How to Choose Between Google Ads and Facebook Ads: The Questions Most Business Owners Never Think to Ask
Platform selection, real budget minimums, and the interview questions that reveal whether a paid ads freelancer actually knows what they're doing.
TL;DR: Before spending a dollar on paid ads, you need three things: a platform decision based on whether your product is need-based or want-based, a realistic budget you can sustain for 90 days without seeing a return, and at least one interview question no rehearsed freelancer can answer convincingly. Google Ads requires at minimum $3,000 per month and 10 clicks per day to feed the algorithm. The best freelancers are often the worst at selling themselves.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Google Ads minimum recommended spend | $3,000/month ($100/day) |
| Time to meaningful results | 90 days minimum |
| Min. daily clicks to feed Google’s algorithm | 10 clicks/day |
| Google Ads CPC in health/services | $5 to $7+ |
| Upwork skill parity threshold | $40 to $50/hour |
| Second-opinion ad audit (Upwork) | ~$50 |
| First freelancer red flag | Promises results in under 30 days |
How to Choose Between Google Ads and Facebook Ads: The Questions Most Business Owners Never Think to Ask
This post is based on a real strategy consultation Peterson published on the Creekside Marketing YouTube channel: Inside a Real Marketing Strategy Call: How to Choose the Right Ads, Budget, and Freelancer. The conversation covers platform selection, realistic budget expectations, and the specific questions to ask before hiring anyone to run your ads.
Most business owners facing their first Google Ads or Facebook Ads decision arrive with three questions: which platform, how much, and who should we hire. They get rehearsed answers from every agency and freelancer they talk to, because most of those people are optimizing for closing the deal rather than giving accurate expectations. What follows is the framework we actually walk through when a business owner brings those questions to us.
How to Pick Between Google Ads and Facebook Ads
The single most important factor in choosing between Google Ads and Facebook Ads is whether your product or service meets existing demand or creates new demand. If people are already searching for what you offer, Google Ads gets you in front of them at the moment of intent. If your product is something people want but are not actively searching for, Facebook and Instagram are better tools because you are triggering demand rather than intercepting it.
Need-based services belong on Google: therapy, dental care, legal help, emergency repairs. Want-based services belong on Meta: coaching groups, memberships, lifestyle products, aspirational offers. The mistake we see most often is businesses spending on Google Ads for a service people do not know to search for, and then blaming the platform when leads do not come in.
A business with counseling services and a coaching membership would use Google Ads for the counseling side (people actively search for therapists) and Meta Ads for the coaching groups (a desire you create, not a problem they are searching to solve). These are not interchangeable. Getting this wrong at the start means you can have a technically excellent campaign running toward the wrong goal entirely.
Google Ads Budget Minimums: Why $30 a Day Will Not Work
The minimum viable Google Ads budget is not a number we invented to push clients toward higher spend. It comes from a specific technical requirement: Google’s algorithm needs at least 10 clicks per day to learn and optimize. In most competitive industries, especially health and professional services, cost per click runs $5 to $7 or higher. That means you need at minimum $50 to $70 per day just to feed the algorithm enough data to function. In practice, we tell most clients not to run Google Ads with less than $3,000 per month, which is roughly $100 per day.
Even $3,000 per month produces nothing if you pull the plug at week six. Google Ads requires 90 days minimum. The first 30 days of a new campaign are essentially a data collection phase. You are not going after conversions yet. You are figuring out which search terms generate qualified traffic, which match types are pulling irrelevant queries, and which ad variations get clicked. At day 90, the campaign looks completely different from day one.
The most common reason Google Ads campaigns fail is not bad setup. It is premature cancellation. The campaign gets shut down before the data has accumulated enough for smart optimization decisions. That is not a platform failure. It is a timeline failure.
This is why we do not take on clients who cannot sustain ad spend for a full 90 days without requiring a significant return during that period. If the spend would genuinely hurt your business to lose, you are not yet positioned to run Google Ads. That is an honest assessment of what the platform requires, not a gatekeeping rule.
