Google or Meta: where to put your first €500 of advertising.

You've decided to try paid advertising. Good. And you stop right at the first question: Google or Meta? Most hosts pick at random, or copy whatever the neighbor did. That's where the first money gets burned.

You don't have to guess. You have to understand one thing: the two channels don't talk to the same customer.

Meta finds people who aren't looking for you

Meta, meaning Instagram and Facebook, intercepts demand that doesn't know it exists yet. The person isn't searching for a retreat: they're scrolling after dinner. You appear in front of them because they resemble your best guests in interests and behavior. It's the discovery channel: you light a desire that wasn't there.

The numbers reflect that nature. In WordStream's 2025 benchmarks, travel on Meta has one of the lowest costs per click of any industry, around $0.63: attention is cheap there. But it's cold attention: the person had no plans to buy anything, so the road from click to booking is long. On Meta you buy the first glance, not the decision. And being the channel of the glance, it lives on images: the photo stops the scroll or it doesn't, and that's where almost everything gets decided.

Google collects people who are already looking for you

Google Ads is the opposite. The person already has the problem in their head and is typing it: "yoga retreat Bali September". You don't have to convince them the experience exists: they're the one searching. The data shows it: in the same 2025 benchmarks, travel on Google has one of the highest click-through rates of any industry, nearly 8%, with a contained cost per click (around $2, among the lowest). Searchers click, because the ad answers exactly their question.

The Google click costs triple the Meta click, but it's worth more, because it comes from demand that's already warm. Google's limit is a different one: it only collects the demand that exists. If "surf camp Nicaragua" gets searched by a handful of people a month, that channel has a ceiling. You can draw all the water in the well, but the well is the well.

Which to choose depends on your customer, not on a rule

Here's the criterion. If your area or your kind of experience already gets searched (check it: type the searches your guest would make into Google and see whether competitors and ads appear), start with Google: you're collecting people who are ready, and €500 gets you your first meaningful data. If instead you offer something people don't know they want, or in an area nobody searches, the first money goes to Meta: you have to get discovered first, you have to dig the well yourself.

At full speed, the answer is often both, running a relay: Meta lights the demand, the person mulls it over for a few days, then searches your name on Google, and there a small ad on your name collects them. Whoever reads the reports at month's end sees "Google converts better than Meta" and cuts Meta. Then Google's conversions drop, because they cut the channel that was generating the searches. It's the most common reading mistake, and the most expensive.

What you can do today

First: before spending a euro, answer the question "does my customer search for me, or do they not know I exist?". Everything follows from there.

Second: start with a small, fixed budget, say €15-20 a day on one channel only, for 4-6 weeks. Less than that produces no readable data; changing everything every three days doesn't either.

Third: watch one number only: how many inquiries or bookings, not how many clicks and likes. An ad with lots of clicks and zero inquiries isn't "almost good". It's an ad paying for curious traffic, and it needs changing.

The real work is figuring out where your ideal customer actually lives, splitting the budget between the channels and reading the data to shift it toward the one that earns, always accounting for the relay between the two. Running these campaigns for hosts is what we do at GYT, so if you'd like to know where to start in your specific case, it's one of the first things we look at together in a free audit.

Sources & references

1. WordStream/LocaliQ · Google Ads Benchmarks 2025 · https://www.wordstream.com/blog/2025-google-ads-benchmarks · Travel: average CPC ~$2.12 (among the lowest), CTR ~7.8% (among the highest). Verified July 2026.
2. WordStream/LocaliQ · Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2025 · https://www.wordstream.com/blog/facebook-ads-benchmarks-2025 · Travel & Hospitality: average CPC ~$0.63 (among the lowest), traffic campaign CTR ~2.76%, conversion rate ~2.8%. Verified July 2026.