The question 'Google Ads or Facebook Ads' hides a more useful one: is your client already searching for what you sell, or not? Because that's the real difference between the two channels, not the price or the platform.
Google intercepts existing demand. Someone types 'debt-relief lawyer Palermo' and you appear. It's warm traffic with intent already formed: closer to the purchase, usually more expensive per click. It works when people know they have the problem and are actively searching for a solution.
Meta, that is Facebook and Instagram, creates demand. People aren't searching for you: they're scrolling the feed. Your ad interrupts and lights up a need that was latent. It's colder traffic but much cheaper and more scalable, and it lets you reach people who don't yet know they need you. In my Meta accounts, cost per lead runs from about €1 to €2.30 in legal niches.
A concrete example on the Meta side: for a public-procurement firm (Spatara) €666 of spend produced 498 leads at €1.34 each. For an ebook funnel in the legal niche, 1,017 contacts at €1.30. Those are numbers that on Google, for the same highly competitive terms, would be hard to reach, because there you pay for high intent.
The practical choice: if you sell a service people search by name and you need volume now, start with Google. If your service is new, educational or impulse-driven, or you want to build an audience cheaply, start with Meta. If you have budget for both, the strongest combination is Meta to create demand and warm up, Google to catch those who then search your name.
What doesn't change between the two is the rest of the engine. A click, from Google or Meta, dies if it lands on a page that doesn't convert and has no follow-up behind it. The platform brings the traffic: the funnel, the automation and the measurement decide whether that traffic becomes revenue.
If you want to know where your system leaks before deciding which channel to invest in, the free 2-minute audit on this site tells you in five questions.