Google Ads or Meta Ads: which brings an SME more?

"Should we advertise on Google or rather on Instagram?" This question comes up in almost every first meeting. The honest answer: it depends on whether your customers are already searching for your offer, or do not yet know that it interests them.

Search intent versus interests: the real difference

Google Ads reacts to an intention. Someone types "van lettering Solothurn" and has a problem at that moment. You pay to be visible at the right second. The drawback: demand is limited, and for narrow technical terms it may be a few dozen searches a month in the canton.

Meta Ads, Facebook and Instagram, interrupts. Nobody searches for you there; you appear between holiday photos. In return you determine the audience: region, age, interests, behaviour, profiles similar to existing customers. That suits offers you have to show.

The rough assignment by situation:

Setting up local campaigns correctly

The most common mistake in local campaigns is the location setting. By default, ads are also shown to people who are "interested in the location", your ad then appears to people reading about Solothurn from far away. Switch to "presence". Second, a radius is better than a cantonal border: from Solothurn a radius covering Grenchen, Biel and Bern captures the catchment area better. Third, ad extensions with address, phone number and opening hours belong in, otherwise you give away space in the results list.

Budget logic without numbers

How much budget is needed depends on three quantities: how often your term is searched, how strong the competition for that term is and how much a won job is worth. From that you can calculate backwards how many clicks a conversion needs and whether that holds up. The rule of thumb: better a few terms with sufficient budget than twenty with a scattered budget. Under-funded campaigns never collect enough data for the automation to learn.

Without conversion measurement everything is guesswork

Clicks are not customers. You have to measure what happens afterwards: submitted form, call, appointment booking, order. Only when these events arrive in the account does the bidding automation optimise for conversions instead of clicks. Coordination with the consent banner matters: where tracking is declined, data is missing and the campaign looks worse than it is.

The mistakes we see most often

Interplay with SEO

Advertising buys visibility immediately; search engine optimisation builds it slowly. Both in parallel makes sense: the campaign shows within a few weeks which terms bring enquiries. Those are exactly the ones you then build out organically. That way the advertising finances the research for the content.

Conclusion

Google for the acute need, Meta for the need nobody has yet formulated, and measurement for both. We set up campaigns for businesses from the region and go through them together after the first weeks.

More on this: SEO and SEA and social media.