You have five hundred pounds a month for advertising and two tabs open. One is Google Ads, where a click on anything worth having costs more than you would like. The other is Meta, where the reach looks enormous and the leads go quiet. Google Ads vs Facebook Ads for small business owners is not a question about which platform is better. It is a question about whether your customer is already looking for you.
There is also a headline going round that you should deal with before it starts moving money about. The claim that Meta has overtaken Google in advertising revenue is a forecast, not a reported result, and the reported results say something different. We will settle that first so it stops influencing a decision it has no business influencing.
Then the useful part: how to split a small budget by what you sell, and the three things that waste more money than picking the wrong platform.
Key takeaways
- Meta has not overtaken Google in reported advertising revenue: Alphabet reported $81.6bn of Google advertising in Q2 2026 against Meta's $59.4bn.
- The widely quoted overtaking figure is an eMarketer forecast published in April 2026 for full year 2026, not a result anyone has filed.
- Google Ads captures demand that already exists; Meta ads create demand from people who were not looking, so the right split depends on your trade.
- An emergency plumber should start near 80 per cent Google; a clothing brand nobody searches for by name should start near 80 per cent Meta.
- Below roughly £300 a month, splitting across two channels is a mistake. Pick one and run it properly for eight weeks.
Did Meta actually overtake Google in ad revenue?
No, and it is worth being precise, because the claim has been repeated as settled fact.
The number everyone quotes comes from an eMarketer forecast published on 13 April 2026. It projects worldwide digital ad revenues for full year 2026 at $243.46bn for Meta and $239.54bn for Google, with Meta growing at 24.1 per cent against Google's 11.9 per cent. That is a projection made in April about a year that has not finished, on eMarketer's own model of what counts as digital ad revenue. A reasonable forecast from a serious firm. Not a result.
The results point the other way. In its second quarter 2026 figures, published on 22 July, Alphabet reported $81.63bn of Google advertising revenue: $63.27bn from Search and other, $11.06bn from YouTube ads and $7.30bn from the Google Network. Meta reported $59.36bn of advertising revenue for the same quarter, up 27.5 per cent year on year. On reported numbers Google is roughly $22bn a quarter ahead.
The two sets of figures are not measuring the same thing, which is how a forecast shows one company ahead while the filings show the other. The duller true version: Meta is growing much faster, the gap is closing, Google is still the larger advertising business. None of which should change what you do. Nobody running a salon off Risbygate picks a channel from a league table.
Google Ads vs Facebook Ads for small business: is the customer already looking?
Every sensible split comes out of one distinction. Google Ads is intent led: somebody has a problem, they have typed it into a box, and you pay to be there while they shop. Meta is interruption led. Nobody opened Instagram to find you. You pay to appear in front of someone who was not looking, and to be interesting enough that they stop.
Neither is better. They are different jobs. Intent is expensive and converts fast. Interruption is cheap and converts slowly, if the creative is good enough.
The first test is whether you can name the phrase. If a person with water coming through a ceiling at seven in the morning types emergency plumber Bury St Edmunds, that is a Google business. If nobody types small batch candle subscription because they do not know it exists, that is a Meta business. Most firms sit between, so the answer is a weighting rather than a winner.
The second test is volume, and here a Suffolk business differs from the American article you read about this. There is only so much search in a market town. A niche service in Thetford or Diss might get thirty relevant searches a month. Five hundred pounds exhausts that in a fortnight, and then Google keeps spending on searches that merely resemble yours.
What Google Ads is good at, and what it is not
Where it earns its money
Named job searches with urgency attached, and high value one off work where the customer compares two or three firms and rings one. Emergency trades, MOT and diagnostics, boiler replacement, legal and accountancy work with a deadline behind it. Anything where the phrase they type contains both job and town. The higher cost per click stops mattering, because the conversion rate carries it.
