I get asked this constantly, usually by someone who tried boosting a post for $50, got fourteen likes and no calls, and concluded the whole thing is a scam.
Fair conclusion from that evidence. Wrong conclusion overall.
Hereâs the honest version, including the cases where my answer is that you shouldnât bother yet.
When Meta ads genuinely work
When youâre not being searched for. This is the big one and itâs the part most people miss. Google captures people who already know they need an electrician. Meta reaches people who donât know it yet. If you install split systems, nobody wakes up and searches âair conditioning installationâ until the day it gets hot. Meta lets you be in front of them in October instead of waiting for January.
When you have something specific to say. âWe do landscapingâ is not an ad. âFull backyard transformations in Newcastle, from concrete slab to finished in under three weeksâ is an ad. The more specific the offer, the better paid social performs.
When you need work now. Search rankings take months. A campaign can produce enquiries in days. That speed is the real product youâre buying, and itâs why ads and SEO belong together rather than as alternatives.
When your job value is high enough. This is simple maths. If a decent job is worth $4,000 to you and it costs $250 in ad spend to book one, thatâs an obvious yes. If you do $80 callouts, the numbers get very tight very fast.
When they donât work
When thereâs nowhere to send people. An adâs job is to get someone to click. What happens next decides whether you get a job. If the click lands on a slow homepage with a generic contact form buried at the bottom, youâve paid for a visit and thrown it away. Fix the destination before you pay for the traffic.
When you boost posts instead of running campaigns. Boosting is Facebookâs easy button and it optimises for engagement, meaning likes and comments. Thatâs a different objective to getting someone to fill in a form. Same money, entirely different outcome. Most people who tell me ads didnât work have only ever boosted.
When you canât handle the leads. Iâve seen campaigns get switched off because they worked. Enquiries came in, nobody called them back within a day, they went cold, and the owner concluded the leads were rubbish. If you donât have a way to respond quickly, more enquiries just means more people annoyed at you.
When the budgetâs too small to learn anything. Meta needs data to work out who to show your ad to. At $5 a day it never gets enough signal to optimise. You end up paying for a permanently confused algorithm.
What a realistic first three months looks like
Month one is tuition. Youâre paying to find out which audience, which message and which offer works. Some of the spend will be wasted. Thatâs not failure, thatâs the cost of information. Expect enquiries, but expect the cost per enquiry to be higher than it will be later.
Month two is where it settles. You cut what didnât work, put money behind what did. Cost per enquiry usually drops noticeably here.
Month three is where you find out if itâs a channel or a experiment. By now you should know your rough cost per booked job. That single number tells you whether to scale it, hold it, or stop.
Anyone promising you results in week one is either lucky or lying.
What to have in place first
Before you spend a dollar, three things.
A destination page built for the ad, not your homepage. One clear thing to do on it, above the fold, working properly on a phone.
A way to respond fast. Ideally same day. Speed of response beats almost every other factor in whether a lead converts.
Some idea of what a job is worth to you. Not exact, just the rough average. Without it you cannot tell whether the ads are working, and youâll make the decision on feel instead of numbers.
The actual answer
For most trade and service businesses with a job value above roughly $1,000, yes, Meta ads are worth it, but only as one part of a setup.
On their own, ads are a tap you have to keep paying to leave running. Turn off the spend, the enquiries stop that day. Thatâs why I donât sell ads as a standalone service. They work best pointed at a site built to convert, with something behind it to catch and track the leads that come in.
If youâve got a site that already converts and a way to handle enquiries properly, ads will probably be the fastest thing you can do to get the phone ringing.
If you donât, ads will just show you faster how much the rest of the setup is costing you.