Google Ads reaches people who are already searching. Meta Ads reaches people who were not. They do different jobs, and a small budget goes furthest when you know which job you need done.
A business owner with a modest monthly advertising budget will often ask us whether to spend it on Google or on Facebook and Instagram. The question assumes the two are alternatives. They are closer to different tools for different jobs, and the right split depends on what your customers already know about you.
Google Ads, in its search form, places your advertisement in front of people at the moment they type a query. Someone searching for an emergency plumber, a coaching class for a particular exam or a wedding photographer is telling you exactly what they want. That is called intent, and it is why search advertising tends to produce enquiries from people who are ready to act. You pay when someone clicks, and you choose the phrases you want to appear for.
Meta Ads, which covers Facebook and Instagram, works the other way. Nobody is searching for you there. People are scrolling through friends, photos and video, and your advertisement interrupts them. That makes it excellent for discovery: introducing a new business, promoting an event, launching a batch, showing off a product. It lets you target by location, age, interests and behaviour, and it works very well with strong images and short video. But the person seeing your ad was not thinking about buying, so more of them need persuading, and the enquiries can be slower to arrive.
A useful rule of thumb follows. If there is existing demand for what you sell, meaning people already search for it, start with Google search. If your offering is new, visual or unfamiliar, or the customer would not know to search for it, Meta is more likely to help. Many local businesses do well with both: search to capture people ready to buy and social to keep the business visible to everyone else.
On a small budget, focus matters. Splitting a few thousand rupees a month across four platforms and six campaigns leaves each too thin to learn anything. Choose one main campaign, and give it enough time and money to produce meaningful data. A common starting point is to put the larger share of the budget on the channel closest to buying, and the smaller share on discovery.
Be realistic about how Meta's system learns. Meta's own guidance is that an ad set needs roughly fifty optimisation events a week to leave its learning phase and perform steadily. A small budget cannot generate that many purchases. The practical answer is to optimise for an earlier action, such as a form submission or a WhatsApp message, which happens more often and lets the system learn faster.
Whatever you choose, get the basics right before spending. Send people to a page built for the campaign, not to the home page, and make it obvious what to do next. Install conversion tracking so you can see which advertisements produce enquiries and not just clicks. Set a location that matches where you actually serve. On Google, add negative keywords to exclude searches that are not relevant, such as free, jobs or courses, if you are selling a service. On Meta, test a small number of different creative approaches instead of one.
Give a campaign at least two to four weeks before judging it, and change one thing at a time. Turning everything off after three days because there have been no sales tells you nothing. Spending steadily on something you are measuring properly tells you a great deal.