Google Ads and Meta Ads get compared as if they were the same product. They are not, and picking the wrong one first is the most expensive decision in this article.
The difference that decides everything
Google captures existing demand. Somebody types “emergency dentist Gurugram” and you appear. Meta creates demand. Somebody is scrolling, sees your ad, and realises they want something they were not looking for.
So the question is not which is cheaper. It is whether people are already searching for what you sell.
If they are, start with Google. Intent is already there and you only have to show up. If they are not, Google will show your ad to almost nobody, and Meta is where you belong.
What clicks cost in India
Cost per click varies more by category than by anything else. Low-competition local services can run a few rupees. Insurance, legal, education and B2B software are the expensive end, where a single click can cost hundreds of rupees because a customer is worth a great deal.
Rather than quote a benchmark you should not trust, use the Keyword Planner inside your own Google Ads account. It gives you a real range for your keywords in your location, which beats any published figure including mine.
How the daily budget actually behaves
Google can spend up to twice your average daily budget on any single day. Across a month it will not exceed 30.4 times that daily figure, which is the average number of days in a month, so overspend on a good day is balanced by underspend elsewhere. People see a double-spend day, panic, and pause the campaign. Do not. Judge it monthly.
The maths that decides your budget
Work backwards from a sale, not forwards from what you feel like spending.
Take your average order value and your gross margin. If a client is worth ₹40,000 to you at 50 percent margin, you have ₹20,000 of room. If one in five enquiries becomes a client, you can afford up to ₹4,000 per enquiry and still break even.
Now check what a click costs and what proportion of clicks become enquiries. At ₹40 a click and a 5 percent enquiry rate, each enquiry costs ₹800. That works comfortably. At ₹200 a click and a 2 percent rate, each enquiry costs ₹10,000, and it does not.
That calculation takes ten minutes and it decides whether the channel is viable before you spend anything.
Where Google Ads money gets wasted in India
- Broad match with no negative keywords. You will pay for searches with no commercial intent within days.
- Sending every click to the homepage instead of a page about the thing they searched for.
- Running Search and Display in one campaign, which hides that Display is spending most of the budget.
- No call tracking, in a market where a large share of enquiries arrive as phone calls.
A sensible starting structure
One Search campaign. One tightly themed ad group. Phrase and exact match only at the start. A negative keyword list you add to every week for the first month. One landing page that matches the search.
Add Display, Performance Max and everything else once the Search campaign is profitable, not before. Performance Max in particular will happily absorb a small budget and tell you very little about why.
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