Paid ad budgets in Vancouver have gotten brutal. Meta CPMs are up ~38% YoY. Google Search CPCs in commercial categories like 'plumber Burnaby' or 'dentist Kitsilano' regularly clear $14 a click. You can't afford to spray and pray.
Meta still wins for visual, lifestyle, and local-discovery brands — restaurants, boutique fitness, home services. Advantage+ campaigns with broad targeting + creative variation now outperform interest-stacked campaigns 7 out of 10 times. Test 6-8 creatives weekly, kill anything below 1.5x ROAS within 72 hours.
Google is mandatory for high-intent service businesses. Don't run Performance Max alone — pair it with a tightly themed Search campaign on your top 20 commercial keywords, with a separate brand campaign defending your name. Negative keyword hygiene matters more than bid strategy here.
LinkedIn is misunderstood. It is the most expensive channel per click but the cheapest per qualified B2B lead if your ACV is over $5K. Use it for thought-leadership ads from a founder profile, not company-page posts. Single image + 200 word post + soft CTA outperforms video right now.
The meta-rule: don't add a channel until the previous one is profitable for 3 consecutive months. Most Vancouver SMBs we audit are running 3 channels and losing money on all of them.