The stuff every trade owner should know about ads.

Google = demand capture. Someone types "emergency plumber near me" at 2am. They have the problem right now, they're ready to pay. You're competing on bid + Quality Score. CPLs are higher ($60–$180 in most trades) but the leads are red-hot.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) = demand creation. Someone is scrolling Reels, sees your before/after of a black-streaked roof turning white, and thinks "wait — my roof looks like that." You're interrupting them. CPLs are usually cheaper ($15–$60) but the leads need follow-up and warming.

For trades, the rough cheat sheet looks like this:

• Emergency / urgent need (plumbing leaks, HVAC outages, locksmith) → Google first.
• Visual transformation (pressure washing, window cleaning, Christmas lights, roofing) → Meta first.
• Planned/seasonal (irrigation install, full roof replacement, lawn programs) → Both, with Meta doing the heavy lifting on awareness.

Running ads isn't expensive. Running them badly is. The average untrained owner running their own Meta ads pays a CPL 2–4x higher than a managed account in the same market — because they don't have the rep volume to recognize what's killing the campaign.

Here's the math we walk through on most audit calls:

• Hours: 10–15 hours/week of real work — copy, creative, bid management, testing, reporting. At a $150/hr trade owner rate, that's $6,000–$9,000/month in your opportunity cost.
• Learning tax: Algorithms need ~6 weeks of clean data to optimize. Most owners change ads every 3 days because "they don't see leads yet" and reset the learning every time.
• Bad CPL: $80 CPL instead of $35 across 30 leads = $1,350 wasted per month. Per month.

Your website (the homepage, the about page, the gallery) is for organic visitors and Google searches. It needs to look credible — that's it.

Your landing page (where paid ads land) is a different animal. It exists to do one thing: convert a clicker into a phone call or form submission. Single offer. Single CTA. No nav menu pulling them away.

Owners who run paid ads to their homepage typically see conversion rates between 1–2%. Owners who run the same traffic to a focused landing page see 8–15%. Same ad. Same audience. 5–10x more leads, just because the destination changed.

CPL (cost per lead) swings wildly by trade, season, and ad platform. The numbers below are what we see across managed accounts on Meta — Google is usually 1.5–2.5x higher because it's intent-driven.

• Pressure washing: $15–$35
• Window cleaning: $20–$40
• Christmas light install: $25–$55 (in-season)
• Lawn care / mosquito: $20–$45
• Roofing (storm or aging market): $40–$120
• HVAC install: $60–$150
• Plumbing (non-emergency): $45–$110

The right CPL isn't "low." It's profitable. A $90 CPL on a $14K HVAC install is a steal. A $25 CPL on a $200 window job might still be losing money. Always reverse-engineer from your average ticket × close rate.

Meta and Google both need ~50 conversion events per ad set per week to fully optimize. Below that, the algorithm is guessing. You'll see noisy results, high CPL, and ad sets that "stop working" — they never really started.

Working backwards from that:

• Most local trades need $1,500–$3,000/month minimum in ad spend to hit learning volume. Below $1,500, you're paying for a science experiment, not lead gen.
• $3K–$6K/month is where most well-run trade accounts hit their stride — predictable CPL, consistent volume, room to test creative.
• $8K+ is where you start running multiple offers, geographic splits, and audience expansion.

And that's ad spend — separate from management fees. If someone tries to charge you $1,500/mo in management on a $500/mo ad budget, the math doesn't work and they know it.

If you ran ads for a season and the leads slowed to a trickle, the culprit is almost always:

• Creative fatigue. The same image/video has been running for 6+ weeks. Your audience saw it 14 times and started scrolling past. New creative — even a small variation — usually drops CPL back to where it was overnight.
• Audience saturation. In a small service area, you can genuinely "use up" the in-market portion of the audience. Solution: rotate hooks (different problems, different angles), expand radius, or layer in retargeting.
• Seasonality. Pressure washing doesn't sell in January. Christmas lights don't sell in March. Owners blame the agency. The calendar is the actual problem.

A good media buyer plans the creative refresh cycle before the slowdown — usually 4–6 weeks in advance — so you never feel the cliff.

Industry data across thousands of service businesses keeps showing the same brutal pattern:

• Called within 5 minutes: 8–10x more likely to close than calls made 30+ minutes later.
• Called within 1 hour: roughly 50% of the close rate of a 5-minute response.
• Called the next day: ~20% as likely to close. Most have already booked the next competitor.

So if you're paying $50 a lead and only calling them back the next morning, you just made every lead 5x more expensive. The ad budget didn't go up — your effective CPL did.

The fix is operational, not creative: instant text notifications, an auto-text-back system that buys you 2–3 minutes, and a non-negotiable rule that whoever is on a truck calls back within 5.

A lead is anyone who fills out a form or calls. That includes tire kickers, wrong-area people, kids messing around, and folks who ghost.

A booked job is someone on your schedule with a deposit or confirmed appointment. That's the only number that actually pays for your truck.

The ratio matters:

• Lead → contact: healthy is 70–85% (you actually reach them).
• Contact → quote: healthy is 60–80%.
• Quote → booked: healthy is 35–55% for most trades.
• Net lead → booked: roughly 15–30% across the funnel is a normal, healthy account.

If your booking rate is way below 15%, the problem is usually sales/operations — speed, scripts, pricing, follow-up — not the ads. If lead quality is genuinely bad (wrong area, wrong service), that's a targeting and offer fix.