This question comes up in nearly every first call we have, usually phrased as "should I be doing Facebook or Google?" The honest answer is that they do genuinely different jobs, and the right one depends less on your budget than on whether people already know they need what you sell.
Intent versus interruption
Google is intent. Someone types "emergency electrician Liverpool" at nine on a Tuesday night. They have the problem, they have the wallet out, they are choosing between whoever shows up. You are not persuading anyone — you are just competing to be picked. That is why clicks cost more, sometimes a lot more in competitive trades.
Meta — Facebook and Instagram — is interruption. Nobody opens Instagram to find a physio. You are putting yourself in front of people who fit the profile and hoping to create a want that wasn't there five seconds ago. Reach is far cheaper, but you are paying to build demand rather than catch it.
That difference drives everything else: what you say, what you spend, and how long before you can judge it.
Where each one wins
- Emergency and urgent trades — plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, tow, emergency dental. Google, clearly. The whole job is being visible at the moment of panic. Meta is close to useless here; nobody sees a plumbing ad on Instagram and saves it for a future burst pipe.
- Barbers, salons, beauty. Meta usually wins. The work is visual, the decision is emotional, local awareness compounds, and offers travel well. Cheap local reach beats fighting over expensive "barber near me" clicks.
- Clinics — physio, dental, allied health. Both, but Google first. There is real search volume from people already in pain. Meta earns its place for specific services or new-patient offers once the search side is running.
- Cafes and hospitality. Meta, and honestly not much of it. Google Ads rarely makes sense; your money goes further on a well-maintained Google Business Profile and good local Instagram.
- Considered, higher-ticket services — renovations, landscaping, solar, mortgage broking. Both. Google catches the ready ones, Meta warms up the people who are thinking about it and haven't searched yet. Retargeting matters here more than anywhere.
What to actually budget
A realistic starting point for a Sydney service business is somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000 a month in ad spend, before whoever is managing it. Below about a grand you generally can't gather enough data to make decisions, and you spend months guessing.
In competitive trades, a single Google click can run anywhere from a few dollars to well north of twenty. Do the arithmetic before you start: if a click is $15 and one in ten callers books, that lead costs you $150 in clicks alone. If your average job is $300, the maths is tight. If it's $3,000, you are laughing. That one sum tells you more than any agency deck.
Run one platform properly rather than two badly. Splitting $1,500 across both usually means neither gets enough to learn from.
Tracking, or you're just guessing
Before you spend a cent, you need to know which enquiries came from where. Conversion tracking on form submissions and calls, call tracking if the phone is your main line, and some habit of asking new customers how they found you.
Without it, you will end up doing what most owners do: judging the ads on gut feel, cutting the ones that felt quiet, and never knowing the campaign you killed was the profitable one. Platform-reported numbers also flatter themselves — treat them as a guide, and trust your booked jobs as the truth.
The ad is not the problem
Here is the bit that gets skipped. Most ad accounts we look at aren't failing because of the targeting or the copy. They are failing because the click lands somewhere useless — usually a homepage that says "Welcome to our website" and makes a person in a hurry hunt for a phone number.
You paid $15 for that click. They will give you about three seconds. If the page doesn't immediately match what they searched, show what you do, and give them one obvious way to act, the money is gone.
So if you are choosing between spending your next $500 on more clicks or on fixing where those clicks land, fix the page. Every time. The best-targeted campaign in Sydney can't rescue a page that leaks.