Google Ads vs Facebook Ads: which should you start with

A Google search ad is shown to someone because of what they just typed. They have a problem, they have put it into words, and the ad is an answer offered in the moment they asked. A Meta ad is shown to someone because of who they are and what they have done: their age and suburb, the pages they visited, the people they resemble. They did not ask for anything; the ad interrupts the feed and has to earn the attention it took. Everything else, the bidding, the formats, the reporting, follows from that one difference between intent and interruption.

In the Snowball Effect, both are the final step. The site steers the narrative and the content proves it; ads buy that proof reach. Our SEO vs Google Ads guide covers the paid-against-organic question; this one covers paid against paid, and the answer is that the two platforms are answering different questions about the same buyer.

Both platforms send people to a page, and the page is the one thing they share, which makes it the place to run them from. The search ad lands on the guide or service page that answers the exact query, per our landing page guide. The Meta ad lands on the page that keeps the promise the person in the clip made, and its retargeting audience is built from everyone the search ad and the hub brought in. The video ads guide covers the cuts each placement needs from one shoot; this guide's point is that the two accounts are one system with one page in the middle, and that a business running them as two separate arguments is paying twice for the same buyer.

The number is cost per enquiry on the page, and it has to be read against two things the platforms will not show you. The first is the organic ranking for the same term: if the site ranks first for "plumber Marrickville", a search ad on it is buying clicks the page would have earned, which the data layer makes visible. The second is branded search: if Meta is working, more people type your name, and a search campaign on your name is then the cheapest click in the account. Our Snowball SEO platform tracks both, alongside the rankings and citations every page earns, so the two ad accounts are measured by what the site did with the traffic rather than by the platform's own report. A campaign judged only inside its own dashboard will always look better than it is.

Search clicks are priced by competition for the term and range from under a dollar to well past fifty in the professional and financial categories; our Google Ads cost guide has the bands. Meta is priced per thousand impressions and is cheaper per contact but dearer per customer, because the person had not asked; the Meta ads guide covers it. The honest comparison is per enquiry on the same page in the same month, which is the only number that answers the question this guide's title asks. Our Snowball SEO platform does the heavy lifting on which terms and pages the budget should serve, so it reaches the media rather than the analysis. See our paid advertising service.