Most trade businesses that have tried Facebook advertising tried a boosted post. It reached four thousand people, got eleven likes from people who already knew them, and produced nothing. That experience is why so many trades believe this does not work, and it is a fair conclusion from the evidence they had.
A boosted post and a lead campaign are not the same product. One buys attention. The other asks somebody to type their phone number in. This page is about the second one.
Meta ads for trades are Facebook and Instagram campaigns built to collect an enquiry directly, with a form that opens inside the app rather than a link that sends somebody to a website and hopes. The trade shows a photograph of its own finished work, says what it does and roughly where, and asks four questions. Name, phone, what the job is, roughly where.
That structure matters because of who is on the other end. The person scrolling is not searching for you. They are two thumbs away from something else, and every step you add between the advert and the enquiry costs you a proportion of them. A form that opens in place with their details half filled in already is the shortest path that exists.
Garden rooms, extensions, re-roofs, kitchens and bathrooms, timber buildings, EV chargers, full rewires, solar and battery. All of these are things somebody thinks about for weeks before they act, which means there is a window in which an advert can reach them.
When the lights go out or a pipe bursts, nobody scrolls. They search. If your work is mostly reactive call-outs, your money belongs in Google Business Profile and search, not here, and we will say so rather than take the retainer.
Plenty of trades are both. An electrician doing emergency call-outs and EV charger installations should advertise the EV chargers and rank for the call-outs. Splitting those two is usually the single most useful thing we do in the first conversation.
The creative decides the result. Targeting decides a much smaller part of it than most people expect, and a broad audience with a great photograph beats a clever audience with a stock one.
Every extra field costs you enquiries. If you need to qualify harder we add one qualifying question rather than five, and we would rather filter with the advert copy than with the form.
On a live timber account we tested 19 creative variants, and one of them produced 230 of the leads. Nineteen is the number that produced the result, not the targeting.
Left on, they crop your photograph, add music and rewrite your text, and you lose the ability to tell which version produced the leads.
A trade audience in one county is small. The same picture running for three months stops working and the cost per lead climbs, which is the most common reason a campaign that started well ends badly.
Two separate questions, and the second one is the one worth answering carefully.
On a live account we run for a timber buildings company, Meta produced 158 leads at an average of £4.84 each over 90 days from £764.94 of spend. Over three years the same account has averaged £4.64, with the best campaign at £2.04 and a traffic campaign at £53.13 that we stopped.
We publish those because they are real, and we would rather you saw the £53.13 than only the £2.04. What we will not do is quote you a cost per lead before we have run anything. A different trade, a different area and a different average job value produce a different number, and a promise made before the first campaign is a promise made with no information. The full version of that argument, including a month where our own cost per lead doubled, is on what a trade lead should cost.
Lead quality is a copy problem far more than a targeting problem. Adverts that mention the job type, the sort of budget involved and the areas you cover produce fewer leads and better ones. If the enquiries are poor, the advert is being too vague, and that is fixable.
Usually within the first fortnight. It also stops within a fortnight of you switching it off, which is the trade-off against search. The comparison is on our page about construction lead generation.
Yes, and some trades should. The bit that defeats most people is not the setup, it is making a new creative every fortnight for a year.
Both, out of one campaign. Facebook ads for tradesmen usually bring in most of the leads, because the audience skews older and the placements are cheaper, and Instagram picks up the rest. You do not choose between them, and you should not: the budget finds whichever is working that fortnight.
We will look at what your competitors are running on Meta right now, tell you whether your work suits this channel at all, and say plainly if it does not. Half an hour, no charge.
Meta ads sit inside our paid social service. If you want this written for your trade specifically, we have pages on marketing for roofing companies and on garden room marketing.
