By Andrew Heppinstall – Founder, Unavoidable Marketing – 11 July 2026

Every quarter I sit down with a trade owner who has been running Facebook Ads for six months and is quietly worried the numbers do not add up. Loads of impressions. A handful of enquiries. Almost no booked jobs. Meanwhile the plumber down the road is running Google Local Service Ads and pulling in three times the work off half the spend. Nobody is doing anything wrong. The channels are just built for completely different jobs.

Across the 40+ UK trade campaigns we run, the average cost per booked job on Google Local Service Ads sits at £65. On Facebook Ads it sits at £190. Same trade, same city, same trade owner. Three times the cost to book the same job on Facebook.

The gap is about intent, not audience quality

Facebook Ads is not a bad channel. Meta has the best interest-based targeting in the industry and the retargeting is genuinely powerful. But its role in a trade marketing plan is fundamentally different from Google Local Service Ads. LSA catches people at the moment they need you. Facebook Ads catches them scrolling with no particular need in mind.

What LSA is doing

Someone’s boiler has just packed in. They Google “boiler repair Leeds”. Your LSA listing appears at the very top of Google, above the paid ads and the map pack, with the Google Guaranteed badge. They tap the phone icon on your listing and call you within 20 seconds of realising they need help. You paid a fixed lead cost for a conversation with a buyer whose intent is already at 10 out of 10.

What Facebook Ads is doing

Someone is on their phone at 9pm scrolling reels of dogs and their friend’s holiday. Your ad appears between two reels. They may or may not need a plumber. They may or may not remember the ad two weeks later when they do. You paid for an impression – and possibly a click – regardless of whether they were even in-market. Buyer intent is somewhere between 0 and 3 out of 10.

You are not paying for the difference in ad platform. You are paying for the difference in intent gap. That is why the maths does not close.

Where Facebook Ads absolutely earns its keep

To be fair to Facebook, there are three trade marketing jobs it does better than any other channel and it would be daft to skip.

1. Brand awareness and warming up cold audiences

The plumber whose face people already know from Facebook is the plumber they Google when the boiler goes. Facebook is a top-of-funnel machine and LSA has nothing that competes with that for cold audience building. £8-£12 per thousand impressions is genuinely cheap top-of-funnel media in 2026.

2. Retargeting site visitors

Meta’s pixel-based retargeting will bring back visitors who bounced off your quote page or your local service pages. It closes 8-15% of them at a low ad cost. LSA has no equivalent – it is a one-shot capture channel.

3. Bigger-ticket, longer-consideration jobs

Bathroom refits, kitchen installs, whole-house rewires. Jobs that people research for two to six weeks before choosing a trade. Facebook is where they see you three times during that research window and where you build the “I have already heard of them” feeling that closes at final quote stage.

The mistake most trades make on Facebook Ads

They run a lead-gen campaign with a form fill for a small-ticket emergency service. £4 per lead looks great on the dashboard until you actually call the leads back and discover most of them were half-asleep on the sofa when they filled it in. Lead-to-job conversion collapses to 6-9%.

Facebook is not built for “I need this in the next hour” service intent. Trying to force it there is where the £190-per-booked-job number comes from. Used correctly – awareness, retargeting, considered purchases – the cost per booked job on Facebook drops closer to £110-£140.

Where LSA does not work either

Because I do not want to only tell one side of it – LSA has its own failure modes we should be straight about.

You cannot advertise services that are outside Google’s Guaranteed categories. If your service mix is 60% commercial work or you specialise in something niche like passive house design, LSA will not show your listing for the terms that actually convert.

The volume ceiling is real. Once you have exhausted the click volume for your category in your postcodes, you cannot buy more LSA impressions. You have hit the top of the well.

Slow responders get penalised heavily. LSA algorithmically drops your ranking if you miss too many lead calls. If you are the tradesperson on the tools and the phone rolls to voicemail three times a day, LSA will eventually stop showing you.

The plan I would put in place for a trade with a fixed monthly ad budget

If you gave me £2,000 a month to spend on paid media for a UK trade, this is roughly what I would do.

£1,200 on LSA to capture the here-and-now search intent. That is where the £65 booked jobs come from.

£500 on a Facebook awareness and retargeting stack. Video creative that shows the humans and the finished work. Pixel-based retargeting of site visitors. Nothing forced, nothing gimmicky.

£300 held back for the odd Google Ads push on specific commercial or high-value service pages LSA cannot fully cover.

Nothing in Bark. Nothing in Yell. Nothing in “boost” buttons on Instagram.

Read the full comparison

The full breakdown with raw cost per lead, cost per booked job, retargeting benchmarks and the exact Facebook creative that works for trades is on the LSA vs Facebook Ads for UK trades comparison page. To compare LSA against Google Ads or Bark, the full comparison hub covers the rest of the channels.

Not sure which mix is right for you?

Free 20-minute audit of your current paid spend for UK trades. We look at what you are running, what it is costing per booked job, and where the wasted budget is. No sales pitch. See our LSA service, our PPC service, or request a free audit. Call 07749 941 111.

Frequently asked questions

Can I run LSA and Facebook Ads at the same time?

Yes, and for any trade with a serious ad budget I would recommend it. LSA catches active buyers, Facebook builds the audience that becomes future active buyers. They complement each other, they do not compete.

Why is my Facebook Ads cost per lead so low but my booked job cost so high?

Because Facebook lead-form conversion looks cheap on the surface but the leads themselves are lower intent. You need to track cost per BOOKED job, not cost per lead. Once you do, the £4-per-lead campaign often looks like £250 per booked job.

Is TikTok or Instagram Reels a better bet than Facebook feed for a trade in 2026?

For younger consumer audiences yes, and for visually rich trades (kitchens, landscaping, interiors) definitely worth testing Reels. For general local trade services aimed at 35+ homeowners, Facebook feed and Facebook Marketplace still deliver the best cost per booked job on the Meta stack.

How long does it take to see results from Facebook Ads for a trade?

Awareness campaigns need at least 60 days of consistent spend before you can judge them. Retargeting can show results within two weeks. Direct lead-gen for emergency service intent is almost always the wrong ask of the channel – expect disappointment inside 30 days.

Does the £190 per booked job number apply to all trades?

It is an average across UK trade Facebook Ads accounts. Emergency plumbing sits higher (£220-£280) because the intent gap is largest. Considered purchases like bathroom refits sit lower (£120-£150) because Facebook’s awareness role actually earns its place there.