For most New Zealand service businesses, Google Ads goes first. It catches people searching for your trade today. Facebook and Instagram ads work best once you need to create demand rather than catch it. Either way you are budgeting two things, management and ad spend, and most clients end up running both channels.
Google Ads vs Facebook Ads: the short answer
Google captures demand. Facebook creates it. That single difference settles most of this argument before you look at a price.
When someone types “electrician Tauranga” or “roof wash near me”, they have already decided they need the job done. Your ad turns up at the moment of intent, and the only question left is who they ring. That is why Google Search is the default first channel for anything urgent, anything with a fixed trigger (a broken hot water cylinder, a failed inspection, a leaking roof), and anything people already know they can buy.
Facebook and Instagram work the other way around. Nobody opens Instagram to find a landscaper. You interrupt them with proof that the job is worth doing, and some fraction of them realise they have wanted their driveway cleaned for two years. That takes better creative, more patience and a longer decision window, and it opens up work that never shows up in a search box.
Here is the practical comparison for a service business in New Zealand, with prices in NZD.
| Question | Google Ads | Facebook and Instagram ads |
|---|---|---|
| Who sees the ad | People searching for your service right now | People in your area who match the customer profile |
| Buyer intent | High | Low to medium |
| Best for | Urgent, searched-for, “I need this today” jobs | Visual, planned, discretionary jobs |
| Worst for | Services nobody knows to search for | Emergencies and same-day call-outs |
| Typical NZ management market rate | $500 to $1,500/month + GST | $500 to $1,500/month + GST |
| Ad spend we recommend | $900 to $1,500/month, roughly $30 to $50 a day | From $500/month |
The channel that suits you is decided by your job type, not by which platform you personally use. Plenty of owners who never touch Facebook do very well on it, and plenty who live on it should be spending their first dollar on Search.
Which is cheaper?
Facebook is usually cheaper per enquiry. Google is usually cheaper per booked job. Both statements are true at the same time, and confusing them is how people end up disappointed.
On Google Search you pay per click, and the click price tracks how valuable the job is. Across the Bay of Plenty commercial searches in our keyword research, clicks run from about $1 to $20 (DataForSEO New Zealand keyword data, as at July 2026). Fewer clicks, higher intent, higher cost each. On Meta you effectively pay per result on a lead campaign, and because you are reaching people who were not looking, the raw cost per enquiry comes in lower and the conversion rate to a booked job comes in lower with it.
The ranges below are what we typically see across New Zealand service accounts, in NZD. They are our own numbers, not a published industry benchmark, and yours will move with your trade and your town.
| Channel | Cost per enquiry we typically see | What moves it most |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search | $25 to $90 | Click price and how good the landing page is |
| Facebook or Instagram lead form | $10 to $50 | Creative quality and how short the form is |
| Facebook or Instagram to a website form | $30 to $80 | Site speed and how clear the offer is |
| Retargeting on either platform | $5 to $25 | Size of your website visitor list |
| Email and SMS to your own past customers | Under $5 | List size and how recent it is |
The one real number we can show you comes from a lead-form campaign for Rideshare Consultants: 250 Facebook enquiries at an $11 average cost, alongside 200 plus website enquiries at a $12 average, with roughly one in five turning into a client. A trade job in Tauranga usually costs more per enquiry than that, because the audience is smaller and the creative has to work harder.
Management costs much the same either way. NZ agencies and freelancers typically charge somewhere between $500 and $1,500 a month + GST to run either channel for a local service business, depending on how many campaigns, services and towns are involved. What matters more than the number is the shape of it. We never charge a percentage of ad spend, because that rewards an agency for spending more of your money. For the full cost breakdowns, read how much Google Ads cost in NZ and how much Facebook ads cost in NZ.
The number that decides everything is cost per booked job, not cost per enquiry. If a $600 job takes three enquiries to book, a $40 Google lead is cheap and a $15 Facebook lead that never answers the phone is expensive.
Is it worth paying for Facebook ads?
Yes, when your work is visual and the job is planned. No, when your work is an emergency and the customer will search.
Housewashing, roof treatments, landscaping, decks, flooring, kitchens, painting and renovations all sell on a photo. A before and after shot does more work than any headline, and Meta is built to put that photo in front of the right suburb cheaply. Boosting a post is not the same thing. Boosting buys engagement, which is why owners tell us Facebook does not work for them when what they actually did was pay for likes.
Blocked drains, electrical faults, lockouts, dead hot water and burst pipes are the other end. That customer is on their phone searching, and no amount of creative gets in front of them faster than a Search ad does. Spend there first.
Three things have to be right before Meta earns its keep:
- A real offer, not a brand post. A free measure and quote, a seasonal price, a package. Something with an answer attached.
- The Pixel and conversion tracking installed. Without it you cannot tell a good month from a lucky one, and Meta cannot find more buyers because it never learns who they were.
- Photos of your own work. Stock imagery kills a local campaign faster than a bad headline.
Get those right and Meta becomes the channel that fills the quiet weeks. If you want the local version of this, our Facebook Ads Tauranga page sets out how the campaigns are built, and the Facebook and Instagram ads management page covers what we run and report on.
When we run both, and how we split the budget
We start with one channel, get it profitable, then add the second. Two half-funded channels lose to one funded properly, every time.
For most service businesses the order looks like this.
- Google Search only, for 60 to 90 days. Enough budget to hold a full day of impressions on your core services, $900 to $1,500 a month, with conversion tracking in place before a dollar is spent.
- Add Facebook and Instagram retargeting. $150 to $300 a month, aimed only at people who have already been on your site. This is the cheapest ad money in the account, because you are talking to people who already know you exist.
- Open Facebook to cold audiences. From $500 a month in ad spend, once Search is producing jobs at a cost you are happy with and you have creative worth showing.
- Layer email and SMS over the top. Ads bring the customer once. Your database brings them back. One seasonal email and SMS remarketing campaign for an exterior cleaning client produced 55 jobs and $17.5K of revenue from a list of 2,000 past customers, with no extra ad spend at all.
Once both channels are running, a 70/30 split of Google to Facebook suits most trades, moving towards 50/50 for anything highly visual or seasonal. Emergency services often stay at 90/10, with the 10 spent purely on retargeting.
If you only have money for one channel, run Search. If you only have time for one job this month, install the tracking.
The split matters far less than whether you can see what is working. Most accounts we take over are not losing money because the wrong platform was chosen. They are losing money because nobody wired up conversion tracking, so every decision for the last year was a guess.
Mitch runs every account here himself from Mount Maunganui, which means one person can actually see both channels at once and move budget to whichever is producing booked jobs this month. If you want a straight answer on which one to start with, book a free 15-minute call and bring your numbers: average job value, how many enquiries you convert, and what you can spend. Fifteen minutes is usually enough to tell you where the first dollar should go, and our Google Ads management page sets out exactly what happens if it is Search.