For most earlier-stage businesses, Facebook and Instagram Ads are a better starting point. Data is cheaper, volume is higher at lower spend levels, and the learning curve is faster. The tradeoff is that Facebook leads carry more window shoppers. More volume, but lower average lead quality.
How to Find a Paid Ads Freelancer When You Do Not Know What to Look For
The best paid ads freelancers are often the worst at selling themselves. This is the most counterintuitive thing we have learned from managing our own team of specialists on Upwork. The people who have done serious, results-producing work tend to be direct and technical. They know what they know, and they do not fill silence with impressive-sounding language. The ones who come across as polished and confident on a first call have often spent more time optimizing the pitch than the craft.
We use Upwork for our own freelancer hiring and recommend it to business owners who want to hire directly. Post the job, collect proposals, review profiles, and look at how long a freelancer’s client relationships have lasted. Someone who churns through clients quickly has not delivered results worth renewing. One whose longest clients have been with them for a year or more has almost certainly earned it.
On Upwork, around $40 to $50 per hour is roughly where skill sets converge. Below that threshold, you will find a mix of people who are genuinely skilled but cannot communicate it, and people who are not skilled but can. The difference is hard to detect without knowing the craft. That is why the interview matters more than the rate.
One firm recommendation: US-based freelancers only for your first hire. Not because overseas talent cannot do good work, but because the volume of low-quality and fraudulent proposals increases significantly, and you do not yet have the pattern recognition to sort them efficiently.
If you are considering an agency rather than a freelancer, ask who will actually be working on the account day to day. Agencies are good at putting their best people on the first call and then routing execution to junior staff or contractors you will never meet. The person who sells you and the person who runs the account should not be strangers to each other by the time you sign.
The Interview Questions That Separate Honest Practitioners from Good Salespeople
Ask every freelancer or agency you interview how they failed recently.
This single question filters better than any credential or case study. Anyone who has actually done the work has failed. That is how you learn which levers work in a given industry, which audience signals are worth bidding on, and which landing page structures convert. A practitioner who hesitates at this question, pivots to a success story, or gives a polished non-answer has told you something important: they have either not done enough real work to accumulate failures, or they are optimizing to close you rather than to help you.
When we interview people for our own accounts, we filter before the call. Anyone who responded “under one month” to the question of how long it takes to see results was immediately disqualified. The minimum is two to three months. Anyone who says otherwise is telling you what you want to hear, and that pattern does not stop after the contract is signed.
Additional questions that reveal whether someone actually knows the work:
Who will be working on the account day to day, and can I meet them before we start?
How do you handle offline conversion tracking, and what is your process for getting qualified lead data back into Google or Facebook? If the answer is “we track form fills and calls,” ask what comes after that. If there is no process for feeding outcome data back into the platform, the algorithm will optimize for the wrong thing indefinitely.
How long do your clients typically stay with you? Retention data is more honest than any testimonial. Testimonials are curated. Client tenure is not.
Once you have hired someone, pay a separate Upwork freelancer around $50 to audit the account after the first month. Two competent practitioners should not give you fundamentally different assessments of the same account. If they do, that is important information about the first one.
For more on how agencies are structured and what good onboarding looks like, see our breakdown of what real paid ads agency onboarding involves and our piece on why Google Ads ROI compounds rather than spikes.
Why Great Ads Cannot Save a Broken Offer or Landing Page
No amount of ad optimization generates qualified leads if the landing page is not relevant to the ad or if the offer does not resonate with the people who land on it. We describe this as the leaky bucket problem internally. If you pour more ad spend into a broken landing page, you are pouring more water into a container with holes in the bottom. Running more ads does not fix it.
