Meta Ads vs Google Ads for Contractors — Which One Should You Run?

Quick answer: Google captures people already looking — higher intent, higher cost per lead, better for emergency and replacement work. Meta creates demand — cheaper leads, colder, and only profitable if you follow up fast. Under roughly $3,000 a month, start on Google. Add Meta once your follow-up process can handle three times the lead volume.

One difference explains almost everything else about these two platforms, and once you see it, the arguments about which one is “better” stop making sense.

Google is pull. Someone’s water heater is leaking, they type “water heater replacement near me,” and you appear at the exact moment they’ve decided to buy. You’re not persuading anyone. You’re winning a race against four competitors for a customer who already exists.

Meta is push. Nobody opens Facebook to buy a roof. You interrupt someone who was looking at a friend’s vacation photos and give them a reason to think about their driveway, their gutters, their 19-year-old AC unit. You’re not capturing demand. You’re manufacturing it.

Everything downstream — cost, lead quality, follow-up load, how long before you know if it’s working — comes from that one distinction.

What Google Ads actually costs a contractor

High intent is expensive because everyone wants it. Clicks on emergency and replacement search terms in competitive metros commonly land in the $15–$60 range, with water damage, roofing, and “emergency” modifiers at the top end and maintenance-type searches lower. Cost per lead for most home-service trades on Google typically runs somewhere from $80 to $250, and higher in dense markets during peak season.

What you get for that price:

They asked for you. No convincing required on the call.
Answer rates are high — often double what a cold social lead produces, because they’re expecting a call.
The buying window is short. Same week, often same day.
It’s capped. There are only so many people searching for your service in your service area each month. Google can’t invent more.

That last point is the one contractors discover the hard way. Search volume is a ceiling. Once you’re capturing most of the qualified searches in your territory, extra budget goes into broader, worse terms and your numbers get worse, not better.

Worth naming here: Local Services Ads sit above regular Google Ads, charge per lead rather than per click, and require background checks and license verification. For plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and several other licensed trades they’re often the single best-performing source available — and many contractors ignore them because setup is tedious. If you’re licensed and eligible, run them before you run anything else.

What Meta actually costs

Cost per lead on Meta for home-service trades typically lands $25 to $80, sometimes lower with a strong offer and a good creative. That looks like a bargain next to Google. It isn’t, quite.

What you’re buying:

Volume, on demand. Meta will produce as many leads as your budget allows. There’s no search-volume ceiling.
Colder prospects. They weren’t shopping ninety seconds ago.
A longer, noisier follow-up. Expect to work harder for each conversation.
Better fit for planned, visible, “I’ve been meaning to do that” work — roof replacement, remodels, exterior cleaning, window replacement, anything where a before-and-after photo does the selling.

Meta also rewards things Google doesn’t care about. Creative matters enormously — a genuine 30-second phone video of your crew finishing a job will routinely beat a designed graphic. And creative fatigues: what works in week one will decay by week six, so you need new material regularly. That’s a real ongoing cost, in time if not in dollars.

The comparison that misleads everyone

Contractors compare the two on cost per lead, decide Meta is three times cheaper, move the budget, and are furious within six weeks. The comparison is wrong at the root, because a Meta lead and a Google lead are not the same object.

Run it all the way to booked jobs instead. Same $3,000, same company:

Google Ads — $3,000

Cost per lead $110 → 27 leads
Booking rate 45% → 12 appointments
Close rate 40% → 4.8 jobs
Cost per booked job: $625

Meta Ads — $3,000

Cost per lead $45 → 67 leads
Booking rate 22% → 15 appointments
Close rate 30% → 4.4 jobs
Cost per booked job: $682

Nearly identical. The $45 lead and the $110 lead produced roughly the same business. But look at the middle column: Meta required 67 conversations instead of 27. Two and a half times the dials, texts, and voicemails for the same result.

That’s the real trade. Meta’s cheaper lead is paid for in labor, and if the labor isn’t there, the math collapses. A contractor who checks leads twice a day will get most of the value out of that Google campaign and almost none out of the Meta campaign. Run your own version of this in the cost per booked job calculator before shifting a dollar.

”Meta leads are garbage” — usually they aren’t

This is the most common complaint in the trades, and in most cases the diagnosis is wrong.

