Meta, Google or TikTok for lead generation: which and why
Cost per lead is the wrong way to compare them, because the three channels do not produce the same object. One finds people already looking. Two create the wanting.
Almost every comparison of these three ends up as a table of costs per lead, which is the least useful way to look at it. The three channels do not produce the same object. Comparing their prices is like comparing the cost of a referral to the cost of a cold call and concluding that one is better value.
The difference that matters is whether the person already wanted the thing.
Google: demand that exists
Somebody typed the query. They have a problem, they are looking for a solution now, and your ad is an answer to a question they asked. That makes it the highest-intent traffic available anywhere.
The consequences follow from that. The lead is the most likely to be real and the most likely to close. The click is the most expensive, because everyone in your category has worked out the same thing and is bidding on the same words. And the ceiling is fixed: you cannot buy more demand than exists, so once you are capturing most of the searches for your service, more budget buys progressively worse variations of the query.
The other thing to know is that intent cuts both ways. High-intent traffic includes people comparing you against three competitors in the same session, so the page has to do more work than it does elsewhere.
Meta: demand you create
Nobody was looking. You interrupted them, and the ad has to manufacture the wanting before it can collect anything. That is harder and it is also the reason the ceiling is so much higher — you are not limited by how many people typed something this month.
Volume is easy to get on Meta. Quality is the whole problem. A form that is easy to fill produces leads from people who were curious, mildly bored, or agreeing with a nice picture, and a lead-generation account that optimises to raw submissions will find more of exactly those people, faithfully, for as long as you let it.
So Meta is only as good as the qualification attached to it, and the qualification has to happen somewhere: a question in the form that a casual clicker will not bother answering, a price stated before the form, or a sales process that can absorb volume and sort it. Pick one deliberately, because if you do not, the sorting happens by accident and usually by your sales team giving up on the channel.
TikTok: attention before intent
The coldest of the three and the cheapest. The audience is not in a buying frame at all — they are being entertained, and your ad is an interruption of an interruption.
That makes it excellent for simple, visual, low-consideration offers and difficult for anything that needs explaining before it can be wanted. It also makes it entirely creative-dependent: on Google a mediocre ad on the right keyword still works, on TikTok a mediocre ad does nothing at all.
For lead generation specifically, TikTok tends to work when the offer can be understood in three seconds and the commitment is small. It tends to fail when the product needs context, when the buyer is at work rather than on their phone in the evening, or when the sales cycle is long enough that a lead who has forgotten who you are is worthless.
The comparison that actually helps
Not cost per lead. Cost per lead your sales team was glad to receive.
These three channels will produce, for the same money, wildly different mixes of that. Ranked by likelihood of closing it is usually Google, then Meta, then TikTok. Ranked by available volume at a price you can sustain it is frequently the exact reverse. That tension is the whole decision, and it cannot be resolved from inside an ad platform, because none of them knows which leads became customers unless you tell them.
Which is the practical requirement underneath all of this: until closed revenue is being sent back to the platforms, you are not comparing channels. You are comparing how good each one is at generating form submissions, which is a competition Meta and TikTok will always win and which means nothing.
Where to start
If people search for what you sell, start with Google. Take the existing demand first — it is the cheapest revenue in the account, and it also produces the conversion data that makes everything else optimisable.
If they do not, or the search volume is tiny, start with Meta and accept that you are paying to create awareness that Google would have harvested for you. Budget for the qualification layer from day one, not after the first month of bad leads.
Add TikTok when there is a creative capability to feed it. Not before: it is the only one of the three where a shortage of new material is fatal rather than inconvenient.
Most accounts that work end up running two, sometimes all three, doing different jobs — search capturing what exists, social creating what does not. The mistake is running all three the same way and comparing them on a number that was never measuring the same thing.