In this article
The comparison: intent capture versus audience discovery
Purpose: Google captures existing demand; Meta creates or surfaces it. Suitable situations: Google when buyers search for the category — “dentist near me”, “sheet metal fabrication Bengaluru”, “CRM consultant”; Meta when buyers can be described but would not search — new residents of a locality, owners of a certain kind of business, parents of school-age children, people who visited your site last week. Capabilities: Google gives you the search term, the area, the hour, and a visitor with a need; Meta gives you the audience, the creative canvas — image, video, carousel — and the ability to follow a visitor who did not enquire. Cost structure: Google’s click prices follow the value of the search, so competitive B2B and professional terms are expensive per click but convert well; Meta’s impressions are cheap and its clicks are cheaper, but fewer of them were looking to buy. Risk: Google spends fast on broad terms if unattended; Meta spends steadily on the wrong audience if the targeting is lazy.
Measures: both on cost per qualified enquiry and cost per customer, never on clicks or reach. The platforms report what flatters them; your CRM reports what matters.
Match the platform to your offer, buying cycle and creative
Offer type: an urgent or specific need — people search, so Google. A considered purchase with a long cycle — people research over months, so Google for the research searches and Meta to stay in front of them afterwards. A visual, impulse or lifestyle product — people discover, so Meta, with Google catching the ones who then search your name. A local service — Google’s map and search first, Meta for the neighbourhood awareness that makes the search happen. Buying cycle: the shorter it is, the more Google; the longer and more relationship-driven, the more Meta and retargeting earn their place.
Creative capability: Google search ads are text and need a good landing page; Meta ads need images or video that stop a thumb, refreshed every few weeks, and a business that cannot produce them will pay for the same tired creative to be ignored. If you have no photographs of your real work and no one to shoot a thirty-second video, start on Google.
Design a test budget and evaluation criteria
Run both for a month, small and tight, with the same landing page and the same tracking. Google: one campaign per service, exact and phrase-match terms from real enquiries, negative terms for jobs and courses, the area and hours you serve. Meta: one audience described as narrowly as your best customers, two or three creatives with the real business in them, one offer. Both: call tracking, the form recording its source, and a weekly half hour reading search terms and audience performance.
Evaluate on four numbers per platform at the end of the month: cost per enquiry, share of enquiries that qualified, cost per qualified enquiry, and — if the sales cycle allows — customers won and cost per customer. Set the criteria before the test: “we keep the platform whose cost per qualified enquiry is under X”, where X comes from what a customer is worth. Then fund the winner and keep the other at a minimum for the role it plays — Meta for retargeting, Google for brand searches — rather than switching it off.
Running each one well, in an Indian SME context
On Google, the waste is in broad terms and in clicks from outside your area or hours; the search terms report every week is where the budget is saved. On Meta, the waste is in reach without intent and in creative that shows stock images; the real workshop, the real doctor, the real product in a customer’s hands outperform the polished stock every time, and a WhatsApp click-to-chat objective often converts better than a form for Indian buyers on either platform.
Both need the landing page to match the ad and the response to be fast. A perfect campaign that sends people to the home page, or that produces enquiries answered the next day, wastes most of what it bought.
Decision table · use it here or print it
Advertising-platform selection matrix
Google catches people who are already looking; Meta finds people who were not. Read the rows against your offer, then pick your case for the test to run first.
| Google Search | Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | Both, in sequence | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How the buyer arrives | Typed the need; intent is explicit | Was scrolling; interest is inferred | Meta creates the interest, Google catches the search it produces |
| Best offer type | A service people search for by name: repair, clinic, CA, machining | A product or offer people did not know to look for; consumer goods; events | A considered purchase with a long cycle |
| Buying cycle | Short: they need it now | Long: they need convincing | Long, with remarketing bridging the gap |
| Creative needed | Text, and a page that matches the search | Images and short video that stop a scroll — the main cost | Both |
| Cost pattern | Higher cost per click, higher intent | Lower cost per click, lower intent, more volume | Blended; judged on cost per qualified enquiry |
| B2B fit | Good where buyers search; limited volume for niche terms | Weak for narrow B2B; LinkedIn is the alternative | Search plus LinkedIn for B2B |
| Test budget | Enough for 100 clicks on the core terms | Enough for 3 creatives × 2 audiences × 2 weeks | Run search first; add Meta when the page converts |
| Judge it on | Cost per qualified enquiry | Cost per qualified enquiry, not per lead | Cost per order by first source |
Free to print and share with your team.
Mistakes, and the decision
The mistakes: choosing on what the agency sells; judging Meta on cost per click and Google on impressions; running a month without tracking and deciding on feeling; putting a B2B industrial product on Meta because “everyone is on Instagram”; putting a new consumer product on Google search when nobody is searching for it yet; and stopping the test in week two. A safeguard: write the evaluation criteria before spending the first rupee.
The decision for most SMEs: Google for the services people search for, Meta for discovery and retargeting, and the proportion set by a month’s test measured on cost per qualified enquiry. This is the campaign work we do — the test design, the setup on both, the tracking, and the monthly review that moves the money — and the free audit starts with the question that decides it: do your buyers search for you, or do they need to be found?
Questions owners ask
Which is cheaper?
Meta per click, Google per customer, usually — because Google’s visitors were looking. The number that matters is cost per qualified enquiry, and only a test on your own offer gives it.
Can a B2B business use Meta at all?
For retargeting site visitors and for reaching owners of a defined kind of business, yes. For capturing a purchase engineer with a drawing, no — they search, and Google and LinkedIn are where they are.
How much should the test cost?
Enough for a few weeks of clicks on each platform with tracking on. The amount depends on your trade’s click prices; the criterion is that you can see cost per qualified enquiry with some confidence at the end.
Do we need video for Meta?
It helps a great deal, and it can be a phone video of the real business. Without any creative capacity, Meta will underperform and Google is the better start.
Should we use WhatsApp as the ad objective?
Often, in India. A click-to-WhatsApp ad removes the form and starts a conversation, which many buyers prefer. Measure it like any other enquiry, with the chat logged in the CRM.
What does GullySales do?
The platform decision from your offer and buyers, the month’s test on both with shared tracking, the creative for Meta and the term lists for Google, and the monthly review that reallocates. Scoped in the free audit and priced in writing.