(Which One Actually Books Jobs)
This is the question every car detailer and pool company asks before they spend a pound, and the honest answer is that they do different jobs. One captures demand that already exists. The other creates demand that does not. Picking wrong is the most common way local businesses waste an advertising budget.
Somebody types "car detailing near me" or "pool repair" because they have already decided they need it. You are not persuading anybody, you are just being there at the moment of intent.
That is why Google clicks cost more and convert faster. This is the clearest example of paid advertising management doing what it is good at.
Nobody opens Instagram hoping to find a detailer. Meta interrupts, which means the click is cheaper but the person was not looking, so your offer has to do far more work.
For most local service businesses Google is the safer first pound, because you are fishing where the fish already are.
It also gives you clean data on what people actually search for, which you can use everywhere else.
Meta is excellent at two things: showing off visual work, and retargeting people who visited and did not book.
Both of those only pay off once the page they land on actually converts.
A few pounds a day on either platform buys you noise, not data. Work out what a booked job is worth, decide what you can afford to pay for one, and set the budget from there rather than from what feels comfortable.
If you cannot say which platform produced the last ten booked jobs, you are not running advertising, you are running an experiment with no results page.
Conversion tracking is not optional.