The difference is not which platform is better. It is what the person on the other end was doing thirty seconds earlier.
Search harvests demand. Meta creates it.
Somebody typing “ceramic coating near me” has already decided they want the service and is now choosing a shop. You are not persuading them, you are competing for them. That is why search leads cost more per lead and book at a much higher rate — you are paying for the qualification, not doing it yourself.
Somebody scrolling Instagram was not thinking about paint protection at all. A colour-change wrap reveal or a tight before-and-after on a black car can make them want it. That costs less per lead and books at a lower rate, because you created the interest rather than catching it.
If you can only run one, run Search
Harvest before you plant. There is existing demand in your city every week and somebody is already capturing it. Search also gives you cleaner feedback: the words people typed are right there in the report, which tells you what your market actually calls the services you sell.
The exception is a service nobody searches for by name — see how we build paid campaigns for the mechanics. Colour-change film and specialty wraps get discovered, not searched. Those belong on Meta from day one.
Budget floors are real
Both platforms optimise by learning from conversions. Below a certain volume they never get enough signal to learn anything, and you pay for the education without receiving it. A budget too small for the bid strategy you chose is worse than the same budget on a simpler one.
A trap worth naming
Smart bidding with a target cost per acquisition is a hard constraint, not a suggestion. Set the target below what a lead really costs you and the platform will simply stop entering auctions. It does not recover on its own, and the symptom — a sudden drop in volume with no obvious cause — looks exactly like seasonality.
Do not let either platform grade its own homework
Both will report conversions enthusiastically. Both will count things you would not call a lead if you saw them: a click on a phone number that never connected, a pop-up dismissal, the same person counted twice because two tags fired on the same page.
The only scoreboard that means anything is the one on your side of the fence — and what a lead really costs explains how to build it — how many distinct people contacted you, and how many of them paid. Everything else is a proxy.
What a clean rebuild can do
Structure matters more than budget at the start. On one detailing and ceramic coating account we took over, rebuilding the campaign structure and fixing what counted as a conversion moved cost per conversion from $17.70 to $7.90 and daily conversions from 3.3 to 9.3, on the same overall spend. Nothing about the budget changed; what changed was what the account was aiming at.
That is the normal shape of the first month on a neglected account — the full breakdown is in our case files. It is not a promise — it is what happens when an account has never had its conversion definitions cleaned up.
Run them together, eventually
Once both are live they stop being alternatives. Meta builds the audience that later searches for you by name, and branded search is almost always the cheapest traffic in the account. If you judge Meta purely on last-click form fills you will underrate it and switch it off, and then watch branded search quietly decline.