An honest comparison of what the three big ad platforms actually cost a UK small business in 2026, which one suits which kind of trade, and how to start on £10 a day without wasting it.
The short version
Google Ads catches people who already want what you sell. Meta — Facebook and Instagram — catches people who would want it if they saw it. TikTok is the cheapest place to be seen but the hardest place to sell directly. Most small businesses should start with one, not all three.
What each one costs
Rough UK cost-per-click ranges, which move with competition and season:
- Google Search: £0.80 to £5.00 a click on competitive trade and service terms, and worse in legal or insurance niches. High intent, high price.
- Meta (Facebook and Instagram): £0.40 to £1.20 a click. Cheaper traffic, colder audience, strong local targeting.
- TikTok: £0.10 to £0.30 a click. The cheapest attention available in the UK right now, but it is discovery traffic, not people searching for you.
A realistic starting budget on any of them is £10 a day. That is around £300 a month, enough to gather data and see whether the phone rings. Below about £5 a day you rarely learn anything useful.
Which platform suits which business
Google suits emergency and need-it-now services: garages, plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, recovery, MOT centres. If people type your service into a search bar when something breaks, this is where your money goes first.
Meta suits anything visual or local-community based: salons, gyms, cafes, tradespeople showing before-and-after work, retail, events. Local radius targeting around a postcode is genuinely good.
TikTok suits products with a visual hook and anyone who can film themselves working. The cost per view is so low that one video doing well can outperform a month of paid search — but it is unreliable as a switch you can flip on demand.
Where small businesses waste money
- Running all three at once on a budget that is too small to teach you anything on any of them.
- Sending paid clicks to a home page instead of a page about the specific thing advertised.
- No conversion tracking, so nobody can say which spend produced which enquiry.
- Broad match keywords on Google, quietly buying clicks for terms you would never choose.
- Boosting posts on Meta instead of building a proper campaign with a defined objective.
- Judging a campaign after three days. Give it two to four weeks before deciding.
A sensible first month
Pick one platform. Build one landing page for the one service you most want more of. Set up conversion tracking before you spend a penny. Run £10 a day for four weeks, note every enquiry and where it came from, and only then decide whether to scale, change or stop. That is about £300 to find out something worth knowing.
The alternative nobody mentions
Paid ads stop the moment you stop paying. A page that ranks in Google, or a fixed sponsorship on a site your customers already read, keeps working after the invoice is settled. For local trades in particular, one well-written page about the job you want more of often beats the same money spent on clicks. See advertising with us for what a fixed monthly slot looks like, or the TikTok Ads UK guide if that is the route you are taking.
Questions
What is the cheapest way to advertise a small business in the UK? Organic search and a Google Business Profile cost nothing but time. Of the paid options, TikTok is cheapest per view and Meta cheapest per useful local click.
How much should a small business spend on ads? Start at £10 a day on one platform. Scale only once you can attribute enquiries to spend.
Google or Facebook for a trade business? Google when people search for the problem you fix. Facebook when the work is visual and local.
Do I need an agency? Not at this budget. Agency fees of £300 to £500 a month on top of £300 of spend rarely pay back for a small local business.