The honest answer to "what do Meta ads cost for a trade business" is a range that depends on your trade, your area, and your creative. So instead of a range, here are the real numbers from one live Glasgow trade campaign we run: 7 qualified leads at £14.61 each in week one, falling to £3.77 per ad-driven lead by campaign to date, with 268 leads captured overall and 151 attributed directly to Meta.
Why the cost per lead fell
Nothing about the budget changed. The creative did. Week one ran with a first version of the ad. As real footage of the work replaced it and the targeting settled, the same spend bought roughly four times the leads. Creative is the biggest lever on cost per lead that most businesses never pull, because they set an ad live and leave it.
What actually drives the number
- Creative: real footage of real jobs beats stock imagery, and refreshing it keeps the cost falling.
- Response time: a lead that waits hours is a lead you paid for and lost.
- Capture: leads have to land somewhere a human sees immediately, not a dashboard checked weekly.
The part nobody budgets for
Ad spend buys the enquiry. It does not buy the follow up. The campaign above runs on :Impact, which sends every lead to WhatsApp within five seconds, scored and ready to call. The same ads with a slow follow up would report the same cost per lead and close a fraction of the work.
The takeaway
Budget for three things: the spend, the creative that keeps the cost falling, and the system that answers fast. A trade business that only budgets for the first one is paying full price for half the result.
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By Dxims, AM:PM Media.