Local Services Ads deserve a mention because plenty of Suffolk trades have never looked at them. They are live in the UK across a growing list of home service and professional categories, sit above the standard ads, carry the Google Guaranteed badge, and charge per lead rather than per click. Verification is slow and prices climb in busy urban categories, but for an eligible trade it is usually the first thing we would apply for, and we prove tracking works before any spend goes through when we run a Google Ads account.
Where it burns it
- Thin search volume. If the term gets thirty searches a month, no budget fixes it.
- Broad match with no negatives. The commonest way a small account wastes half its money.
- Clicks landing on the homepage. Someone searched for one specific job and you handed them a menu.
- Paying for terms you already rank for. If you are top of the organic results, you are buying a click you had free.
- Performance Max on a small budget. It will spend, and you will struggle to see where. On a few hundred pounds, a tight search campaign you can read beats an automated one you cannot.
What Facebook and Instagram ads are good at, and what they are not
Where they earn their money
Anything visual, anything new, anything with an occasion attached. A venue opening, a treatment nobody knew existed, a before and after that makes the case in two seconds. Meta is also the cheapest place to talk again to people who visited your website and did not enquire, the most reliably profitable thing most small businesses can do with a hundred pounds.
It is the right home for planned rather than urgent work too. Nobody searches for a kitchen refit the moment they want one. They think about it for four months, and Meta keeps you visible through them, so that when they finally search, they search for you by name.
Where they burn it
Creative starvation, mostly. Meta advertising is a creative business with a media budget attached, not a targeting business. One image running unchanged for six weeks fatigues and your cost per result drifts up whatever the targeting does. If you cannot produce something new every fortnight, the budget underperforms. That is a real cost, which is why we quote ad creative for Meta and Google as a fixed piece of work rather than pretending it is free.
The second trap is cheap leads. A lead form produces enquiries at a cost per lead that looks brilliant on the dashboard and terrible in your diary, because the person filled in three fields while queuing for coffee and has no memory of it. The number that matters is cost per booked job. The third is that Meta marks its own homework, so reconcile its reported conversions against what landed in your inbox.
How to split a small ad budget by business type
Here is where we would start a new account, before any data exists. These are opening positions, not conclusions, and every one should move after eight weeks of real numbers.
| Business type | Where demand starts | Opening split |
|---|
| Emergency trade: plumber, electrician, locksmith | Someone is already searching, urgently | 80% Google, 20% Meta retargeting |
| Garage, MOT, vehicle repair | Named job search, low consideration | 80% Google, 20% Meta |
| Accountant, solicitor, consultant | Named job search, high value, slow decision | 70% Google, 30% Meta |
| Planned trade work: kitchens, extensions, landscaping | Months of thinking, then a search | 50% Google, 50% Meta |
| Restaurant, pub, new venue | Category search plus occasion discovery | 40% Google, 60% Meta |
| Clinic, salon, aesthetics | Some search, mostly trust and discovery | 30% Google, 70% Meta |
| Clothing, homeware, food and drink brand | Nobody searches for you by name yet | 20% Google, 80% Meta |
The pattern underneath is simple. The more urgent the need, the more the money belongs on search. The more your product is a want rather than a need, the more it belongs on social. A Sudbury butcher selling a Christmas order deadline is a Meta business in November and a Google business the week before Christmas.
One further adjustment. If you already sit in the map pack for your main term, move a slice of the Google budget to Meta, because you are partly competing with yourself. If you are invisible in local search, fixing that is usually cheaper per enquiry than buying the clicks, which is why our local search work in Bury St Edmunds sits inside the monthly plan.
How much should a small business spend, and when to stop?
The floor, and why splitting below it fails
Below about £300 a month, do not split. Two campaigns on £150 each will both take months to gather enough data to optimise, and you will cancel both while concluding advertising does not work. Pick the single channel the table points you at, run it eight weeks without fiddling, and judge it on booked work.
What to measure instead of cost per click
- Cost per enquiry, counted from your own inbox and phone rather than the platform dashboard.
- Cost per booked job, which is the only number that pays wages.
