Hypothetical: a UK bathroom fitter in Bristol gives us £1,500/month for ads. No prior data, no pixel history, the website is new. What do we actually run with that money? This is the plan, not a theoretical framework.
The split
- Google Search
- £600/mo
- Meta · Lead gen
- £700/mo
- Meta · Retargeting
- £100/mo
- Local Service Ads (where eligible)
- £100/mo
Why this split. Google Search captures intent — the customer who has decided they want a bathroom fitter and is hunting. Meta captures interest — the customer who is not yet searching but will be. Retargeting closes the loop. LSA is cheap, gated, and high-intent where it works.
Google Search · £600/mo
Tight, geo-fenced, intent-led keywords only. 'Bathroom fitter Bristol.' 'Bathroom installation [postcode].' No 'cheap bathrooms' (price-shopper hell). Heavy negative-keyword sweeps from week one — DIY, parts, plumbing-supply queries. Bid manual CPC, not Smart Bidding, for the first 60 days while data accumulates.
Expected: 25-40 clicks/month at £15-24 CPC. Conversion to lead 8-15%. Cost per lead £40-£75. High-quality leads — these are intent-driven.
Meta Lead Gen · £700/mo
Single Advantage+ campaign, geo-fenced 25-mile radius. Three creative angles, all video, all under 30 seconds: handheld owner-on-camera explaining the process; before/after carousel with pricing; on-site footage of a real job mid-build, no music, captions on. Run all three concurrently and let Advantage+ pick winners.
Critical setting: optimise for 'qualified lead', not raw form fill. Use a multi-step form (postcode → job type → budget) to filter tyre-kickers. CPL goes from £6 to £14, but cost per qualified lead drops because the qualified rate triples.
Expected: 50-80 leads/month, 30-50 of them qualified. Cost per qualified lead £14-£23. Booked-visit rate 35-45% if AI follow-up is wired in.
Meta Retargeting · £100/mo
Two audiences: site visitors who did not book, and lead-form openers who did not submit. Creative is testimonial-led — real customer quotes, real names, real before/afters. £100/month is enough to keep frequency healthy without burning the audience out. ROAS on retargeting consistently outperforms cold by 4-6x.
Local Service Ads · £100/mo
Eligibility-dependent. Where it works (and for many UK trades it now does), it is the cheapest qualified lead source available. Pay-per-lead, not per click. Gated by Google's verification process. Budget low and let it run.
What you should expect by month 3
- , 70-110 qualified leads per month, blended
- , 30-45 booked site visits
- , 4-7 won jobs at typical close rates
- , At £14k average job value, £56k-£98k in won revenue from £4,500 in spend
Where most £1,500/mo budgets get burned
Three failure modes. Spreading the budget across five platforms instead of two. Optimising for raw CPL instead of qualified leads. Refreshing creative once a quarter instead of every two weeks. Avoid those and a £1,500 budget delivers credible results inside 90 days.
Ad budget below £1,000/month is mostly noise. Above £1,500 is where signal starts. Below that, do referrals and SEO and come back when you can spend more.
Seb Planchais
We run this exact split for two of our renovation clients. The numbers above are not modelled — they are the outputs we are seeing, blended across both accounts in March 2026.