This is the first question almost every business asks us, and the honest answer is that it depends on one thing above all others: whether people are already searching for what you sell.
The distinction that actually matters
Google Ads harvests demand. Someone types “emergency plumber Gurgaon” and you appear. The intent existed before your ad did; you are competing for it, not creating it.
Meta Ads generates demand. Nobody opens Instagram looking for your product. Your ad interrupts them, and the creative has to do the work of making them care. That is harder, but it is the only option when the search volume for what you sell is close to zero.
So the first thing to check is not your budget or your industry. It is your category’s search volume.
Start with Google if…
- People search for your category by name. Legal services, repairs, medical, B2B software with an established category, travel, insurance, education.
- Your purchase is urgent or problem-driven. Anything someone buys because something broke or a deadline is approaching.
- Your price point is high and considered. Search intent tends to carry buyers who have already decided they need the thing.
- You have very little creative capability. Search ads are text. You can run a competent search campaign without a designer; you cannot run a competent Meta campaign without creative.
Start with Meta if…
- Your product is new, novel or category-creating. If nobody knows to search for it, search will not find them.
- The purchase is impulsive or visual. Fashion, food, home, beauty, fitness, most direct-to-consumer ecommerce.
- You need volume fast to learn. Meta will spend a test budget faster and give you data on angles and audiences sooner.
- Your margins allow experimentation. Demand generation costs more per conversion at the start, before creative and audience learning compound.
Why splitting a small budget across both is usually a mistake
The most common error we see in accounts we audit is a modest monthly budget divided evenly between platforms, with neither getting enough conversions to exit the learning phase or to produce a statistically meaningful read.
A rough working rule: you want enough weekly conversions on a campaign for the platform’s bidding to have something to optimise against, and enough total conversions over a test window that a difference between two variants is not just noise. Splitting a budget that can barely support one channel across two guarantees you learn nothing on either.
Pick one. Get it to a stable cost per acquisition. Then add the second channel with incremental budget, not by cannibalising the first.
The question people skip
Before either platform, check whether your tracking is trustworthy. If conversions are double-firing, if Meta and Google are both claiming the same sale, or if your CRM shows half the leads the ad account reports, then every optimisation decision you make afterwards is built on a number that is wrong. We have seen accounts “scaled” for months on a conversion event that was firing on page load.
Fix measurement first. It is unglamorous and it is the highest-return work in most accounts.
A short decision path
- Check monthly search volume for your three most commercial keywords. If there is meaningful volume, start with Google Search.
- If volume is negligible, start with Meta and budget for creative production, not just media.
- Verify conversion tracking end to end before spending at scale.
- Run one channel until cost per acquisition is stable for four consecutive weeks.
- Only then add the second channel, and judge it on incremental revenue rather than platform-reported ROAS.
If you want a second opinion on which way your business should go, we are happy to look at your numbers – see our services or get in touch via the contact page.