A Meta lead has a shelf life measured in minutes. They were mid-scroll, they tapped an instant form that pre-filled their name and number, and their intent was mild. Call in three minutes and you have a real conversation. Call in three hours and you’re a stranger phoning about something they barely remember doing. The lead didn’t go bad — it expired.

Three things separate contractors who make Meta work from contractors who quit it:

Automated text inside 60 seconds, from a number that accepts replies, naming the company and the thing they enquired about.
A real cadence — six to eight touches over ten days, mixing text and call, not one attempt and a shrug.
A qualifying offer. “Free estimate” attracts everyone with a pulse. “Free roof inspection for homes built before 2010” filters before the click and costs you slightly more per lead for considerably better leads.

If you’re not doing all three, don’t run Meta. Fix follow-up first — why response time decides the job covers the mechanics, and the speed to lead calculator will quantify what your current lag costs.

Which one, for which trade

Emergency and urgent work — burst pipes, no heat, no AC, storm damage, water in the basement. Google, decisively. Nobody scrolls Facebook while their kitchen floods. Add Local Services Ads if eligible.

Planned replacement with a visible result — roofing, siding, windows, pressure washing, decks, remodels. Meta is strong here, sometimes stronger than Google, because the work photographs well and the buyer is persuadable rather than urgent.

HVAC — both, and shift the mix by season. Google carries the July and January emergency peaks; Meta carries spring and fall, when nobody’s searching and you’re selling replacement to people whose system is old but still limping.

Anything with a long consideration cycle — large remodels, additions. Meta to generate interest, Google to catch them when they finally start searching, and a real follow-up system in between, because that gap can run months.

The order to do this in

If you’re starting from nothing: one platform, done properly. Split $2,000 across Google and Meta and you’ll have two half-funded campaigns, neither with enough conversion data to optimize, and no clean read on either. Put it all on Google. Get to a stable cost per booked job. Then add Meta with new money, not by cannibalizing what’s working.

If you’re already running both and can’t tell which is carrying the business, that’s a tracking problem, not a strategy problem. You need to know which source produced each booked job — not each lead. Until you have that, every budget decision you make is a guess. Work out your ceilings first with the max cost per lead calculator, and if you’re weighing paid campaigns against buying leads from a platform, the exclusive-vs-shared breakdown runs that comparison.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which platform gives contractors cheaper leads, Meta or Google?

Meta, almost always — typically $25–$80 per lead for home services against $80–$250 on Google. But cheaper leads don’t reliably mean cheaper jobs. Google leads book and close at higher rates because the person was actively searching, so the two platforms often end up within a hundred dollars of each other on cost per booked job. Compare at the job level, never at the lead level.

Can a contractor run both platforms at the same time?

Yes, and most established contractors should — but not until one of them is producing a stable, known cost per booked job. Running both from day one on a small budget splits the conversion data, keeps both campaigns in the platform’s learning phase, and leaves you unable to tell which one deserves more money. Sequence them.

Because the intent was mild and the window is short. Someone who tapped an instant form mid-scroll has largely moved on within the hour. Contractors who text automatically inside a minute and follow a six-to-eight touch cadence over ten days get contact rates several times higher than contractors who call once, the next day. The lead source is rarely the problem — the response time is.

How long before I know if a campaign is working?

Sixty to ninety days. The first month is mostly the platform’s learning phase plus you patching follow-up gaps. Meta typically needs longer than Google to settle, because it takes several creative rotations to find what your market responds to. Killing either platform after two weeks tells you nothing except that two weeks isn’t enough.

Are Local Services Ads better than regular Google Ads?

For eligible licensed trades — plumbing, HVAC, electrical and similar — they frequently outperform standard search ads, because you pay per lead instead of per click and you sit above everything else on the page. The catch is the verification process, which is genuinely tedious, and limited volume in smaller markets. Run them alongside search ads rather than instead of them.

What budget do I need before Meta ads are worth trying?

Enough to generate roughly 20–30 leads a month so the platform can optimize, plus the operational capacity to actually work them. At a $45 cost per lead that’s around $1,000–$1,400 in media — but the harder requirement is the follow-up. If nobody can respond within minutes, that budget will produce leads and no jobs, and you’ll conclude Meta doesn’t work when what didn’t work was the process behind it.