Google Ads vs Facebook Ads: The Question Is Answered by a Number
If people already search for what you sell, start with Google and treat Meta as the second channel. If they do not — if nobody types your product into a search box because they do not know it exists — then Meta is not a preference, it is the only channel available to you, and Google will only ever capture the demand Meta creates. Everything else in this comparison is a detail hanging off that one fact.
The useful part is that you do not have to guess which store you are. It is a number, it is public, and you can have it before lunch. I read the pages ranking for this term first, and all of them sort the answer by funnel stage or by how old your store is. None of them tells you to go and count the searches, which is the step that settles it.
Which is better, Google Ads or Facebook Ads?
Whichever one matches the demand that already exists in your category. Google harvests demand; Meta creates it. A channel that harvests nothing when there is nothing to harvest is not underperforming, it is empty.
Put plainly: the question is not which platform is better, because they do different jobs. It is which job your store needs doing first, and that is decided by whether strangers are already looking for your product by name, by category, or not at all.
The condition that flips the answer is category search volume, not budget, not funnel stage and not how visual your product is. A store selling a product with thousands of monthly non‑branded searches and a store selling something nobody has a word for are in different businesses, whatever they have in common on the shelf.
Why is the funnel-stage answer the wrong one?
Because it describes what the channels do rather than what your store needs, and every store gets the same answer. Top of funnel goes to Meta, bottom of funnel goes to Google, run both — it is true, it is untestable, and it does not tell anybody what to do on Monday.
The budget splits those pages quote have the same problem. One recommends three quarters of the budget to search and a quarter to social. Another recommends the reverse for new stores and a flip once you are established. Both are describing a real pattern and both are unfalsifiable, because neither names the condition that would make it wrong.
Business age is the weakest version of this. A new store in a category with heavy existing search demand should be on Google from day one, and an established store selling something genuinely novel will still be carried by Meta in year five. Age is a proxy for a thing you can measure directly, so measure the thing.
How do you tell which one your category is?
Count the monthly searches on the non‑branded terms a stranger would use for your product, in the country you sell to. That number, against your order value, is the whole decision.
- Write down how a stranger asks for your product. Not your product name, not your brand, not the category label you use internally. The words someone would type who does not know you exist. Five to fifteen phrases.
- Get the monthly volume for each. Keyword Planner is free with an active ad account, and any keyword tool does it. Sum them, and separately note the two or three with the highest volume, because they will carry most of the traffic.
- Check the results page for the biggest ones. If the top of the page is Shopping listings and retailers, that is commercial demand you can buy. If it is definitions, news and forums, the volume is real but it is people learning rather than buying.
- Divide the volume you believe by your conversion economics. Total commercial searches a month, times a realistic click share, times your site conversion rate, times order value. That is roughly the ceiling on what search can produce for you this month, before a single bid is set.
The last step is the one that stops arguments, because it turns an opinion about channels into an amount of money. If the arithmetic says search can produce a few thousand dollars a month at full coverage and you need thirty, the conversation is over regardless of what anybody prefers. Search cannot invent searchers.
Run the same discipline on the cost side before committing. What Google will charge you depends on the auction in your category, and I have written separately about what Google Ads actually costs a Shopify store and how to work it out in advance.
The decision table
| What you are deciding on | Google Ads wins when | Meta wins when |
|---|---|---|
| Existing demand | People already search the category. You are competing for a query that exists whether or not you advertise. | Nobody searches it, because they do not know the product exists. Meta is the only way to reach them at all. |
| Speed to first sale | Shopping can produce orders within days of a feed going live, with no creative to test. | Slower to a first sale, because the creative has to find an angle before the targeting can do anything. |
| What the work actually is | Feed quality, search terms, structure. Unglamorous, largely technical, and it compounds quietly. | Creative volume. The account is a creative testing operation with a media buyer attached, and it never stops needing new work. |
| Cost of being wrong | Low. A bad keyword costs you clicks and you exclude it. Mistakes are visible in the search terms report. | Higher. A bad creative angle can eat a fortnight of budget before the data is conclusive, and the diagnosis is a judgement call. |
| Scaling past your category | Poorly. There is a hard ceiling at total search volume and you will feel it. | Well. This is the real argument for Meta — the audience is effectively unbounded, so budget can keep going up. |
| Measurement you can trust | Better. Query‑level data and a clear line from search to click to order. | Worse, and it got worse again after tracking restrictions. Platform‑reported results reliably overstate what happened. |
| Low order value products | Often unaffordable. A click costs what it costs regardless of your margin. | Usually cheaper per click, which is the difference between viable and not for a cheap product. |
| Recovering people who already came | Remarketing works and is cheap, but the inventory is limited by search behaviour. | Clearly better. Retargeting site visitors and existing customers is the least arguable thing Meta does. |
Both columns have wins, which is not diplomacy — it is the actual state of things. A comparison where one platform takes every row is describing the writer’s specialism rather than the choice.
