Facebook ads for tradies

The goal is booked jobs at a cost you can quote against. Everything else is decoration.

Trades accounts fail in predictable ways: a service area drawn too wide, leads nobody calls back within the hour, and creative that shows the van instead of the finished work. None of that is a targeting problem.

Set it up around the job, not the suburb list.

Define the service radius you'll actually drive, then let delivery work inside it. Hand-built suburb lists and interest stacks mostly narrow the auction and raise your cost per lead.

Optimise for the outcome that matters — a booked job or a qualified call, not a form fill. If your form leads are cheap and nobody converts, you're paying to collect bad phone numbers.

The creative that works for trades.

Before and after, in that order, with the problem named in the first second. Finished work outperforms branded vans, and a real job site outperforms stock footage every time.

Volume still matters: a handful of concepts a month, each with variants, so you're not running the same three ads to the same suburbs until the cost per lead doubles.

Price transparency, call-out fees and guarantees belong in the ad, not hidden until the phone call. It filters the leads you don't want.

What a lead should cost, honestly.

It depends entirely on job value. A $400 service call and a $40,000 renovation justify wildly different costs per lead, and the only number that matters is what a job is worth to you against what it costs to get one.

Which is why measurement is the first thing we fix: without the job value flowing back, you're optimising toward whichever leads are cheapest to collect rather than most profitable to win.

Questions people actually ask.

Get your trades account read properly.

Fifteen minutes with Josh, no pitch. You'll leave knowing the two or three things costing you the most right now — and what it would take to fix them.