TL;DR
Meta clicks look cheaper. Google leads look pricier. Neither number pays your bills. Here's the only cost metric that actually matters.
→ See how this applies to your business (free 30-min call)The honest answer to "which is cheaper" is that it's the wrong question, and the way it's wrong is costing service businesses real money. But you came for numbers, so let's start with the numbers, and then I'll show you why they lie.
On raw clicks, Meta almost always looks cheaper. On qualified leads, Google often looks cheaper. And on the only thing that pays your mortgage — cost per booked job — neither platform's dashboard can tell you the answer, because the deciding factor happens after the click, on your side of the fence.
The Cost Mechanics: CPC vs CPM
The two platforms even charge you differently, which is the first source of confusion.
Google Search runs on cost-per-click (CPC) — you pay when someone clicks your ad. Meta runs primarily on cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) under the hood, and you back into an effective cost-per-click from there. That structural difference is why the sticker prices feel so far apart.
Realistic ballpark ranges for local service businesses, understanding that your market moves these a lot:
If you stopped reading here, you'd move all your money to Meta. That would be a mistake, and here's why.
Why Cheaper Clicks Aren't Cheaper Leads
A click is not a lead. A lead is not a customer. The gap between those things is where Meta's cheap clicks get expensive.
The person who clicks your Google ad typed "emergency roof repair" thirty seconds ago. Their intent is nearly maxed out. A meaningful share of those clicks turn into a phone call or a form fill, because the person was already trying to buy.
The person who "clicks" your Meta ad was scrolling between a friend's vacation photos and a recipe video. Even a good Meta click is a fraction as ready to buy as a good Google click. So it takes far more Meta clicks to produce one real lead — which means your true metric, cost per lead, compresses the gap dramatically and often flips it.
Run the arithmetic. Say Google costs you 20 dollars a click and one in five clicks becomes a lead: that's 100 dollars per lead. Say Meta costs you 2 dollars a click but it takes forty clicks to produce a lead of comparable quality: that's 80 dollars per lead. Suddenly the "10x cheaper" channel is roughly the same — and the leads aren't even the same temperature.
Cost Per LEAD Is Still the Wrong Finish Line
Here's where most advertisers stop optimizing, and it's still two steps short of the number that matters.
Cost per lead treats every lead as equal. They aren't. A Google emergency-service lead and a Meta "download our guide" lead can cost the same and be worth wildly different amounts, because one is ready to book today and the other needs three weeks of nurturing and might never buy.
The number that actually determines whether an account is profitable is cost per booked job — how much you spent to put a paying customer on the calendar. And you cannot get that number from Google Ads or Meta Ads Manager, because neither platform knows which leads became revenue. That data lives in your CRM and your calendar, not their dashboards.
This is the single biggest reason service businesses misjudge which channel is "cheaper." They optimize toward the metric the platform hands them for free — cheap clicks, or at best cheap leads — instead of the metric that requires connecting ad spend to actual booked work. Optimize for cheap clicks and you'll happily scale a channel that produces garbage. Optimize for cost per booked job and the picture frequently inverts.
Cheap clicks are the easiest thing in advertising to buy and the most expensive habit to keep. Booked jobs are the only unit that pays you back.
What Actually Drives Your Costs
Neither platform has a fixed price. What you pay is set by a handful of levers, most of which are in your control:
That last point is why the channel debate is usually a red herring. The businesses obsessing over shaving two dollars off a Meta CPC are often leaving 40% of their booked-job potential on the table in the gap between the lead arriving and anyone responding.
So, Straight Answer
The businesses winning on cost aren't the ones who found a secret cheap channel. They're the ones who measure cost per booked job instead of cost per click, and who close the follow-up gap so they stop paying for leads that go to waste. When we get an AI caller on every inbound lead inside 90 seconds and route it all through one GoHighLevel pipeline, cost per booked job drops even when the click price doesn't move a cent — because you finally convert the leads you were already buying.
If you're judging your ad spend by what Google or Meta charges per click, you're measuring the wrong thing — and probably overpaying for jobs without knowing it. [Book a free strategy call](/book) and we'll trace your real cost per booked job and show you where the money's actually going.
Free Weekly Briefing
One AI Marketing Tactic.
Every Tuesday. Free.
What's actually working across our client accounts right now — ROAS moves, follow-up sequences, creative angles. The stuff that isn't in any blog post yet.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. 1,200+ business owners already in.