Which Is More Expensive: Google Ads or Facebook Ads? The Honest Cost Math

Google Ads costs more per click than Facebook. Substantially more — often three to eight times more in local service categories. That fact is true, easy to verify, and almost completely useless for deciding where to put your budget.

It's useless because clicks are an input, not an outcome, and the two platforms sell fundamentally different things. Comparing their CPCs is like comparing the price of a plane ticket to the price of a tank of petrol without mentioning where you're going.

Here's the comparison that actually determines which is more expensive *for your business*.

The Raw Numbers, For Context

In local service verticals, current market rates run roughly:

Google Search: $6–$30 per click in most home service categories. Legal, insurance, and emergency-restoration terms run far higher — $50 to well over $100 per click is normal for high-value intent keywords.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram): $0.60–$3.00 per click, and the platform is really sold on CPM — typically $8–$25 per thousand impressions for local targeting.

So on a click basis Google looks 5–15x more expensive. On a *lead* basis the gap narrows sharply. On a *customer* basis it frequently reverses.

Why the Gap Closes

The reason is intent, and it's the single most important concept in this comparison.

Google search is demand capture. Someone typed "emergency AC repair near me" at 6pm in August. They have the problem right now, they're actively shopping, and they will hire someone today. You are paying to be present at the moment of need — and competing against every other business that also wants to be there.

Meta is demand creation. Nobody opened Instagram looking for a roofer. You're interrupting, which is why the click is cheap and why a much larger fraction of those clicks are curiosity rather than intent.

That difference shows up as conversion rate at every stage:

Stack those and the picture changes completely.

A Worked Example

A roofing company, $2,000 budget on each platform, realistic mid-market numbers.

Google Search:

Meta:

Look at what happened. Google's cost per lead is nearly six times Meta's — and cost per *customer* comes out roughly comparable, with Meta slightly ahead in this scenario.

Now change one variable. Drop Meta's lead-to-appointment rate from 12% to 5%, which is entirely realistic for an account with no fast follow-up, and Meta's cost per customer jumps to about $1,600. It becomes the far more expensive channel while its cost per lead still looks like a bargain.

Cheap leads are only cheap if you can convert them. Meta's economics live or die on follow-up speed in a way Google's don't.

The Variable That Decides It

That last point is the one worth internalising, because it's the lever most businesses don't realise they're pulling.

Google search leads have durable intent. Someone who searched for an emergency plumber and filled in your form still wants a plumber two hours later. You'll lose some to competitors who called first, but the underlying need persists.

Meta leads have perishable intent. Someone tapped a lead form while scrolling. Ninety minutes later they've forgotten they did it. Call them the next morning and a meaningful share won't remember filling anything in.

This is why the same Meta campaign can produce a $667 customer for one business and a $1,600 customer for the business down the road running identical creative. The difference isn't the ads. It's whether someone talks to that person in the first few minutes.

We see this consistently: accounts that move Meta follow-up from hours to seconds see appointment rates on the same lead volume improve dramatically, which reprices the entire channel. Nothing about the ad spend changed.

When Each Is Genuinely More Expensive

Google is more expensive when:

Meta is more expensive when:

Both get more expensive when: you can't attribute results to source, so you can't tell which one is actually working and end up optimising on cost per lead, which is the wrong number.

The Comparison Unit That Matters

Stop comparing CPC. Compare cost per booked appointment and, where you can measure it, cost per closed job against gross profit per job.

Concretely, for a business with a $1,100 average ticket at 40% gross margin — $440 of gross profit per job — a channel producing customers at $300 is excellent, $440 is breakeven on the first job (and possibly still fine given lifetime value and referrals), and $700 is losing money unless repeat business is strong.

Run that calculation for each channel separately, and run it monthly. The answer changes with season, with competition, and with how fast you're following up.

What Most Businesses Should Actually Do

If your budget is under about $3,000/month: pick one, usually Google search on your highest-intent terms with tight match types and an aggressive negative list. Split budgets across two platforms rarely give either enough data to optimise.

If you're spending $3,000–$15,000/month: run both, but for different jobs. Google captures the people actively looking. Meta builds awareness and generates volume in your slower season. Judge them on different KPIs — Google on cost per booked job, Meta on cost per qualified conversation.

Before you increase spend on either: fix response time. Halving your median response time is nearly always cheaper than doubling your budget, and it improves the economics of every channel simultaneously. A business responding in four hours is effectively paying a tax on every lead it buys, and it pays that tax on Google leads too.

And instrument properly. Call tracking numbers per campaign, UTM capture on every form, source written to the CRM contact and carried to the opportunity so revenue rolls up by channel. Without that, everything above is a guess.

At Thinxster we run both platforms for service businesses, but the part that changes the economics is underneath: AI caller agents responding to every lead within ninety seconds regardless of source, GoHighLevel pipelines so every ad dollar traces to a booked job, and optimisation against cost per booked appointment rather than cost per click. That stack has carried $102M+ in tracked client revenue at a peak ROAS of 9.2×.

If you want to know which platform is actually more expensive *for you* — measured in booked jobs, not clicks — [book a free strategy call](/book) and we'll run the numbers on your real account data.