You've got a limited PPC budget, a business to run, and two advertising platforms both telling you they're the answer to everything. You'd be forgiven for not knowing which one's going to help and which one's just going to help itself to your budget.
Paid ads are one of the few marketing channels where a small business can compete with much bigger players, see results within days rather than months, and know exactly what every pound is doing. The hard part isn't running paid ads, it's working out where your budget should actually go.
This is a plain-English guide to that decision, based on what we've seen work across the small business campaigns we manage day to day. We'll cover why paid ads are worth your time, how Meta Ads and Google Ads differ, and which one to start with.
Why bother with paid ads at all
The obvious answer is leads. But if that's the only reason you run paid ads, you might be missing a trick.
Speed. Most marketing is a slow burn. SEO can take months to show real movement. Paid ads can be live and bringing in enquiries the same afternoon you launch them. For a small business that needs results now, not next quarter, that's hard to beat.
They teach you about your own business. Paid ads are the fastest, cheapest market research you'll ever run. Launch ads across your services and watch what happens. If one converts far better than the rest, you've just learned something genuinely useful about what your customers want. You can focus your budget on that offer, adjust your messaging, test a different angle, and refine it in real time. Try getting that kind of feedback from a billboard.
You know exactly what's working. Unlike most marketing, paid ads are measurable down to the penny. You can see what a lead costs you, which ad brought it in, and whether the numbers stack up. That takes the guesswork out of your budget.
None of this works if you're not tracking conversions properly. If you can't see which clicks turned into enquiries, you're not really doing PPC, you're just spending money and keeping your fingers crossed. Sort your tracking first, and then you'll be working from real numbers instead of a hunch.
Meta Ads
Chances are you've heard of Meta Ads, advertising across Facebook and Instagram. It can look intimidating from the outside, but we'd like to reassure you that it isn't really.
We have found that Meta's algorithm is genuinely very good, and more helpful than most business owners realise. Feed it clear signals about who your customer is and what a good result looks like, and it does an enormous amount of the heavy lifting, finding people likely to care about what you offer. Your job is to give it a clear goal, plenty of good creative, and to resist micromanaging every setting. (If you want more detail on getting the most out of it, we've written about that here.)
Where Meta really earns its keep is top-of-funnel traffic, people who aren't searching for you yet and might not even know they need you. A well-placed Meta ad plants the seed and starts building familiarity. It's demand creation, not demand capture.
We've found Meta a particularly strong fit for our clients with businesses that are visual, local, or selling something people buy on impulse or emotion. Think cafes, salons, events, boutique e-commerce, anything where seeing it is half the sell. You're not waiting for someone to come looking for you. You're showing up in their feed and giving them a reason to remember your name.
Google Ads
Now you've got your head round Meta Ads, let us introduce you to Google Ads, which works the other way round.
Google is brilliant at reaching people further down the funnel, people actively looking for your service right now. Someone might be searching for exactly what you offer as you read this. They have the intent, they have the need, and they're ready to act. Every day you're not running Google Ads is a day that lead goes to a competitor instead.
That's the core appeal. You're not creating demand, you're capturing it the moment it exists. Somebody types in what they need, and you're sitting right at the top of the results with the answer.
Yes, clicks on Google tend to cost more than on Meta. But that's because the intent is higher. Someone searching for your service is far closer to buying than someone scrolling their feed, so those pricier clicks are often worth the fee. Think of it like this: if Meta plants the seed, Google harvests the crop once it's grown.
That makes Google the natural choice for services, trades, and anything people actively search for when they have a problem to solve: emergency plumber, accountant, driving lessons, local law firm. When someone needs it, they search for it, and you want to be there when they do.
So which one should you choose?
Choosing between Meta and Google is genuinely hard, and anyone who tells you it isn't is probably about to sell you something. In our experience, the ideal setup uses both, Meta to build awareness and create demand, Google to capture that demand once it exists. They work best as a team.
But let's be realistic. Most small businesses don't have the budget to run both channels well, and that word matters. Spread a small budget thinly across two platforms and you'll usually do neither properly. Half-hearted ads on two fronts lose to focused ads on one, every time.
So here's our recommendation: choose one and get properly good at it. Use the funnel to decide which.
- If people already search for what you offer, start with Google. The demand exists, go and capture it. This suits most service businesses and trades.
- If you need to create demand first, start with Meta. Nobody searches for a product they don't know exists yet, so get in front of them and plant the seed. This suits visual, local, and impulse-led businesses.
Master one channel, learn how it behaves, get your cost per lead to somewhere you're happy with, and only then think about adding the second. Doing one thing properly beats doing two things badly, every time.
Putting it into practice
Paid ads are one of the best tools a small business has. They're fast, they teach you what your customers actually want, and they tell you exactly what your marketing is delivering, provided you're tracking things properly.
Meta creates demand at the top of the funnel. Google captures it at the bottom. Both are powerful, but if budget forces a choice, pick the one that matches where your customers already are and get genuinely good at it before you branch out.
If you'd rather not work this out alone, get in touch and we'll help you find the right starting point for your budget.