Google Ads or Facebook ads, which one a cleaning company should run first
Both can fill a cleaning schedule, but they reach different people at different moments. How each one works for house cleaning, what it costs, and when each wins.
You have a few hundred dollars a month to spend on ads and two obvious places to spend it. Google Ads or Facebook and Instagram. Most cleaning business owners pick one based on what a friend said, run it for three weeks, and decide ads do not work.
Both can work. They just do different jobs. Here is how to pick the right one first, based on the kind of client you want and the state your business is in today.
The one difference that matters
Google catches people who have already decided. Someone types "house cleaning near me" or "move out cleaning Tempe" because they need a cleaner, usually soon. You pay when they click.
Facebook and Instagram reach people who have not searched yet. They are scrolling, see a photo of a spotless kitchen and a clear offer, and think, I should really do that. You pay to be seen, whether or not they act.
That single difference drives everything else: the cost per lead, the type of client, how fast it works and what the ad needs to say.
Where Google wins
Move-out, move-in and one-time deep cleans. These are deadline jobs. A tenant has a walkthrough on Friday. A seller has photos on Monday. They search, they call the first two companies that look real, and they book. Google puts you in front of that moment.
When you need jobs this month. Search ads can produce calls within days of going live. If your calendar has gaps next week, Google is the faster lever.
When your reviews are already decent. A Google ad sends people straight to a page where your rating and review count sit beside your competitors. If you have more reviews than most, that comparison works for you. The median cleaning company in our benchmark report has 6 reviews, and only 7.1% have passed 100, so the bar for looking established in your area may be lower than you think.
What it costs. Clicks for cleaning searches in most metro areas tend to run a few dollars each, higher for move-out terms in busy rental markets. A realistic test budget is $15 to $30 a day for at least a month. The Google Ads guide covers campaign setup, the keywords to block and what a fair cost per lead looks like.
Where Facebook and Instagram win
Recurring weekly and biweekly clients. Most people who end up on a recurring plan were not searching for one. They were tired, busy, or about to host family, and an ad caught them at the right time. Meta is where you create that demand.
A clear, simple offer. Facebook works best with one specific thing: a first deep clean at a set price for a home up to a certain size, or a recurring plan with the first visit discounted. Vague ads about quality and trust do poorly. Real before and after photos from your own jobs do far better than stock images.
Local word of mouth at scale. Cleaning is personal. People hire who their neighbor uses. An ad with a short testimonial from a real client in the same town, used with permission, borrows that trust.
What it costs. A test of $10 to $20 a day for two to three weeks is enough to see if the offer works. Leads often come in cheaper than Google, but more of them need follow-up before they book. The Facebook and Instagram ads guide walks through creative, offers and retargeting.
A simple way to decide
Answer three questions.
- Do you need jobs in the next two weeks? Start with Google.
- Is most of your revenue, or the revenue you want, from recurring clients? Start with Facebook and Instagram.
- Can you answer the phone and texts within a few minutes during the day? If not, fix that before running either. A Google lead that waits two hours has usually booked someone else. A Facebook lead that waits a day has forgotten they asked.
If you answered yes to both of the first two, run Google first to fill the calendar, then add Meta once you have a steady base and a few strong before and after photos.
The mistakes that make both fail
Sending traffic to a page with no price signal. Cleaning buyers want a rough idea of cost before they talk to anyone. A page with "starting at" pricing or a simple estimate form gets more leads from the same clicks.
No website at all. 37.3% of cleaning companies in our data link no website from their Google profile. Facebook ads can run without one, but Google Ads cannot, and both convert better when there is somewhere real to land.
Judging too early. Three days of data on either platform tells you almost nothing. Commit a fixed budget for a set period, usually 30 days, then decide.
Not tracking where clients came from. Ask every new client how they found you and write it down. It sounds basic, but it is the only way to know which channel is paying for itself.
A hypothetical example
Say a two-person cleaning company in a mid-size city wants five new recurring clients before the holidays. They have a solid set of reviews but no ads running. A sensible plan: $20 a day on Google for move-out and deep clean searches to keep the schedule full now, and $15 a day on Facebook with a recurring plan offer aimed at homeowners within 10 miles. After 30 days they compare cost per booked client, not cost per lead, and move money to whichever is cheaper.
If you want either campaign set up and run for you, any service is available as a free 14-day trial, no card. Text or call (801) 666-2415.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, house cleaning companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor