Are Facebook ads worth it for tradies? The honest answer, with the maths

A bloke at the servo tells you he's pulling jobs off Facebook. That night the app waves a "Boost post" button at you for $47 and you tap it, because $47 isn't the end of the world. Two weeks later: 3,100 people reached, nine likes, a comment from your auntie, not one job. So are Facebook ads worth it for tradies, or was that the cheapest lesson you'll ever buy?

Nearly every page ranking for this question was written by an agency that sells Facebook ads. Here's the version nobody selling them will hand you: it comes down to one number, and you can work it out tonight on the back of a docket.

Are Facebook ads worth it for tradies?

Facebook ads are worth it for tradies whose average job is worth a few thousand dollars, who reply to every enquiry within the hour, and who can afford to spend for two or three months before judging the result. For emergency call-outs, small-ticket work, or a business already missing calls, the same money does more elsewhere.

The rest of this page is how to work out which side of that line you're on — because the same $1,500 a month that's a bargain for a bathroom renovator is a slow bleed for a mobile mechanic.

The one number that decides it

Agencies report cost per lead — the flattering number. The one that matters is cost per booked job:

Ad spend ÷ jobs actually won = what each job cost you. Compare that to what you make on a job.

Run it with your own figures. Say $1,000 through over a month brings 20 enquiries, you reach ten, quote eight, win three. That's $333 a job. If you clear $1,800 on an average job you'd take that trade every day of the week. If you're doing $250 service calls, you've just paid $333 to earn $250 — and no amount of better ad copy fixes maths that far underwater.

Ignore anyone's published lead costs, agency pages included — they swing wildly by trade, suburb and season, and any number not from your own account is a guess. Do the reverse: what would a job have to cost before it stopped being worth it? Write that number down. That's your kill switch, and deciding it in advance stops a "trial" quietly running for eight months.

When Facebook ads work for a trade business — and when they don't

Facebook doesn't catch people searching. It catches people scrolling. That difference decides everything.

They tend to earn their keep when the work is:

• Planned, not urgent. Bathrooms, decks, landscaping, pools, roof restorations, solar, window and door work. Nobody wakes up needing a new deck — you're planting the idea.
• Visual. A before-and-after of your own work stops a thumb. Every competitor using stock images doesn't.
• Worth real money. The bigger the job, the more room between what a lead costs and what it earns.
• Work you can actually take on. Ads that fill a diary you can't service are an expensive way to annoy people.

They're the wrong tool when the customer already has a problem right now — blocked drain, dead hot water, no power to half the house. That person isn't scrolling, they're searching, and picking from the map results. If that's most of your work, your money belongs in showing up in the map pack, not in a Meta account.

The leak that empties most tradie ad budgets

Here's the part that stings. Most ad spend that "didn't work" wasn't wasted by the ads — it was wasted after the lead arrived.

A Facebook lead is colder than a Google one by nature — thirty seconds earlier they were looking at a mate's holiday photos. That interest has a shelf life measured in minutes. Ring back Thursday about a Monday enquiry and you've paid good money to warm up a customer for whoever called first.

So the test to run before you spend a cent isn't an ad test. It's this: count last month's enquiries and how many you never followed up. Missed calls with no callback. Quotes sent and never chased. Messages seen at 9pm, forgotten by morning. Those leads are already paid for. If there's a pile of them, buying more is like ordering a second load of gravel while the first washes down the driveway.

Plug that first. Every missed call answered and every quote followed up properly costs you nothing in ad spend and lifts the return on every dollar you eventually do spend. It's also the boring, unglamorous half of using AI in a trade business — not clever marketing, just making sure nothing that comes in falls out again. That's the job an AI team handles in the background while you're on the tools.

If you're going to run them, do it like this

1. Decide the money you're willing to lose. A monthly figure and a window — 8 to 12 weeks. Spend above your comfort level and you'll panic and switch it off in week two, which guarantees you learn nothing.
2. One trade, one area, one offer. "Bathroom renovations, 20km around Geelong" beats "all plumbing, all of Victoria" every time.
3. Use your own photos. Same angle before and after, shot on your phone, suburb named in the copy. It'll beat anything a designer makes you.
4. Be specific about the next step. "Free quote" is what every other ad says. A named job, a rough price range and what happens after they click beats any targeting setting.
5. Only use lead forms if you'll ring inside the hour. Otherwise send them to a call or a message thread you watch.
6. Track it to booked jobs. One row per enquiry: date, name, quoted, won, value. Boring, and the only honest scoreboard you'll get.
7. At the end of the window, decide. Under your kill-switch number, keep going. Over it, stop — and don't let anyone talk you into "one more month of optimisation".

What to do before you spend anything

Facebook ads aren't a scam and they aren't magic. They buy attention from people who weren't looking for you — useful if your jobs are big, planned and photogenic, a slow leak if they're small and urgent.

The tradies who make them pay aren't the ones with the cleverest ads. They're the ones who had their house in order first: reviews coming in, a page that looks alive when someone checks, and every enquiry answered fast enough to matter. Do that much and you may find you don't need the ads. Do it and then run them, and you'll get a fair go at knowing whether they worked.

Common questions

How much should a tradie spend on Facebook ads?

Spend what you can lose for two to three months without flinching — that's roughly how long an honest read takes. Work backwards from your average job: if you clear $1,500 a job and would accept paying $300 to win one, a $1,200 month needs four booked jobs to be worth repeating. Set that number before you start, not after.

Are Facebook ads or Google ads better for tradies?

They do different jobs. Google catches people who already have the problem and are searching right now, which suits emergency and repair work. Facebook puts you in front of people who haven't started looking, which suits planned, discretionary jobs like renovations and outdoor work. If you can only do one and your work is urgent-repair, start with Google and your Google Business Profile.

Why do my Facebook leads never answer the phone?

Usually because too much time passed. Someone who filled in a form mid-scroll has often contacted two or three other businesses in the same sitting and moved on within the hour. Ring within minutes rather than days, text as well as call, and expect a share of tyre-kickers regardless — that's the nature of buying attention rather than catching intent.

Do I need an agency to run Facebook ads?

Not to start. A simple campaign with your own job photos and a tight local radius takes an evening to set up yourself. An agency earns its retainer once you already know your cost per booked job and want to scale it — paying a monthly fee to find out whether ads work for you at all is an expensive way to run a test.