- Percentage of enquiries answered within the hour. Nobody measures this and it usually explains everything.
When to turn it off
If last month's enquiries are still sitting unanswered, the ad budget is not your problem and more of it will not help. An enquiry answered in five minutes and one answered in two days are not the same asset, and the gap between them is worth more than most people's entire media spend. Closing that gap costs nothing but a habit: reply the same hour, every time.
Three things that waste more money than the channel choice
Arguing about Google versus Meta is the interesting part of this decision and rarely the expensive part. In accounts we take over, the money is going somewhere else.
- The page the click lands on. Sending paid traffic to a homepage is the most expensive habit in small business advertising. Someone searched for bathroom fitting in Newmarket and you gave them a hero image and a menu. A page answering that exact search, asking for the enquiry above the fold, often doubles the conversion rate without a penny more spend, which is why landing pages are part of the website plan.
- Tracking nobody ever proved. If you cannot say which campaign produced Tuesday's phone call, you are not optimising, you are guessing with a dashboard open. Call tracking and proper conversion events before the first pound leaves the account.
- Speed of response. Paid traffic is impatient by definition. They clicked because they wanted it sorted. If your reply arrives the next working day, you paid for a lead a competitor closed.
There is a third channel worth a test line rather than a real allocation. ChatGPT advertising has opened to UK businesses and the click intent is unusually high, though volume is nothing like search. We covered what it costs in our piece on ChatGPT ads for UK small businesses. Fund it from a testing slice, not from the channels paying your bills.
Frequently asked questions
Has Meta overtaken Google in advertising revenue?
Not on reported results. Alphabet reported $81.63bn of Google advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2026 against Meta's $59.36bn. The claim comes from an eMarketer forecast published in April 2026, projecting full year 2026 worldwide digital ad revenues of $243.46bn for Meta and $239.54bn for Google. It is a projection on a different measurement basis, not a filed result.
Should I spend on Google Ads or Facebook Ads first?
Start with Google if you can name the phrase a customer types when they need you, and there is enough search volume locally to spend against. Start with Meta if your product is something people want but would never search for, or if you are new and nobody knows the name yet. Urgency points to search, discovery points to social.
How much should a small business spend on ads each month?
Enough to buy meaningful data in one channel, which in most Suffolk categories means at least £300 a month before you split anything. Beyond that, spend should follow gross margin and capacity rather than a percentage rule. There is no point generating forty enquiries a month for a two van operation that can service twelve of them.
Are Google Local Services Ads available in the UK?
Yes, across a growing list of home service and professional categories, though eligibility varies by trade and location. They charge per lead rather than per click, appear above the standard search ads, and carry the Google Guaranteed badge. Verification takes time, lead quality is not guaranteed, and lead prices rise sharply in competitive urban categories.
Why do my Meta ads produce cheap leads that never convert?
Because an instant form asks almost nothing of the person filling it in. A lead costing £4 that never answers the phone is more expensive than one costing £40 that books. Add a qualifying question, send traffic to a real page instead of a form when the offer needs explaining, and measure cost per booked job rather than cost per lead.
Can I run both Google and Meta on £500 a month?
Yes, but only once one of them is working. Run a single channel for eight weeks, get it to a stable cost per booked job, then peel off twenty to thirty per cent for the second channel, usually as retargeting rather than cold reach. Two cold campaigns started at once on a small budget will both take too long to read.
Where we would start if this were your business
Find your row in the table, take the opening split, and commit to it for eight weeks without changing it every Tuesday. Before a penny goes out, check the tracking works and the click lands on a page built for that exact search rather than your front door. Then judge it on booked work, not impressions.
After eight weeks you will know something no forecast can tell you: what a customer costs you, in your town, in your trade. That number beats any industry benchmark, and once you have it the split argues itself.
We run both channels on a fixed quote rather than a percentage of spend, so the advice does not get more expensive the more you spend. If you want a straight answer on which one to start with, tell us what you sell and where, and the plans everything else sits inside are on the pricing page.
