This is the question that comes up most often, usually phrased as “everyone keeps telling me to do Instagram ads, is that right?”
The honest answer is that it depends on one thing: whether people are already searching for what you sell.
The difference in one line
Google shows your ad to someone who typed what they want. Meta shows your ad to someone who fits a description and happens to be scrolling.
That is the whole distinction, and almost everything else follows from it.
When Google goes first
If your service is something people look for by name when they need it, start with Google. Emergency plumbing, dentists, auto repair, law, HVAC, moving companies, roofing. Nobody scrolls Instagram and decides to get a root canal, but plenty of people type “emergency dentist Thornhill” at ten at night.
Search demand is the signal. If there are people actively looking, being the first credible result in front of them is the shortest path between spending a dollar and earning one.
The trade-off is cost. You are bidding against everyone else who wants that same person, and in competitive trades around Toronto a click is rarely cheap. That is survivable if your average job is worth a few thousand dollars. It is painful if you sell a twenty dollar product.
When Meta goes first
If nobody is searching for you, Meta is usually the better start. That covers most new products, anything people did not know existed, and anything bought on impulse or appearance.
It is also where visual businesses do well. Salons, cafés, clinics with a before-and-after story, home staging, custom furniture. Meta will show your work to people who match your customer profile within a radius you choose, and good footage does a lot of the work.
The trade-off is patience. You are interrupting someone who was not thinking about you, so it takes more impressions, and the numbers look worse for the first couple of weeks while the platform figures out who responds.
What usually happens in practice
Most local businesses end up running both, but not at the same time and not at the same weight.
The sequence that tends to work is Google first, if there is search demand, because it pays back fastest and tells you what people actually call the thing you sell. Then Meta second, to reach the larger group who would buy but were never going to search.
Splitting a small budget across both from day one is the common mistake. Neither platform gets enough data to learn, so both look like they failed.
The part nobody enjoys
Whichever you pick, you need to be able to tell which ads produced enquiries, not just which produced clicks. That means conversion tracking set up properly before you spend anything, and somebody checking it after the first week.
Without that you are guessing, and after three months you will have a bill and no idea which half of it worked.
A reasonable starting point
Pick one platform. Give it enough budget to run for at least a month without being throttled. Track enquiries rather than clicks. Look at cost per enquiry, and decide from there.
If you want somebody to set that up and tell you honestly which one your business should start with, that is what our paid advertising work covers, for businesses around the Greater Toronto Area.