
Nobody searches for a deck they had not thought about building. Nobody googles solar before they have decided solar might be worth looking into. That demand has to be created, and search cannot create it.
This is where Meta earns its keep for trades. Clicks are cheaper because you are reaching people earlier, before the decision exists. The leads are colder and more of them go nowhere, but you are reaching a group Google physically cannot show you: people who would want what you do if they knew it was an option.
It is also where photographs do the work. Trades are one of the few industries where the before and after shot is genuinely persuasive advertising, and Meta is built for that in a way search results are not.
- Discretionary work people choose rather than need, like decking, landscaping or a kitchen
- Anything where the finished result sells the job better than a description of it
- Seasonal work you want to seed before people start searching, like heating in early autumn
- Local awareness in the suburbs you actually want to work in
Why cost per lead is a misleading way to compare them
The usual comparison is to run both, look at cost per lead, and pick the cheaper one. That comparison is nearly always won by Meta, and it is nearly always the wrong conclusion.
Meta leads are cheaper because they are earlier. A form filled in by somebody who saw a nice deck while scrolling is not the same asset as a call from somebody whose roof is leaking, even though both appear in a spreadsheet as one lead.
The number that settles the argument is cost per job won, not cost per lead. That means tracking which enquiries turned into quoted work and which quotes turned into invoices. Most trades businesses do not track this, which is why the platform argument goes round in circles.
If you do nothing else after reading this, start recording where each enquiry came from and whether it became a job. Six months of that data will answer the question for your business better than any article can.
The budget split that usually works
For most trades we work with, the sensible starting point is to fund Google first until you are capturing the searches that already exist in your service area, then put additional budget into Meta to create demand beyond that ceiling.
The logic is simple. Existing demand is the cheapest work you will ever win, so take all of it before paying to create more. Once Google is capped, and you will know because impression share stops improving with more budget, Meta is where the next job comes from.
The exception is a genuinely new offering. If you have added a service nobody in your area knows you do, no amount of Google budget will help, because nobody is searching for you to do it yet.
What quietly decides both
Whichever platform you pick, two things outside the ad account will do more damage than any targeting mistake.
The first is the page people land on. A quote request that lands on a home page rather than a page about the specific job loses people. Paid traffic has no patience and will not go looking.
The second is response time. Trade enquiries go to whoever answers first, and that is not an exaggeration. A lead that sits in an inbox until the end of the day has usually already called somebody else. If you are going to pay for the enquiry, be set up to answer it while it is still warm.
The short version
Google for work people already know they need. Meta for work they would want if they saw it. Most trades businesses need both, in that order, and the argument about which is cheaper is settled by tracking jobs won rather than leads received. If you want help running either, we work as a Facebook and Meta ads agency across Melbourne.
