How Much Should an Installation Company Spend on Facebook Ads?

Most budget advice online is a number pulled from a hat and dressed up as a benchmark. What follows instead is the commercial logic: what a budget is for, what it buys, and how to tell whether yours is working.

Where to start, and why

Local Jobs generally recommends beginning at around £500 a month of Meta spend. We don't think £500 is a magic figure. It's simply a sensible place to begin learning in many local installation campaigns — enough to reach a decent share of a town or district repeatedly, and enough for a month's worth of results to mean something.

The first month isn't really about winning jobs. It's about establishing four facts:

After that first stretch you'll know roughly what an enquiry costs, what sort of jobs are coming through, whether your area produces enough of them, and whether the economics look viable. Those four answers are worth the money on their own, even if the decision at the end is "not for us".

Why £5 a day is often difficult to learn from

Tiny budgets aren't wrong morally, they're just slow to teach you anything. At very low daily spend, a campaign reaches few people, gathers little information, and produces results dominated by chance. Two enquiries in a month might mean the campaign works or might mean nothing at all. You can't tell, and neither can Meta's system, which needs a reasonable flow of results before it gets good at finding more of the right people.

The practical consequence is that a very small budget often costs more per enquiry, not less, and takes three times as long to produce an answer. If the only budget available is a few pounds a day, it's usually better to concentrate it on a smaller area than to spread it thinly across a county.

Why a huge starting budget isn't automatically smart

Going the other way has its own problem. Spend heavily from day one and you'll scale up whatever you happened to build in week one — including the mistakes. The advert that seemed obviously right, the area that turned out to be too wide, the form with a question too many.

What affects the cost of an enquiry?

Cost per enquiry varies enormously between installers, which is exactly why published "average" figures are close to useless. The things that genuinely move it:

• What you install. A £600 job and a £20,000 job attract completely different response rates.
• Where you work. Population density, competition and local wealth all matter.
• How specific the advert is. Vague adverts get cheap, weak responses.
• The quality of your photographs. This is usually the biggest single lever.
• How much you ask for. Two questions or eight changes the number sharply.
• Time of year. Outdoor installations behave very differently in February and June.
• How long the campaign has been running and how much it has learned.

How job value determines what you can afford

The right way round is to work out what an enquiry is worth to you before worrying about what it costs. The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of an invoice:

• Take your average job value.
• Take off materials, labour and subcontractors to get gross profit per job.
• Work out how many enquiries it typically takes you to win one job.
• Divide gross profit by that number. That's roughly your ceiling per enquiry, before it stops being worthwhile.

Two illustrative examples — these are arithmetic, not benchmarks, and your figures will differ:

Those two businesses should not have the same attitude to advertising. The first can absorb a fairly expensive enquiry and still do very well. The second has almost no room, and would need either a much higher close rate, bigger average jobs, or a different channel altogether. Same advice, wildly different conclusions — which is why "how much should I spend?" has no universal answer.

We're building an Installer Lead Cost Calculator to do this arithmetic properly. It isn't finished, and we'd rather not put up a half-built version, so for now the four steps above on a scrap of paper will get you there.

Why cost per lead isn't enough

Cost per lead is the easiest number to obsess over and the easiest to game. Loosen the advert, ask fewer questions and promise something vague, and cost per lead falls immediately. Whether you win more work is another matter entirely.

Track the chain instead: spend, enquiries, enquiries worth quoting, quotes, jobs won, gross profit. The number that matters most is cost per job won, and you can only get there by recording what happened after the enquiry landed.

When should you increase spend?

Increase when all of these hold:

• Enquiry quality is reasonable — a fair share are worth quoting.
• You've got weeks of evidence, not days.
• Your cost per job won is comfortably below your gross profit per job.
• You have the capacity to survey, quote and install more work.

Then move in steps rather than leaps, and give each step time to settle before judging it. Doubling a budget overnight resets a campaign's learning and makes the following fortnight hard to read.

When to stop, or change something

If the numbers don't work, the answer is not usually more money. Spending more on a campaign with a fundamental problem simply buys more of the problem.

• Enquiries are far too cheap and mostly useless — tighten the advert and ask a better question.
• Enquiries are expensive but good — look at your area, your photos and your page before touching the budget.
• Enquiries arrive but never answer the phone — fix follow-up first; that's not an advertising problem.
• Nothing at all after a fair run — the offer, the imagery or the fit with the channel needs rethinking.
• You're at capacity — pause it. Nobody benefits from enquiries you can't service.

What's paid to Meta, and what's paid to Home Service Installs

Worth being completely clear, because bundled pricing hides this constantly:

• £850 a month to Home Service Installs for Local Jobs: building the campaign page, running the Facebook and Instagram advertising, the Job Check questions and ongoing improvement. Rolling monthly, no setup fee.
• Around £500 a month to Meta as a recommended starting advertising budget, paid directly by you from your own ad account. It never passes through us and we take no cut of it.
• So a typical starting outlay is about £1,350 a month, of which the advertising portion is entirely yours to increase, reduce or pause.

We won't tell you how many enquiries that produces, because we don't know — it depends on your trade, your area, your photographs and your competition. Anyone quoting you a lead count before seeing any of that is guessing.

For the wider context, read our plain-English guide to Meta ads for installers or the overview of lead generation for installers. If you're weighing this against paying per lead, our comparison of buying leads versus generating your own covers the trade-offs.