Google Ads vs Facebook Ads (and LinkedIn, TikTok): which platform for your goal?

Google Ads vs Facebook Ads is often the first question a small business asks when it decides to pay for advertising. The answer depends less on which platform is better than on where your buyers are when they need you. Google shows your ad to people who are searching for what you sell; Facebook and Instagram, whose ads are both bought through Meta, show it to people who fit an audience while they scroll.

LinkedIn and TikTok complete the shortlist for most small businesses, so this comparison covers all four, goal by goal, with the minimum budgets each platform publishes and my honest view of each. Figures are as of October 2026.

This comparison is part of my guide on how to get more clients, which also covers the channels you do not pay for by the click.

Google Ads vs Facebook Ads: searching vs scrolling

The difference that settles most cases is intent. On Google, someone types “emergency plumber Leeds” or “accountant for landlords”, and your ad answers a question they have just asked. On Facebook or Instagram, nobody asked: your ad appears between friends’ photos and videos, and it has to earn attention before it can sell anything.

That gives each platform a different job:

• Google Ads captures demand that already exists. You choose the searches (keywords) and the area, and on a search campaign you usually pay when someone clicks.
• Meta ads create demand, or wake it up. You choose people rather than searches: their location, age and interests, your own customer lists, visitors to your website, and audiences that resemble them. Depending on your settings, you pay for impressions or for clicks.

The formats follow from that. A Google search ad is text: headlines and descriptions that match a search, and a responsive search ad takes up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, which Google combines. A Meta ad is an image, a video or a carousel, so you need visuals that make someone stop scrolling.

One nuance: Google also sells display and YouTube ads, which reach people while they browse or watch rather than when they search, so they work more like Meta’s. When small business owners say Google Ads, they usually mean search ads, and those are what I compare here.

Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok side by side

The minimums come from each platform’s help pages in October 2026 and are given in US dollars, so expect the equivalent in pounds in your account.

These are floors, not test budgets: I come back to that after the four platforms.

When Google Ads is the better choice

Choose Google when people already search for what you sell, in words you can predict:

• Urgent needs: a locksmith, an emergency plumber, a boiler repair. People in a hurry search, then call the first credible result.
• Local services people compare: an accountant, a dentist, a driving school, an office cleaning company.
• B2B services with a clear name: “commercial air conditioning installation”, “IT support for small offices”.

My view: Google Ads is not that tricky, but it asks for research before the first pound goes out. You need to know who your target is and what they type, to choose where to be seen and to get a better conversion rate from the clicks you pay for. Keyword Planner, free inside a Google Ads account, shows how often each phrase is searched and the range advertisers bid to appear at the top of the page. I mainly use Semrush for this research: it shows the keywords advertisers pay for and what they cost, and the ones that work are often worth winning in SEO instead of paying for every click.

Spending is easy to cap. You set an average daily budget, and Google Ads Help explains the rule: a single day can cost up to twice that budget, but a month never costs more than 30.4 times it. At £15 a day, the month stops at £456.

Google’s limit is the other side of its strength. If nobody searches for your product, because it is new or because people do not know their problem has a solution, there is no search to put an ad against. My guide to Google Ads for small business covers the basics and the research to do before spending.

When Facebook and Instagram ads are the better choice

Choose Meta when your offer is easy to show and people are not searching for it yet:

• Visual products: furniture, clothes, food, interior design.
• Local consumer offers: a restaurant opening, a gym, a beauty salon, an event.
• Something new that people would want if they saw it, but would not think to search for.
• Retargeting: showing an offer again to people who visited your website without getting in touch.

In Ads Manager, every campaign starts with one of six objectives: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App promotion or Sales. With Leads, people can send their details through a form inside Facebook or Instagram, without leaving the app. If what you advertise is your own mobile app, my comparison of Apple Ads, Google and Meta for app installs shows where to put a first budget.

My view of Facebook and Instagram ads: they are good for awareness and for conversion, but you have to burn cash on A/B testing to see what works best. The image, the first line and the audience are guesses until the numbers come in, and testing each guess costs money. Use the A/B test built into Ads Manager rather than changing things by hand every morning: edits can send an ad set back into its learning phase, and Meta advises letting a test run for at least seven days.

The two mistakes I warn people about on Meta are skipping the research and skipping the tests. Meta has no keywords to target, so the research is about your audience’s own words: what they complain about and how they describe it. For my own copywriting, I use AI deep research to find what people complain about most in a niche; on Meta, those words feed the ads and help you choose the interests to target. My article on Facebook ads mistakes covers these and the other ways to burn a budget.