At what spend does the answer change?
Around the point where Meta can generate enough weekly conversions to optimise on, which for most stores is the first threshold that actually binds. Below it, Meta is being asked to learn from too little data and will spend inefficiently no matter how good the creative is.
The mechanism is worth understanding because it is specific to Meta and it has no equivalent on the search side. A campaign optimising towards purchases needs a steady flow of them to stabilise. A store spending very little, on a high order value, generating a handful of orders a week, never gives it that flow. The account stays in a permanent learning state and the results look like bad luck rather than a structural mismatch.
| Situation | Where the money should go first | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Small budget, category has search volume | Google, almost entirely. | Search does not need volume to work. A small budget on a narrow set of high‑intent terms is a real campaign; the same budget on Meta is a sample too small to learn from. |
| Small budget, no search volume | Meta, and accept it will be inefficient at first. | There is no alternative. Keep the target event higher in the funnel until purchase volume exists, and expect the first months to be tuition. |
| Growing budget, both channels live | Fund Google to the point where it stops finding profitable volume, then everything else to Meta. | Search has a hard ceiling and social does not. Filling the bounded channel first and letting the unbounded one absorb the rest is the order that wastes least. |
| Large budget, search saturated | Meta, and the creative operation behind it. | Once impression share on the commercial terms is high, more money into search buys worse traffic. This is the point at which the honest answer flips. |
Notice the flip in the last row. Every guide that tells you Google first, forever, is wrong above a certain spend, and every guide that tells you Meta first is wrong below one. The useful question is which side of your own category’s ceiling you are sitting on.
What each one is genuinely better at
Google is better at being found by someone who has already decided what they want. Meta is better at being seen by someone who has not, and at coming back to people who nearly bought.
- Google, for a store, is mostly Shopping. The feed is the campaign. Most of the performance is decided before any bid is set, which is why feed work pays better than bid work in almost every account I look at.
- Google is the better channel for a considered purchase. Long deliberation, comparison, specifications — all of it happens in a search box.
- Meta is the better channel when the product needs showing. If the appeal is visual or the use case needs demonstrating, a static listing cannot do the job.
- Meta is the better channel for a product nobody has a name for. You cannot bid on a word that does not exist yet.
- Meta owns retargeting and customer reactivation. Even in a store where Google does the acquiring, this part usually belongs to Meta.
When should you run both?
Once the first channel has stopped finding cheap growth, and not before. Running both from the start is the default recommendation everywhere and it is usually wrong for a store under real budget constraints.
The reason is attention rather than money. Both channels reward being run properly, and running two badly is reliably worse than running one well. A split budget also halves the data each side gets, which matters enormously on Meta and somewhat on Google.
If you do run both, fix the attribution question first. Both platforms will claim the same orders and the two dashboards added together will report more revenue than the store took. Decide in advance which number governs the budget — store revenue against total spend is the honest one — or you will end up reallocating budget based on whichever platform lies more confidently.
Where each one loses money
Google loses money on queries that look commercial and are not. Meta loses money on audiences that engage and never buy. Both failures are quiet and both are visible if you go looking.
On the search side the waste is concentrated in broad terms and in campaign types that choose their own queries. A store that has never built a negative keyword list is paying for research traffic, job seekers and people trying to fix the product they already own; the starter list of negative keywords covers most of it. The larger version of the same problem is a Performance Max campaign quietly collecting your branded searches and reporting them as new acquisition.
On the Meta side, the classic loss is a campaign optimising towards an event that is not a purchase. Add to cart, view content and engagement all produce reassuring numbers and none of them pays for anything. The second is creative fatigue mistaken for audience exhaustion, which leads people to keep widening targeting when the problem is that they have shown the same three ads for two months.
Both platforms, in other words, will let you spend a considerable amount of money generating activity. Deciding which channel to back is the easy half; the harder half is having a number that tells you when either one has stopped working.
Questions people ask
Do Google Ads work better than Facebook ads?
Should I run Google Ads or Facebook ads first?
Is $20 a day good for Google Ads?
How should I split budget between Google Ads and Facebook ads?
Which is cheaper, Google Ads or Facebook ads?
Want this run properly?
I am Greg Asuncion, an ecommerce paid media consultant. I run Google Ads, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft for direct‑to‑consumer brands on Shopify — one person, published pricing, and a free audit after a call. Here is how I decide channel strategy for stores.