Should a small home service business run Google ads or Facebook ads?

By Robert Earl, Home Service Guild. Updated September 29, 2026.

What does a Google ad do for a home service business?

A Google ad shows up when someone types a search like "furnace repair near me" or "new AC unit cost" into Google. The person is already looking for what you do, and your ad appears at the moment they are deciding who to call. With a search ad, you pay when someone clicks on it.

That makes Google ads a natural fit for work people go looking for, whether it is an emergency repair or a replacement they have started to research. An HVAC company can reach the homeowner whose system quit in July and the one pricing a new furnace in October with the same kind of ad.

The limit is that a Google ad can only reach people who are searching. If few homeowners in your area search for a particular service in a given week, there is little for the ad to show up for. And a click is only worth something if the page it lands on makes the next step clear and somebody answers the phone.

What does a Facebook ad do for a home service business?

A Facebook ad shows up while someone is scrolling through Facebook or Instagram. You choose who sees it by things like where they live and what they are interested in, and the people who see it were not looking for you when it appeared.

That works better for planned work that looks good in a photo, the kind of project a homeowner had not thought about until someone showed it to them. A landscaping company that shows a finished patio or a fall cleanup to homeowners in the neighborhoods it already serves is using Facebook for what it does well.

It is a weaker fit for emergencies. A homeowner with water on the kitchen floor goes to Google to find help. Facebook ads also tend to need good photos and some patience, because the person who saw your ad may not call for weeks, and that delay makes it harder to know which ad earned the job.

Which kind of ad should a small home service business try first?

Match the ad to the way your customers buy. Trades that live on urgent repairs usually get more from being found in search, and trades with seasonal, visible, or planned work give Facebook more room to help. Plenty of businesses end up using both, each for the work it suits.

Before spending on either, make sure the free pieces are in place. Your Google Business Profile sits on the map next to the search ads, and many homeowners call straight from it. If that profile is half finished or shows an old phone number, an ad will not make up for it.

We will not quote you a typical cost per call or tell you which platform wins for your trade. Those numbers change with the trade, the town, and the season, and anyone who gives you one without looking at your business is guessing.

How do I tell which ad brought the calls?

In many small businesses the phone rings, someone writes down the customer's name and address, and nobody asks or records where the customer found the company. At the end of the month the ad bills arrive, and the owner is left guessing which ones paid for themselves.

Google and Facebook each report results for their own ads, and those reports often do not match what your phone and your job list show. A form fill from an ad may never turn into a job, and a call from someone who saw your ad last week may never show up in the ad's report at all. The only count that tells you what an ad was worth is the one that follows an inquiry from the ad all the way to a booked job.

That count is only possible when every call, form, and message lands in one place along with where it came from. Keeping every inquiry in one list is covered in how to keep track of leads from calls, forms, texts, and marketplace sites.

What a fix looks like

In a business that has fixed this, the owner can open any month and see how many inquiries each ad brought in and how many of those became booked jobs. The ad that fills the schedule gets more of the budget, and the one that brings in form fills that never turn into work gets changed or switched off. Decisions about next season's spending start from that job list, so the owner is choosing between Google and Facebook with the business's own results in front of them.

As part of Getting Found, Home Service Guild runs Google search ads and Facebook and Instagram ads from accounts in your name and tracks which ads and pages bring in calls.