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Capture and creation
Every useful thing about this comparison follows from one distinction.
On Google, the customer arrives with a problem already formed. They have a leaking flat roof, they have typed it, and they are looking at four options. Your advert does not need to persuade them they have a problem. It needs to persuade them you are the safe choice, and it needs to appear at all.
On Facebook and Instagram, nobody is looking for you. They are looking at a niece’s holiday. Your advert has to do a job search adverts never have to do: make somebody who was not thinking about their driveway start thinking about their driveway. That is a harder job, it fails far more often, and when it works it reaches people no search campaign could have found because they never searched.
Capture is limited by how many people are searching. Creation is limited by how good the advert is. That single sentence explains almost every result either platform will ever produce for you.
What a search advert is buying
A place in a queue at the moment of decision, at a price set by an auction against everyone else who wants that queue.
The strengths are the obvious ones. Intent is proven rather than inferred. The timeline is short, so attribution is comparatively clean. Volume is predictable enough to plan a diary around. And the search terms report gives you something no other channel does: a written record of what people typed, which doubles as the best market research a small firm can get.
The constraint is a hard ceiling. If two hundred people a month search for your trade in your area, that is the whole market, and no budget beyond the point where you own it does anything except buy worse searches. Firms that keep increasing paid budget past that point start paying for people looking for jobs, courses, materials and DIY guidance. The Google Ads page covers the negative keyword discipline that keeps that from happening.
For scale, and clearly labelled as not British: WordStream and LocaliQ’s 2026 analysis of 13,474 United States campaigns reports a median cost per click of $8.33 and a median cost per lead of $90.92 in Home & Home Improvement, against $5.42 and $66.69 across all industries. Medians per campaign, US dollars, US auctions. There is no equivalent published UK figure: the CMA obtained real UK numbers from Google under statutory powers in 2020 and redacted them, so any UK table you find is somebody’s own client data or these figures relabelled.
What a feed advert is buying
Attention, cheaply, from people selected by where they live, how old they are and what they have engaged with. The click costs a fraction of a search click. The click is also worth a fraction, because the person clicking it had no problem five seconds ago.
Meta does three things well for trade businesses, and they are worth naming precisely because they are not “cheaper leads”.
- Visible work sells itself. A resin drive, a landscaped garden, a loft conversion, a bathroom. Before-and-after content is genuinely persuasive in a feed in a way that a text advert cannot be.
- Geography is tight and cheap. Show a completed job to people within three miles of it. Neighbours of a house you have just worked on are the warmest cold audience in existence.
- It reaches the undecided. Plenty of people know their fascias look tired and have never once searched for a fascia company. Search will never reach that person. A photograph of the house two streets away might.
The catch is that response is slower and messier. Enquiries arrive less qualified, the buying window is longer, and last-click reporting will undersell the channel while over-crediting whatever they searched afterwards. Judging Meta on the same 30-day view you judge search on is a category error. See Meta ads management for how the measurement is set up so that comparison is fair.
Which trades suit which
The dividing questions are simple. Is the job urgent? Is it visible? Would a homeowner recognise the need without being told?
| Type of work | Buying trigger | Search | Meta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency plumbing, locksmith, drainage, electrical faults | Something has just gone wrong | Strong. The decision happens in minutes and position wins it. | Weak. Nobody buys an emergency from a feed a week beforehand. |
| Roofing repairs, boiler replacement, glazing repair | Failure or wear, decided over days | Strong. Searched deliberately, often comparing three firms. | Supporting. Retargeting and proof, rarely first contact. |
| Driveways, resin, landscaping, garden rooms | Discretionary improvement | Good, but volume is limited by how many people have already decided. | Strong. Visible outcome, local demonstration, long consideration window. |
| Kitchens, bathrooms, extensions | Planned, researched for months | Good on specific late-stage searches. | Strong for the early months, provided you can wait for the enquiry. |
| Commercial scaffolding, contract maintenance | Procurement and specification | Strong on narrow commercial terms. | Weak. The buyer is not scrolling in a personal capacity. |
| Gutter clearing, exterior cleaning, fascia work | Nobody was thinking about it | Modest search volume at best. | Strong. This is the clearest demand-creation case in the trades. |
Sector-level detail, including the wasted searches specific to each trade, sits on the industries pages.
