We have spent just over £40,000 of our clients' money on Meta ads in the last 12 months. Three accounts, two trades (bathroom and full-renovation), all UK. This is what worked, what burned, and what we now refuse to do.
- Total spend
- £40,180
- Leads
- 4,317
- Avg CPL
- £9.31
- Booked site visits
- 1,402
Lesson 1: stop optimising for leads, start optimising for conversations
If you optimise for 'lead' as Meta defines it — a form fill — you will get cheap leads that hate you. Half of them will ghost. The other half will be tyre-kickers asking your price before saying hello. The fix is to put a real friction point in the funnel: a phone number requirement, a qualifying question, a calendar booking. CPL goes up. Booked-conversation rate goes up more.
Lesson 2: creative beats targeting, every time
Meta's targeting is now mostly automatic. Advantage+ does the heavy lifting. Where you actually have leverage is in creative. The single best-performing format we have run is a 30-second handheld phone video shot inside a real bathroom mid-renovation, with the trade owner talking, no music, captions burned in. It looks ugly and feels real. It outperformed every studio-shot ad by 2.4x on cost per booked visit.
Lesson 3: never trust the dashboard alone
Meta will tell you a lead cost £6 with a straight face while your client tells you nobody is showing up to site visits. Always cross-check Meta-attributed leads against your CRM and against actual revenue. We have seen attribution lag by 14 days on the dashboard versus reality.
- , Use UTMs on every ad and pipe them into your CRM.
- , Track booked-visit-to-quoted ratio, not just lead-to-booked.
- , Reconcile weekly. Trust monthly numbers, not daily.
What we now refuse
We will not run lead-form ads without a calendar follow-up step. We will not run static image ads in 2026 unless they are part of a creative test. We will not bid on broad keywords without negative-keyword sweeps. And we will not let a campaign run more than two weeks without a creative refresh — fatigue is the slow death of every Meta account.
Spending £40,000 to learn this stuff sounds expensive until you see what it returns. The single best-performing account in that spend returned £198,000 of tracked revenue from £14,200 of spend in nine months. Meta works for trade businesses. It just takes attention, not just money.