You're Calling Them Too Late.
A person who fills in a Facebook lead form was scrolling. They saw your ad, tapped, and their details were pre-filled. Ten seconds later they're looking at a video of someone's dog. They are not sitting by the phone waiting for you.
Call them inside five minutes and you'll reach most of them and they'll remember why they enquired. Call them the next morning and you're a stranger from an unknown number. The drop-off between five minutes and five hours is brutal, and most businesses are on the wrong side of it because the owner is on a job and the lead is sitting in an email.
Before you touch the campaign, look at your own response time. If it's over an hour, that's your first fix, and no amount of targeting will compensate for it.
The Form Made It Too Easy.
Meta's Instant Forms pre-fill name, email and phone from the person's profile. On the default "more volume" setting, someone can submit a lead in two taps without reading anything. Cheap leads, high volume, and a large share of people who don't remember doing it.
The fixes are simple and they cost you volume in exchange for quality, which is the right trade. Switch the form to "higher intent" so there's a review step before submission. Add two or three real qualifying questions: the suburb, the timeframe, the rough budget. Make the phone number a typed field rather than pre-filled if reach rates are terrible. And write the intro screen so it's clear what happens next, because "we'll call you today" filters out people who don't want a call.
A form with three qualifying questions might double your cost per lead and halve your lead count. If the ones you get answer the phone, you've come out ahead.
The Ad Promised Something The Call Doesn't Deliver.
If the ad says "free quote" and the first thing your team does is qualify budget, the lead feels ambushed. If the ad leads with a giveaway, a discount or a competition, you'll get people who want the giveaway. If the creative is a pattern-interrupt that's got nothing to do with the service, you'll get curiosity clicks that convert to nothing.
The ad sets the expectation. The call has to meet it. Read your best-performing ad and then listen to how your leads are being called, and check they're the same conversation. The metric that matters here isn't click-through rate or cost per lead. It's cost per lead who was actually a fit, and engagement-bait creative always looks good on the first one and terrible on the second.
One Call, One Voicemail, Then Nothing.
Most businesses call once. If there's no answer, they might leave a voicemail. Then the lead goes into a spreadsheet and is never touched again. We audited a builder's account last year where 40 leads produced three jobs: 22 of the 40 had never been called, and nine had been called once, two days after they enquired.
A proper follow-up sequence for a Facebook lead is a call within minutes, a text if there's no answer ("Hi, it's [your name] from [business], you enquired about [job], when's a good time?"), a second call that afternoon, a third the next morning, and a text two days later. Five touches over three days. Most businesses don't have the time to do that, which is fair enough. But if nobody's doing it, the leads were never bad. They were just uncalled.
Fix It In This Order.
- 1. Measure your speed to lead — time from form submit to first call attempt, over the last 20 leads. If the median is over an hour, stop here and fix this first.
- 2. Rebuild the form — higher intent, three qualifying questions, an intro that says a call is coming.
- 3. Match the call to the ad — the opening line of the call should reference the exact thing the ad promised.
- 4. Put a follow-up sequence in place — five touches in three days, every lead, no exceptions.
- 5. Only then look at targeting — and if the four above are sorted, you'll usually find the targeting was fine.
If you'd rather not do the calling yourself, that's the entire reason our Full Funnel plan exists. We run the ads, call every lead within the hour, run the follow-up sequence, and send you booked appointments instead of names.