Facebook Ads vs Google Ads for Local Contractors on Long Island

A Nassau or Suffolk County electrician running $1,500/month on Google Search Ads for "electrician near me" will typically pay $8–$20 per click and land 20–35 leads a month. The same $1,500 on Facebook Ads might buy 500–1,000 clicks at $1.50–$3 each — and generate a fraction of the actual jobs, because almost none of those clicks came from someone who needs an electrician today. The channels aren't interchangeable; they answer different questions at different points in a homeowner's decision.

What each channel is actually selling

Google Ads sells intent. Someone searching "roof leak repair Massapequa" has a problem right now and is actively looking for someone to fix it. That's why the clicks cost more — you're paying to be in front of a person who already decided to hire a contractor and is choosing which one.

Facebook Ads sells attention. A homeowner scrolling isn't looking for a contractor; they're looking at photos from a cousin's barbecue. An ad for kitchen remodeling that catches their eye plants an idea, but it doesn't convert into a call the way a Google search does, because the intent isn't there yet.

The question isn't "which platform is cheaper" — it's "which point in the decision am I trying to reach."

Cost-per-lead: the number that actually matters

Click cost is the wrong comparison. Cost-per-lead is the right one, and it varies a lot by trade:

• Plumbers and electricians (emergency intent): Google Local Services Ads run $1,200–$2,500/month and generate leads at effectively per-call pricing. Facebook rarely produces a usable lead for genuine emergency searches — nobody's scrolling mid-emergency.
• Roofers and remodelers (higher consideration, bigger ticket): Google Search cost-per-lead often runs $80–$200 given competitive click costs on high-value terms. Facebook can produce leads at $30–$70 each, but conversion-to-job rate is meaningfully lower since many of those leads are still in the research phase.
• Landscapers and fencing companies (seasonal, visual): Facebook performs relatively better here — before/after project photos are genuinely engaging scroll content, and the buying window (a few weeks to a season) gives Facebook's slower-intent traffic time to turn into a real inquiry.

Where Google Ads wins outright

For any trade where a homeowner has an active, time-sensitive problem — no heat, no hot water, a leak, an electrical issue — Google Ads and Local Services Ads win without much of a contest. The searcher has already decided to hire someone; the only question is who answers first. A Long Island plumber or electrician chasing emergency work should treat Google as the primary channel and everything else as secondary, full stop.

Where Facebook Ads earns its budget

Facebook is a better fit for project-based trades with a longer consideration window: kitchen and bathroom remodeling, home additions, landscaping design, fencing, roofing replacement (as opposed to emergency repair). These are purchases homeowners think about for weeks or months before they ever type a search query, and a well-targeted Facebook campaign — geo-fenced to specific Long Island towns, showing real before/after project photos — keeps a contractor's name in front of that homeowner during the thinking phase. When the homeowner finally does search, name recognition from Facebook often shows up as a shorter path to booking the job.

A realistic split for a project-based Long Island trade

For a remodeling or landscaping company running $2,000/month in paid ads:

• $1,200–$1,400/month on Google Search — captures homeowners actively searching "kitchen remodel cost Long Island" or "landscaping company near me."
• $600–$800/month on Facebook — geo-targeted awareness ads with real project photos, aimed at the same towns the Google budget targets, building recognition ahead of the search.

Run this split for a full 60–90 day window before reallocating. Facebook's contribution shows up indirectly — in shorter sales calls and homeowners who already recognize the name — which doesn't show up cleanly in a single month's lead count the way Google's does.

What actually breaks both channels

Neither Google's intent nor Facebook's attention is worth much if the traffic lands somewhere that doesn't convert. The pattern shows up the same way across trades: a homeowner clicks a $15 Google ad or a $2 Facebook ad, lands on a site that takes six seconds to load on their phone, can't find the phone number without scrolling past three paragraphs of stock copy, and leaves. That's not a channel problem — Google delivered a person who was actively searching, and Facebook delivered a person who'd been primed by weeks of project photos. The site is what turned a paid click into nothing.

This is why cost-per-lead numbers can look identical on paper for two contractors running the same budget on the same platform and still produce wildly different job counts. A landscaping company with a fast, mobile-first site and a click-to-call number that actually works will out-convert a competitor spending the same $2,000/month on a slower, harder-to-navigate site — on both channels, not just one.

Tracking which channel is actually working

Most Long Island contractors run both channels and can't say with confidence which one is producing jobs, because the phone number on the site is the same regardless of which ad the caller clicked. Two fixes matter more than any amount of extra ad spend:

• A tracked, unique phone number per channel. A dedicated tracked line for Google traffic and a separate one for Facebook traffic turns "the phone rang 40 times this month" into "Google produced 28 calls, Facebook produced 12" — the difference between guessing and actually managing a budget.
• A simple intake question. Even without call tracking, asking "how did you hear about us" on every call and logging the answer for 90 days gives a rough split good enough to reallocate budget with some confidence.

Without this, contractors tend to default to whichever channel "feels" like it's working — usually Google, because its leads convert faster and are easier to notice — and quietly starve Facebook of the budget it needs to prove out a slower-converting, longer-window channel.

Seasonal timing differs between the two platforms

Google Ads spend should track search volume directly: heavier in spring and early summer for landscaping and remodeling searches, heavier in winter for heating-related emergency trades. Facebook spend works on a different clock — because it's building awareness for a project a homeowner hasn't started searching for yet, the highest-leverage window is 4–8 weeks before peak search season. A landscaping company that wants strong May search volume should be running Facebook awareness ads in March, not waiting until May to compete with every other landscaper bidding on the same Google terms at the same time.

Creative differences between the two platforms

The ad itself needs to work differently on each platform, not just the targeting. Google Search Ads are almost entirely text — a headline matching the search term, a line on service area, a phone number or click-to-call button. There's no room for a photo to do the convincing; the searcher already has intent, so the job of the ad is just to confirm you're a legitimate, local option before they click.

Facebook is the opposite. The ad is competing with photos of someone's kids and a friend's vacation, so it has to earn attention on its own before it can sell anything. Real before/after project photos — an actual finished kitchen, an actual re-landscaped yard in a recognizable Long Island setting — consistently outperform stock photography or generic service graphics by a wide margin. A contractor without a library of decent job photos is starting Facebook at a real disadvantage no matter how well the targeting is set up; that's worth fixing before spending real money on the platform.

When to skip Facebook entirely

Not every Long Island trade needs to run Facebook at all. A one or two-truck plumbing or electrical operation with a full schedule from Google and referrals alone doesn't need a second channel just because it exists — adding Facebook spend without the capacity to handle more calls just generates leads that go unanswered, which is worse than not running the channel in the first place. Facebook makes the most sense once Google and GBP are already producing a steady baseline and there's real crew capacity to grow into, and the trade itself has a long enough consideration window for awareness advertising to matter.

Where this fits in Forge's service mix

Forge builds the site and service-area pages that both channels point traffic to — a Google click or a Facebook click that lands on a slow site or a buried phone number is wasted spend regardless of which platform sent it. Pricing covers what that build costs, and if the current site isn't converting either channel's traffic into calls, get started and we'll fix the part of the funnel actually losing the leads.