You have run Facebook ads before. The leads came in, the phone numbers were real, and almost none of them turned into work. Some never answered. Some wanted a price for a job you do not do. One wanted a quote for a garden wall in a town two hours away.
So you turned the ads off and decided Facebook leads for builders are a waste of money.
Facebook does work for builders. What you had was a lead form pointed at the wrong people, with nothing behind it to sort the serious enquiries from the browsers. Bad Facebook leads for builders are almost always a setup problem rather than a platform problem, and that is fixed in the setup rather than the budget.
Your lead form did exactly what you asked it to
Most builders start with the default Facebook lead form. It asks for a name, an email and a phone number, and it fills two of those in automatically from the person’s profile. It takes about four seconds to complete.
Four seconds is the problem. A form that takes no effort collects people who put in no effort. You get volume, the cost per lead looks brilliant in the reporting, and your week fills up with calls that go nowhere.
The fix is to make the form harder in useful ways. Ask what the job is. Ask for the postcode. Ask when they want the work done and roughly what budget they have in mind. Every question you add loses you some leads and raises your cost per lead. It also removes the people who were never going to book.
A builder does not need more enquiries. A builder needs enquiries that turn into quotes.
Cheap leads and good leads are not the same thing
The number most agencies report on is cost per lead, because it is the one that looks best. It is also the easiest number to make attractive by lowering quality.
The number that matters to you is what it costs to get one booked job. To know that, you have to track further down the line than the form fill. How many enquiries did you actually speak to. How many turned into a site visit. How many of those became work.
Once you measure that, decisions get simpler. A campaign at £12 a lead where one in four books is worth far more than a campaign at £4 a lead where one in thirty does. The cheap campaign wins on the report and loses on the bank balance.
We ask clients for that back end data early, because without it we are optimising towards the wrong thing.
Speed to contact decides most of it
A Facebook lead is not like a website enquiry. Someone filling in a form in a spare minute on their phone is nowhere near as committed as someone who searched for you, read your site and picked up the phone.
That interest fades fast. A lead you call within five minutes behaves completely differently to the same lead called the next morning. By then they have carried on scrolling, forgotten they filled anything in, or had two other builders round.
This is where most trade campaigns quietly fail. The ads work, the leads arrive, and they sit in an inbox until Friday. If nobody in the business can respond within the hour, that has to be solved before more money goes into ads. Sometimes that is an automated text that goes out the moment the form lands. Sometimes it is a person whose job it is to ring them.
Fixing the follow up usually does more for the results than any change to the targeting.
What this looked like for Force One Homes
Force One Homes came to us wanting enquiries for high value residential projects, not general building work.
From £285 of initial ad spend, the campaign produced over 16 leads and a pipeline worth over £1 million. The first job landed at seven weeks, from a six week campaign.
Mat Boyd, Director, is quoted on the full case study, which is worth reading if you want the detail of how it was set up.
The point of that example is not the pipeline figure. It is that £285 is a small budget. The campaign worked because it was aimed at a specific kind of job in a specific area, with a form that asked real questions and a process for answering the enquiries quickly. None of that requires a big spend to get started.
What good looks like
If your Facebook ads are producing time wasters, work through these before you increase the budget or give up.
Know what job you are actually advertising for, and say it plainly in the ad. “Kitchen extensions in Essex” filters better than “quality building services”.
Ask enough on the form to sort the serious from the curious. Job type, postcode, timescale, rough budget.
Set your targeting to the area you will genuinely travel to. Not the whole county because the reach number looks better.
Have a way of responding within the hour, and make sure somebody owns it.
Track through to booked work, not to the form fill.
Give it long enough. A six week campaign tells you something. Two weeks tells you nothing.
The honest version
Facebook ads will not fix a business that cannot follow up, and they will not sell a job nobody wants at a price nobody will pay. What they do well is put your work in front of homeowners nearby who are thinking about a project and have not started ringing round yet.
Done properly, that is a steady flow of enquiries you can plan around instead of waiting on word of mouth.
If you are getting leads that go nowhere, or you have written Facebook off after a bad run with another agency, we will look at what you were running and tell you straight whether it is worth another go. Talk to us about lead generation for your trade business, see how we approach Facebook advertising, or what we do for construction and home improvement businesses.