Google Catches Demand. Meta Creates It.
When someone's hot water system dies, they Google it. That's Google Ads territory and you should be there. But nobody Googles "should I renovate my bathroom" at 9pm on a Tuesday. They scroll, they see a finished bathroom that looks like theirs could, and they think about it. That's where Meta earns its keep: renovations, painting, landscaping, solar, decks, pergolas, pest control plans, anything where the job is considered rather than urgent.
The practical difference is that a Meta lead is earlier in the decision than a Google lead. They're interested, not ready. Which means the follow-up matters more, not less, and that's the part most tradies underestimate.
"Free Quote" Isn't An Offer. Everyone Has One.
The single biggest improvement in most trade accounts is the offer. Every competitor offers a free quote, so it filters nothing and motivates nobody. Better: a fixed-price starting point ("Full interior repaint from $X"), a specific outcome with a timeframe ("Deck built before Christmas, booking now"), a guarantee that costs you nothing if you're good ("On time or the first hour's free"), or a genuinely useful first step ("Free 15-minute site check with a written scope, not a sales pitch").
Give the person a reason to enquire now rather than in three months, and tell them exactly what happens after they do. Both of those lift lead quality more than any targeting setting.
Your Phone Photos Beat Any Stock Image.
- Before and after, your own jobs — the highest-performing format for trades, every time. Slightly rough is fine. Stock photos are not.
- You on camera, 20 to 30 seconds — walking a job, explaining one thing a customer should know. Captions on, no intro, hook in the first two seconds.
- A finished-job photo with the price in big text — "This deck: $14,200. Booking November now." It qualifies the budget before they enquire.
- A plain-text post — white background, black type, reads like something you wrote in your notes app. It cuts through a feed full of polished ads.
- Five ads minimum, five different messages — not five colour variations of one ad. Meta needs options to find who responds to what.
Refresh creative every four to six weeks. When the same people have seen the same ad five or six times, cost per lead climbs and no budget change will fix it.
Three Questions. Suburb, Job, Timing.
Use Meta's Instant Form set to "higher intent," and ask three questions before the contact details: what suburb, what's the job, and when are you looking to start. Add budget as a multiple choice if your jobs range widely. You'll get fewer leads and a higher cost per lead, and the ones you get will be people who own a house in your service area with a real job in mind.
Write the thank-you screen so it tells them you'll call within the hour and from which number. Then actually do that.
Go Broad. Let The Form Filter.
Interest targeting for trades ("people interested in home improvement") is mostly noise now. Target your service radius, set the age range to homeowners (30 and up for most trades), and otherwise leave it broad. Meta's algorithm is better at finding your buyers from a strong ad and a qualifying form than any interest stack is. Add a one-percent lookalike of your past customers once you have a hundred or so, and exclude people who've enquired in the last 90 days.
Budget: $50 to $100 a day is the realistic floor for a trade campaign in a metro area to produce steady leads and enough data to optimise. At $20 a day you'll get leads, but you'll spend months in learning phase and never really know what's working. Judge the campaign after $600 to $800 of spend, on cost per lead you could actually quote, not cost per form fill.
Don't touch it for seven days. Every edit resets learning. The most common way tradies wreck a campaign is by changing the budget or pausing an ad on day three because it "wasn't doing anything."
This Is Where The Money Is.
A Meta lead called within five minutes converts several times better than one called the next day. You're on the tools, so you won't be calling within five minutes. Either someone in the office does it, a setter does it, or you accept that half your leads will go cold. The campaign is the easy bit. What happens after the form is what separates a tradie who says "Facebook ads don't work" from one running two crews off it.
If you want the campaign built and the leads called, qualified and booked into your calendar so you only talk to people ready to get a quote, that's what we do. If you'd rather run it yourself and just want it built properly, book The Launch Session and we'll build it live in your own account in 90 minutes.