Facebook ads budgets for trades: a starting-point guide
Nobody can tell you the right Facebook budget for your business from a headline. But you can work it out in ten minutes with a pen, your average job value and an honest guess at how many quotes you close. This guide walks through that maths, gives worked examples at three spend levels, and tells you when to turn it off.
Start at the end: what is a job worth to you?
Forget cost per click. Start with the money you actually bank. Take your average job value and your gross margin on it. A bathroom fitter doing £6,000 refits at 35% margin makes roughly £2,100 per job before overheads. A decorator doing £900 rooms at 50% makes £450.
Now ask how many quotes you need to win one. Most trades close somewhere between one in three and one in five of the quotes they attend. Be honest. If you think you close 80%, you are either exceptional or not counting the ones who went quiet.
Those two numbers tell you what you can afford to pay for a lead. Everything else in this guide hangs off them.
The back-of-a-van calculation
Here is the chain, using the bathroom fitter as a worked example. These are illustrative figures, not anyone's results.
- Margin per job: £2,100
- Quotes needed per job won: 4 (a 25% close rate)
- Leads needed per quote attended: 2 (half the enquiries are not worth visiting or do not book)
- So 8 leads per job won, and £2,100 to pay for them
- Break-even cost per lead: about £260
- A sensible target, leaving room for profit and for Meta having a bad week: £80 to £130 per lead
Three budgets, three outcomes
Cost per lead on Meta for UK trades varies wildly by trade, area, creative and time of year. For the worked examples below, assume a middling £35 per lead for a mid-ticket trade. Your number will differ. Use the structure, not the figures.
| Daily spend | Monthly spend | Leads at £35 each | What you learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| £10 | About £300 | 8 or 9 | Almost nothing. Too few leads to judge creative or follow-up |
| £30 | About £900 | 25 or so | Enough to see which ad wins and whether your follow-up copes |
| £100 | About £3,000 | 85 or so | Enough to run two audiences and two offers side by side and trust the result |
Why £10 a day usually disappoints
Meta's system learns from conversions. At £10 a day in a UK town, it might get eight leads a month to learn from. That is not enough signal for it to work out who your buyers are, so it guesses, and the guesses are expensive.
There is a second problem. Eight leads a month means one bad fortnight (holiday, a run of time-wasters) wipes out your sample. You cannot tell whether the ad is broken or you are unlucky.
If £300 a month is genuinely the ceiling, run it in bursts. Spend £30 a day for ten days when you need work, then pause. You get a readable sample and you are not paying for impressions in weeks you are already booked.
The minimum that makes sense by job size
A rough rule we would stand behind: your monthly ad budget should be at least the margin on one job, and ideally two. The logic is simple. If one extra job a month pays for the whole campaign, everything after that is profit, and you can survive a flat month without panic.
For a locksmith or a decorator, that might be £400 to £600 a month. For an extension builder, it might be £3,000 and still look cheap. The agencies on our Facebook ads agencies for extension builders list tend to assume budgets at the top of that range for exactly this reason.
Agency fee versus ad spend
If you use an agency, there are two numbers, and they should be kept apart. Ad spend goes to Meta, ideally from your own card on your own ad account. The management fee goes to the agency.
A common trap is a £500 a month package where you never find out how much reached Meta. Ask. If £300 of a £500 fee is management, your actual ad budget is £200 and the maths above says you will not learn much. The no-contract Meta ads agencies for trades we have looked at vary a great deal on this point.
Seasonality: spend when the phone would ring anyway
Trades are seasonal and Meta is an auction. Heating engineers see boiler demand spike in October and January. Landscapers get their enquiries from February to May. Roofers get storm-driven calls whenever the weather turns.
Spend more in your busy season, not less. It feels backwards, because you are already busy, but cost per lead is often lowest when demand is high and you can afford to be choosy about jobs. Cut back in the dead months rather than fighting the market.
When to turn it off
Three triggers. First, you have spent two months' worth of a job's margin and have not won a job. Second, cost per lead has doubled from your first month and the creative has not changed, which means fatigue. Third, you are getting leads but not calling them back within the hour, in which case the budget is not the problem and our guide on following up Facebook leads fast is the next read.
Do not turn it off because one week was quiet. Meta needs seven days of stable spend to settle after any change. Judge on fortnights, not days.
A budget plan you can actually follow
- Week 1 to 2: £30 a day, one audience, two ads. Note the cost per lead and how many you spoke to
- Week 3 to 4: kill the weaker ad, add one new one. Same spend
- Month 2: if cost per lead is under your target, raise spend 20% a week. If not, fix creative or follow-up before adding money
- Month 3: decide. Scale, hold or stop, based on jobs won not leads received
Frequently asked questions
What is the minimum Facebook ads budget for a tradesperson?
A workable floor is around £30 a day, or roughly £900 a month, which produces enough leads to judge the ad and your follow-up. Below that, run short bursts rather than a trickle.
Should ad spend go through the agency or my own account?
Your own ad account and card where possible. It keeps the data in your name and makes the agency fee visible as a separate line.
How long before I know if Facebook ads are working?
Give it a full month at stable spend before judging, and make the decision on jobs won rather than leads received.
Should I spend more in my busy season?
Yes. Cost per lead is often lowest when demand is high, and you can be selective about the jobs you take.