Facebook and Instagram Ads Management

Creating demand, not catching it

Paid search is demand capture. Somebody types a problem into Google and you pay to be the answer, which is why it produces work quickly and why it is capped by how many people are searching this month.

Meta is demand creation, and it is answering a different question: how many people in your service area would hire you if the thought had occurred to them. For most trades that pool is far larger than the search pool, and it is the reason a business that has maxed out what Google can deliver can still grow.

It also means Meta is judged on a longer horizon. Somebody who sees your ad today may enquire in March. Expecting the day-one cost per lead of a search campaign from a channel addressing people who did not wake up wanting your service is the most common reason businesses conclude Meta does not work for them.

Both channels together generally beat either alone. A multi-location contractor in Illinois ran exactly that combination over twelve months and produced 3,800+ total leads and calls — 1,300+ leads and 1,500+ calls through Google Ads, with 950+ further leads from Meta at roughly $58 each.

Why most contractor Meta accounts fail

The patterns are consistent, and only one of them is about targeting.

• Optimising for the wrong objective — paying for reach or engagement when what is needed is enquiries, so the campaign is being graded on a number nobody can bank
• Boosted posts standing in for campaigns, which buys views from the cheapest available audience rather than the one that hires you
• Lead forms filled in by people who do not remember filling them in, because nothing in the ad set expectations before the form appeared
• Nobody calling the lead for two days, by which point the enquiry is cold and a competitor has it
• Creative written as a company announcement rather than aimed at somebody who was not thinking about roofing thirty seconds ago

Lead forms or landing pages

Meta's instant forms open inside the app and fill themselves in from the user's profile. That low friction cuts cost per lead and is exactly why the leads can be worse — somebody can complete one almost by accident.

Landing pages ask for more effort and therefore qualify harder. Fewer leads, each worth more. For a high-ticket job where your sales time is the scarce resource, that trade is usually correct.

The deciding factor is what a wasted follow-up costs you. If a quote means driving across the metro, qualify harder before the drive. If qualifying is a two-minute phone call, volume wins and the form is fine. We also add qualifying questions to instant forms, which gives back much of the filtering without losing the convenience.

Creative is the targeting now

Meta's targeting controls matter far less than they did. After the privacy changes of recent years and the shift to broader automated audiences, the algorithm finds the people — and what decides who it finds is the creative itself. The ad showing a roof replacement is shown to people who respond to roof replacements. That is the targeting.

Which puts the work where it should have been anyway. For contractors, the genuinely scarce asset is photography of your own finished jobs. Before-and-afters outperform stock imagery so consistently that we would rather delay a launch than run a campaign on library photos of somebody else's work.

Volume of creative matters too, because ad fatigue in a local service area is real — a modest population sees the same ad repeatedly within weeks. A campaign running one ad has nothing to rotate to when performance decays, and performance always decays.

Video outperforms static for most trades, and it does not need a production crew. A phone held steady on a finished job, walked slowly, with a tradesperson explaining what was done, reliably beats a polished corporate piece.

Retargeting, the cheapest thing on the platform

Most people who visit your website leave without contacting you. Retargeting puts you back in front of that specific group, and because they have already shown interest it is almost always the lowest cost per enquiry in the account.

It needs the Meta pixel installed and firing correctly, which is where we usually find the first problem in an inherited account — the pixel is on the homepage only, or it fires on page load but not on form submission, so the platform cannot learn what a conversion looks like.

Beyond site visitors you can retarget people who watched most of a video, opened a lead form without finishing it, or engaged with the page. The half-finished lead form is a particularly good audience: clear intent, interrupted.

Reach at distributor scale

For distributors the job is different from a contractor's. You are not chasing homeowners; you are staying in front of a defined trade audience across a branch network, so that when a contractor needs product your name is the one that surfaces.

That is a reach and frequency problem rather than a lead-generation one, and it is where Meta is strongest. A multi-state building supply distributor we work with reached 1.2M+ people over twelve months, with 3M+ impressions, 22,000+ link clicks and 160+ leads from the Meta side of the programme. An exterior building products supplier in Ohio ran a comparable approach to 2.6M+ impressions and 18,600+ link clicks.

Distributors also have a funding advantage worth naming: much of this is co-op eligible, so manufacturer marketing dollars can carry a meaningful share of the spend if the creative is compliant and the claims are documented.

Measuring it honestly

Attribution on Meta is messier than on search and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Someone sees an ad on a phone, mentions it to a spouse, and calls you from a different device a fortnight later. No platform reports that cleanly.

So we instrument what can be instrumented — pixel and conversions API, calls and form submissions tracked as conversions, lead source captured in the CRM — and then we watch the number that cannot be gamed: total enquiries, against total spend, over a period long enough to mean something.

We also ask your team what callers are saying, because 'I saw you on Facebook' is data that no dashboard will ever show you. On a channel whose job is to put you in somebody's head weeks before they act, that qualitative signal is often the earliest evidence the campaign is working.

Why A&B

We are a Meta Business Partner, and more usefully, we run these campaigns for the same clients whose search and website work we handle. The site the ad points at, the speed it loads, the form that receives the lead and the CRM that follows it up are all things we control, which removes the usual argument about whose fault a poor result is.

We also run Meta alongside Google for most clients rather than selling it as a standalone. The two do different jobs — one catches demand, the other creates it — and the right split shifts with your season, your capacity and what your market is doing. That is a conversation we would rather have monthly than lock into a contract.