The creative burden nobody budgets for
Here is the part that decides whether Meta works for you, and it has nothing to do with targeting.
A search campaign can run for months on a handful of well-written text adverts, because the person reading them was already looking. A feed campaign consumes creative. The same photograph shown to the same town for six weeks stops working, and no amount of budget or optimisation rescues it. You will need new material regularly, and the best material is not produced by an agency. It is produced on site, on a phone, by whoever is doing the job.
- Before and after, from the same angle. Unglamorous and consistently the best performer.
- Short clips of work in progress. Thirty seconds of a machine doing something satisfying beats a polished thirty-second film.
- Real reviews as images. Reviews matter enormously. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, a US panel of 1,002 consumers, found 97% read reviews and 68% would only use a business rated four stars or above. Not a UK sample, but the direction is not controversial.
- Faces. The person who will turn up, saying what they do. Trust in the trades is personal.
If nobody in your firm will photograph a job, be realistic: Meta will not work for you, and that is a resourcing fact rather than a marketing opinion. Search asks far less of you.
Running both, in the right order
Where both are viable, the sequence that works is search first, Meta second, funded once the first is profitable.
Search proves the economics quickly and cheaply. It tells you what a converting enquiry is worth to you and how many exist. Once you have that number, Meta has something to be measured against. Starting with Meta means spending on demand creation with no idea what a lead is supposed to cost, which is how firms end up with three hundred cheap clicks and no jobs and conclude the whole platform is a scam.
The exception is a trade in the bottom row of the table above. If your work is genuinely invisible to search, going straight to feeds is correct, because there is no search demand to capture in the first place. Everything else follows.
The strongest combination, once both are running, is not two separate campaigns. It is search capturing the people who have decided, Meta retargeting the ones who visited your site and did not enquire, and a follow-up sequence catching the slow ones. Roughly half of Meta’s value in trade accounts is retargeting rather than cold prospecting, and retargeting only exists if the tracking was set up properly on day one.
When Meta is a waste of your money
We turn this one down more often than we sell it, so here is the list.
- Emergency-only work. Nobody keeps a locksmith advert in mind for the day they get locked out. Spend it on search.
- Commercial and public sector buyers. Procurement does not run through Instagram.
- No photographs and no intention of taking any. Stock images of somebody else’s bathroom perform exactly as badly as they deserve to.
- Nobody to answer slowly-arriving enquiries. Meta enquiries need chasing more than search enquiries do. If they will sit unanswered until Friday, you are buying disappointment.
- A budget that will only stretch to one channel and a trade that suits search. Split budgets underperform focused ones, every time.
If your work is visible, local and discretionary, Meta can be the better of the two channels and we will say so. If it is urgent, commercial or invisible, search is where your money belongs and we would rather tell you that than sell you both. The check takes one call: what you do, what a job is worth, and whether anyone is taking photographs. Ask, and see the results page for the four sectors where we can show our own account data rather than an argument.
Want this decided on your numbers rather than in the abstract?Average job value, close rate and the area you cover. That is enough to say which of these is right for you, including when the answer is neither.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
Are Facebook leads lower quality than Google leads?
Less qualified at the point of arrival, which is not the same thing. A search enquiry has already decided they need the work; a feed enquiry often has not. That means more chasing and a longer conversation, and it means the two channels should never be judged on the same close rate without adjusting for it.
Which is cheaper per lead?
Meta almost always looks cheaper per enquiry and frequently is not cheaper per job won. The right comparison is cost per quoted job, or better, cost per job won, measured over a window long enough to suit each channel. Comparing 30-day cost per lead flatters feeds and penalises search.
Can I run Meta ads with no photographs of my work?
You can, but we would advise against paying for it. Creative is the single biggest determinant of whether feed advertising works, and stock photography of somebody else’s finished bathroom is the clearest signal to a scrolling homeowner that the advert is not worth stopping for.
How much budget do I need to test Meta properly?
Enough to run long enough to get past the learning phase with more than one piece of creative, which for a local trade firm usually means committing to at least six to eight weeks rather than a fortnight. Stopping at two weeks because the enquiries are slow is the most common way firms waste the whole test.
Should I run both at once from the start?
Only if the budget genuinely supports both. Otherwise start with whichever matches how your customers buy: search for urgent and researched work, feeds for visible discretionary work. Prove the economics on one, then fund the second out of it.