Meta also lets you start small. Its help page on minimum budgets suggests at least $1 a day for an ad set charged per impression, and Ads Manager warns you when a budget is too low for your settings. A dollar a day will not teach you much, though.

LinkedIn Ads: for B2B, when one client is worth thousands

LinkedIn is the platform built on what people do at work: you choose them by job title, seniority, company size and industry, taken from their own profiles. That precision is what B2B businesses pay for, and it is priced accordingly.

My view: LinkedIn Ads burn through your cash fast, but done right, the clients they bring are bigger tickets. LinkedIn’s budget guidance sets a minimum of $10 a day, or the equivalent in your currency, and suggests about $25 a day for a new advertiser. That is $750 for a 30-day test, before you know whether it works.

So LinkedIn only makes sense when you can name the job titles of the people who buy and one client is worth thousands of pounds. My tutorial on how to advertise on LinkedIn walks through a first campaign and the settings that keep spending under control. If the sums do not work, the same decision-makers can be reached by email, and my comparison of PPC vs cold email shows how the costs differ.

TikTok Ads: awareness first, with a higher minimum

TikTok ads appear between videos in the For You feed, and they tend to work best when they look like ordinary TikTok videos rather than adverts.

My view: people on TikTok are not really buyers. They come to be entertained, so for most small businesses, TikTok advertising is about brand awareness, not next week’s enquiries. It suits consumer brands with a young audience and a product that shows well on video: food, fashion, beauty, a visual trade.

TikTok Ads Manager groups its objectives in three stages: awareness (Reach), consideration (Traffic, Video views, Community interaction) and conversion (Lead generation, Sales), plus App promotion for apps. Its minimums are higher than Meta’s: according to TikTok’s budget help page, a campaign budget starts at $50 a day and each ad group at $20 a day, or the equivalent in your currency. For website conversion campaigns, TikTok recommends at least $30 a day per ad group for European advertisers.

If you already post on TikTok, start with Spark Ads. They put money behind a post you have already published, or a creator’s post with their permission, and the views, likes and follows they earn count on the original post. Pick the posts that did well on their own. My article on TikTok for small business in 2026 covers what changed on the app this year.

A minimum budget is not a test budget

The minimums tell you what each platform accepts, not what you need to learn anything. A useful test buys enough clicks or leads to show a pattern.

Work backwards from what a client is worth to you:

1. What a new client leaves you in the first year, once the cost of doing the work is paid: say £2,000.
2. The share of leads that become clients: say one in four.
3. Your break-even cost per lead: £2,000 ÷ 4 = £500. Above that, the ads lose money; aim well below it, because your time costs something too.
4. Your test budget: enough leads to judge, at the cost you are aiming for. At £100 a lead and ten leads before you decide, that is £1,000, spread over a few weeks rather than spent in three days.

Then compare the platforms on cost per client, not cost per click. A click on Google may cost more than a click on Meta, but if it comes from someone ready to buy, the client can still cost less. Over the same period, add up what each test cost and count the clients it brought. My tutorial on tracking your funnel with UTM links and GA4 shows which platform brings booked calls.

Two costs are easy to forget. The page the clicks land on: a page that does not convert wastes the budget on every platform alike. And your own time: every platform needs checking several times a week.

How to choose your first platform and test it

1. Write your goal in one sentence: calls this month, sales of a product, meetings with finance directors, or more people who know your name. The table above gives the platform that matches.
2. Check the demand on Google first. In Keyword Planner, look at the monthly searches and top-of-page bids for what you sell, in your area. If people search for it, start with Google; if nobody does, you will have to create the demand: on Meta or TikTok for consumers, on LinkedIn for businesses.
3. Prepare the page the ads will lead to: one offer, one way to get in touch, quick to load on a phone. I use Microsoft Clarity to see where visitors hesitate or leave, and whether the copy, a picture or the layout is to blame. If your site is not ready for paid visitors, that comes first, and it is the job of my website service.
4. Set up conversion tracking before the first ad: a Google Ads conversion, the Meta pixel, LinkedIn’s Insight Tag or the TikTok pixel, loaded only after visitors accept your cookie banner.
5. Run one platform and one objective, with a budget you can afford to lose and an end date. Change one thing at a time, so you know which change made the difference.
6. Judge on cost per client, then scale up, change the offer or stop.

Add a second platform only once the first brings clients at a cost you can accept and checking it has become a routine. It is easy for a small business to fall for every new channel: there is a lot of noise in marketing, and that is rather the point of it. My article on shiny object syndrome explains why one channel you master beats four you half-run.