Facebook and Instagram ads work for trades that travel to the customer (builders, kitchen and bathroom fitters, roofers, plumbers and heating engineers, electricians, landscapers, window installers and cleaners) when they are aimed at the right jobs, the right postcodes and a diary that can absorb the enquiries. If customers come to you instead, at a shop, salon or showroom, my page on Facebook ads for local businesses is the better fit.
How homeowners choose a trade on Facebook and Instagram
When a pipe bursts or the power trips, people search on Google and ring the first firm that answers. Meta ads rarely win that job, and I would not try to make them. Urgent call-outs belong in Google Ads for trades and home services.
Facebook and Instagram earn their place with the planned job someone has been mulling over for months: a new kitchen, a loft conversion, a garden redesign, a resin driveway, replacement windows, a boiler upgrade before winter, solar panels or a regular cleaner. The homeowner is not searching yet, but they notice a firm a few miles away showing work it finished on a house like theirs. By the time they ask for quotes, your name is already on the list.
Before anyone invites a stranger round to price a job worth thousands, they look for the same reassurances: photos of real finished work, reviews they can check on Google, Checkatrade or Trustpilot, membership of the scheme that matters for the trade (Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, TrustMark or FENSA), a sense of the price range, and whether you cover their postcode. The ads and the page behind them should answer those questions before the first phone call.
What changes for a trade or home service business
You go to the customer, so the map is the targeting
A service area business only makes money where its vans can get to without losing half a day in traffic. I set the location by postcode districts or a radius drawn from where your jobs actually are, leave out areas where travel time makes work unprofitable, and split the area when job values differ, because a loft conversion is worth a longer drive than a gutter clear. In London that often means a handful of boroughs rather than the whole city.
The diary sets the budget
Most trades are limited by people, not demand. A steady flow of enquiries is no use to a two-person firm that can only start a few jobs a month. I plan spend around how many quotes you can visit and how many jobs you can take on, and we agree in advance how spend comes down when the diary fills and goes back up when it thins, for example after the Christmas lull or when the outdoor season ends.
Rules on prices, finance and claims
- Prices include VAT. The CAP Code expects prices shown to consumers to include VAT and any charges everyone has to pay. A “from” price must be one a reasonable number of customers can actually get.
- Finance wording is regulated. “Spread the cost” or “0% finance” on a kitchen or a boiler is a consumer credit promotion. Unless your business holds its own FCA permission as a credit broker, the wording must be approved by an FCA-authorised firm, so in practice your finance provider or its compliance team signs it off before the ad runs. Meta has its own rules for ads that offer credit, and I check the current ones before any finance message goes live.
- Grants and “free” schemes. Ads for insulation, heat pumps or boilers that mention government funding must be accurate about who qualifies. A “free boiler” headline that turns out to depend on benefits or property type misleads people and draws complaints.
- Badges and reviews must be real. Show only scheme logos the business currently holds, and quote reviews word for word with a note of where each came from. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans fake reviews and misleading review practices outright.
Tracking a job that is won weeks later
The click, the enquiry, the site visit, the quote and the signed job can be weeks apart, and the money usually changes hands long after Meta has stopped watching. Under PECR the Meta Pixel may only fire once a visitor accepts marketing cookies, so I set it to load on consent and pair it with the Conversions API for those consented events. The most useful signal is which enquiries became paid work. I send those back to Meta as offline conversions, using hashed contact details from your job sheet or CRM, so the campaign learns to find homeowners who sign rather than homeowners who only ask.
A typical home services campaign
- One job type per campaign. Bathrooms, extensions and roof repairs attract different people at different prices, so each gets its own ads, form and budget.
- Creative from your own jobs. Phone footage of a finished kitchen, a short walk-round of an extension, a before and after of a driveway, or the owner explaining what a rewire involves. Stock photos of smiling builders do little. I write a filming brief the crew can follow on site, with the homeowner’s permission and with house numbers and car registrations kept out of shot.
- An enquiry route that matches how you work. Facebook lead ads suit firms with someone in the office to ring back. Click-to-WhatsApp ads suit trades who reply from the van between jobs and like customers to send photos of the problem. For high-value work, a page with prices, finished projects and reviews often brings fewer but better enquiries.
- Questions that filter. Postcode, type of job, rough timescale and whether they own the property. Each question costs a few leads and saves wasted site visits.
- Instant follow-up. Leads go straight to your phone, inbox or job management software, with an automatic text so the homeowner hears from you within minutes. On planned work the firm that replies first often gets the visit.
- Retargeting the people who looked. Those who watched a project video or opened a form without sending it see a second ad with reviews, your guarantee or your finance option while they decide.
- Judged on jobs won. I report cost per lead, but the figures that matter are quotes given, jobs won and what those jobs were worth.
Mistakes I see in home services accounts
- Chasing emergency work on Facebook. Nobody scrolls Instagram with water coming through the ceiling.
- Boosting posts. The Boost button buys likes and comments, often from people far outside the area you cover.
- An area drawn too wide. Many form fills arrive from postcodes you would never travel to, and each one takes time to turn down politely.
- Forms built for volume. Prefilled forms with no questions bring in names that never answer the phone.
- Running flat out with a full diary. Paying for enquiries you cannot quote for, then replying a week late, costs you reviews as well as money.
- Ex-VAT prices and unearned badges. Both break advertising rules, and customers feel misled when they find out.
- Judging on cost per lead. A cheap lead for a job the homeowner cannot afford costs more than a dear one that signs.
- The same three ads for a year. In a small local area the same households see them over and over, and results fade.
What you receive
- A review of your existing Meta ad account, pixel and cookie banner, with the first changes I would make.
- A service area plan by job type, and a budget tied to the number of jobs you can take on.
- A filming and photo brief your team can follow on site, plus all ad copy, checked against the CAP Code and Meta’s advertising policies.
- Lead forms or messaging set up and connected to wherever you handle enquiries.
- A monthly report on enquiries, quotes, jobs won and cost per job, as far as your records allow.
Ongoing campaigns run as monthly Facebook ads management. Your ad spend is paid to Meta directly and is separate from my fee.
How Meta ads fit with the rest of your marketing
Facebook and Instagram plant the idea, and Google usually closes it. A homeowner who saw your loft conversion video in March often searches your company name in May, reads your Google reviews and then rings. That is why I look at SEO for trades and home services and your Google Business Profile alongside the ads. Strong ads cannot rescue a profile with a handful of reviews and no photos of your work.
Next step
Tell me which jobs you most want more of, roughly what one is worth to you, which postcodes you cover and how many new jobs you could take on next month. If you already run Facebook or Instagram ads, I will go through the account and tell you what I would change first. Book a call about your trade business to get started.