Google Shopping or Meta Ads: How I Decide Where the Money Goes

By Brennan Lunin, Founder at BL AdWorks

The honest answer to “which platform should I spend on” is that it depends on whether people already know they want what you sell. Everything else is detail.

But that answer is useless on its own, so here is how I actually make the call.

The one question that decides it

Is there existing demand for your product, or do you have to create it?

Somebody typing “replacement filter for a Brita pitcher” has already decided. They do not need persuading, they need finding. That is Google, and specifically Shopping, where the product, the price and the picture show up against the intent.

Somebody scrolling Instagram at 11pm has decided nothing. They were not looking for you. If your product is one that people do not know to search for, or one where seeing it *is* the pitch, that person is reachable, and Google cannot reach them because they never typed anything.

Search harvests demand. Social creates it. Almost everything else about the two platforms follows from that.

What follows from it

On Google, the creative matters less and the structure matters more. You are not convincing anyone; you are showing up correctly for what they already want. The wins come from the search terms report, negative keywords, and a product feed with clean titles. Boring, and it works.

On Meta, the creative is the targeting. The algorithm will find the audience for your ad, so what you show largely determines who you get. This is why creative testing systems matter there and barely exist on search: the lever is different.

Google is easier to be mediocre at profitably. Intent does a lot of the work for you. Meta punishes mediocre creative harder, because there is no intent underneath to save you.

What the sourced data actually says

I want to be careful here, because this is where most posts start inventing.

WordStream publishes Google Ads benchmarks from around 13,000 real search campaigns across 23 industries, April 2025 to March 2026. The average cost per click is $5.42, the average conversion rate 8.18%, and cost per click rose for 87% of industries.

That is what published, methodologically-stated data covers: costs and rates. What it does not cover, on any platform, is ROAS. I went looking. Nobody credible publishes a ROAS benchmark by platform, because ROAS depends on your margin, and the people with the data know that. The pages that do publish one disagree with each other by wide margins and cite nothing.

So if you were hoping for a table telling you Google returns 4.2x and Meta returns 2.8x, I cannot give you one honestly, and neither can the people who do.

How to actually choose

Start with one. Not both. Splitting a small budget across two platforms gives each one too little data to learn from, and you end up with two accounts that are both bad.

Pick the one your demand type points at. If people search for what you sell, Google. If they have to see it to want it, Meta.

Give it enough budget to produce signal. My opinion, not a benchmark: below roughly a thousand a month you are buying noise, not information. You will not gather enough conversions for anything, human or algorithmic, to learn from. Other operators will give you different numbers and none of us can prove ours.

Judge it against your breakeven, not against a blog. Breakeven ROAS is one divided by your gross margin. At a 40% margin you need 2.5x just to stand still. That is the line that decides whether the channel works, and it is different for every store.

The thing both platforms have in common

Whichever you pick, you are renting. The price is set by an auction that gets more expensive nearly every year, and the platform can change the rules without asking you.

WordStream’s data has cost per click rising for 87% of industries. That is the trend line you are buying into, on either platform.

Which is the argument for making each customer you buy worth more than one order, so you can afford to keep playing. But that is a different post.

If you only take one thing

Do not choose the platform that worked for someone else’s store. Choose the one that matches whether your customer is looking for you or has never heard of you. That single question gets it right more often than any benchmark table will.

Sources: WordStream 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks (~13,000 campaigns, 23 industries, April 2025–March 2026).