When we review a new account, we do not start with the campaigns. We start with where the traffic lands. Is the messaging consistent with what the ad promised? Does the offer make sense for the audience the campaign is reaching? Is there a clear, frictionless conversion action? These factors determine whether traffic converts. The ads can be technically perfect and results will still be poor if the destination is wrong.
This is also why we are cautious about running ads for businesses that have not proven their offer through any other channel. If organic traffic, referrals, and direct outreach have not converted, running ads to the same offer introduces a second variable. When conversions do not come in, you cannot tell whether the ads are underperforming or whether the offer simply does not resonate. Both problems look identical from a dashboard.
Offline Conversion Tracking: The Difference Between Campaigns That Learn and Campaigns That Guess
Form fills and phone calls are a starting point, not a complete setup. Anyone can fill out a form. Bots fill out forms. People with no intention of buying fill out forms. If Google or Facebook is optimizing toward form fills, it is trying to get you more of something that may have no connection to your actual business outcomes.
Offline conversion tracking means feeding the platform data on which of those form fills actually became qualified leads or paying clients. That signal needs to go back into Google or Facebook. Without it, you are funding a campaign that learns the wrong thing and gets progressively better at it.
According to Creekside Marketing’s analysis across $20M+ in managed ad spend, campaigns with qualified offline conversion signals consistently outperform campaigns optimizing for raw form volume. The gap widens over time as the algorithm becomes more accurate about who to reach.
When you interview a paid ads freelancer, ask specifically how they handle offline conversion tracking. Ask whether they have a process for getting post-lead outcome data back into the platform. If they can walk you through that clearly, they are data-driven. If the answer stays at “we track form fills and calls,” you will be funding a campaign that learns the wrong lesson from your spend.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if I have enough budget for Google Ads?
The minimum we recommend is $3,000 per month. More important is whether you can sustain that spend for 90 days without requiring a return during that period. If you cannot, start with Facebook Ads. The data is cheaper, you learn faster at lower spend levels, and you can validate your offer before committing to the higher minimums Google requires.
What is the fastest path to paid ads results?
Facebook and Instagram generally produce results faster than Google Ads. Cost per conversion is lower, you collect more volume with less spend, and the initial learning phase is shorter. For most service-based businesses starting out, Meta Ads is the faster path to initial learning. Lead quality is lower on average, so qualifying leads carefully and feeding outcome data back into the platform is critical.
How do I evaluate a paid ads freelancer if I have no background in ads?
Ask them how they failed recently. Ask who will actually be working on your account. Ask how they handle offline conversion tracking. Once you have hired someone, pay a separate Upwork freelancer around $50 to audit the account after the first month. Two competent practitioners should not give you fundamentally different assessments of the same account. If they do, that tells you something about the first one.
Should I start with Google Ads or Facebook Ads?
It depends entirely on your product. If people are actively searching for what you sell, start with Google. If you are creating demand for something people want but are not yet searching for, start with Facebook and Instagram. Many businesses need both, but the platform selection should map to the specific offer you are running ads for, not to the business as a whole.
Want a Clear Picture of Where Your Ad Spend Should Go?
The questions above are part of how we work through every new client conversation at Creekside Marketing. We manage $20M+ in ad spend across Google and Meta, and the pattern holds: businesses that get the platform decision right, commit to a realistic budget for the full timeline, and hire people who can talk honestly about failure get results. Businesses that cut corners on any one of those three typically come to us after six months of wasted spend and no clear answers.
If you want a direct assessment of where your advertising should go and what realistic results look like for your business and budget, apply for a $10K Profit Audit. We look at your current setup, or your plan if you are starting from scratch, tell you where the gaps are, and give you a clear picture of what it would actually take to make paid ads work.
Peterson Rainey is the founder of Creekside Marketing, a paid advertising agency managing Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns for service businesses across the US. He has managed $20M+ in ad spend across hundreds of accounts and specializes in data-driven campaign strategy, offline conversion tracking, and building paid ad systems that compound over time.
