Almost every business that comes to us about advertising has the same starting position: a budget somewhere between ₹15,000 and ₹40,000 a month, and a plan to “try both and see what works”.

That plan is why most first campaigns fail. Split across two platforms, neither gets enough spend to leave the learning phase, and after eight weeks you have two sets of inconclusive data and a conclusion that “ads don’t work for us”.

Pick one. Run it properly for ninety days. Here is how to decide which.

The question that decides it

Forget the platforms for a moment and answer this:

Is someone, right now, typing what you sell into Google?

If yes, start with Google. If no, start with Meta.

That is genuinely most of the decision, and everything below is detail on how to answer it honestly for your own business.

When Google is the right first platform

Google Ads catches existing demand. Someone has a problem, they have already decided they want it solved, and they are looking for who will solve it. You are not creating the want — you are being present at the moment it turns into a search.

That fits you if people search using words that describe your business:

Emergency and urgent services — plumber, electrician, AC repair, packers and movers, RO service. Nobody browses for these. They search at the moment of need and call one of the first three results.
Professional services with a clear name — CA, lawyer, architect, dentist, physiotherapist, driving school.
B2B supply — anything where a purchase manager types a product spec into Google.
Established categories — “school admission Bhubaneswar”, “banquet hall booking”, “car service centre near me”.

The tell is simple: if you can write down the exact phrase a customer would type, and it is not your brand name, Google is where your money should go first.

What Google costs

CPCs in India vary enormously by category — a few rupees for a broad informational term, ₹150+ for competitive legal or insurance keywords. For most local service businesses you are looking at ₹8–₹60 per click.

At ₹25 average and a 5% conversion rate, 400 clicks is ₹10,000 and around 20 enquiries. Whether that is good depends entirely on what one customer is worth to you, which is the number you should work out before you spend anything.

When Meta is the right first platform

Meta Ads — Instagram and Facebook — creates new demand. Nobody wakes up searching for a boutique they have never heard of. They see it, they want it, they act.

That fits you if:

What you sell is visual. Fashion, food, interiors, salons, jewellery, events, real estate. If a photograph does the selling, this is your platform.
Nobody is searching yet. New category, new product, or something people did not know they could buy locally.
You are targeting a demographic, not a query. “Women 25–40 in Bhubaneswar interested in home décor” is a Meta targeting spec. It is not a Google search.
Your average order value is low. Meta’s cost per result is usually lower, which matters when you are selling a ₹900 product rather than a ₹90,000 service.

What Meta costs

Cheaper per click than Google, usually — but the intent is colder, so more clicks are needed per sale. Lead-generation campaigns in India commonly land somewhere between ₹40 and ₹300 per lead depending on category and creative quality.

That range is wide because the creative is the variable, not the targeting. Which is the next section, and it is the most important one.

The thing nobody tells you about Meta

On Google, your ad is text. It is hard to be dramatically better than a competitor at writing three lines.

On Meta, your ad is a photograph or a video, and the gap between a good one and a bad one is enormous. The same budget, the same audience, the same offer will produce completely different results depending on whether the creative stops a thumb.

This is where most Meta campaigns are actually lost. Not in the targeting — in the fact that the ad is a Canva template with a stock photograph, running against a competitor who filmed something real.

It is also the honest reason we tend to do well here. BPS Network is the digital arm of a working production studio: the cameras, the lights, the crew and the 3D suite are in the same building as the people running the campaign. Ad creative is not a vendor we hire on your behalf and mark up — we shoot it.

If you are choosing an agency for Meta ads, ask where the creative comes from before you ask what the management fee is.

Running both — and when it is actually right

Both is correct eventually. It is rarely correct first.

The sequence that works:

Months 1–3: one platform, enough budget to leave the learning phase, tracking installed properly.
Month 4: you now know your real cost per lead and your close rate. Only now can you tell whether the second platform is worth funding.
Months 4+: add the second platform, with the first one as your benchmark.

The exception is retargeting. If your website already gets meaningful traffic, a small Meta retargeting budget alongside Google Search is one of the highest-return things you can run — you are showing ads to people who already came to you.

Tracking, before anything else

An ad account without conversion tracking is a machine for spending money and guessing.

Before a single rupee goes out:

Google Ads: conversion actions for calls, form submissions and WhatsApp clicks. GA4 linked.
Meta: the Pixel installed and, ideally, the Conversions API, because browser-side tracking loses a growing share of events.
Both: UTM parameters, so you can tell which platform a lead came from six weeks later.

Without this, the platform optimises toward clicks — which it can see — instead of customers, which it cannot. That single gap is the difference between a campaign that improves month over month and one that plateaus.

What a first month should look like

Ad spend: ₹10,000–₹30,000. Below ₹10,000 there is usually not enough data to learn from.
Management: ours runs ₹5,000–₹50,000 a month depending on the number of campaigns and how much creative is being produced.
Ad spend is billed by Google and Meta directly to your card. You own the accounts. Any agency that runs your ads through their own account is holding your data, and you should decline.

Expect Google Search to produce calls within 48–72 hours. Expect Meta to take 7–14 days before the algorithm settles into a stable cost per result.

The short version

Search for what you sell, right now, on Google. If your competitors’ ads appear, demand exists and Google is your first platform. If nothing appears, nobody is looking yet, and your job is to be seen rather than found — which is Meta.

Then commit to that one for ninety days, with tracking installed, and judge it on cost per customer rather than on clicks.

Google Ads or Meta Ads — which one should you run first?