Facebook ads for builders

Facebook ads for builders

A homeowner does not search for an extension builder until they have already decided to build. Facebook reaches them in the months before that, while they are still wondering whether it is possible.

Search finds people who already decided

Google is where you catch demand that exists. Someone types "extension builder near me" because they have made their mind up, which is why those clicks are contested and expensive, and why you arrive as the fourth quote.

Facebook and Instagram are the other end of that. The person scrolling has not decided anything. They have a kitchen they are tired of and a vague sense that the back of the house could be better. A photograph of a finished extension two streets away is what turns that into a conversation, and you are the first firm in it rather than the fourth.

What a building ad has to show

Your own work, photographed on a normal day. The finished room, the brickwork, the skip on the drive if that is what it looked like. Real photographs from a phone beat a rendered visual, because the thing being proved is that you did it, not that it is possible.

Before and after side by side does more work than either alone. So does a street that looks like the streets you are advertising into. A homeowner in a nineteen thirties semi is looking for evidence that you have worked on a nineteen thirties semi.

What to leave out: stock photography, anything with an American kitchen in it, and any claim you would not make standing in someone’s kitchen.

An extension lead is not a fencing lead

This is the single most common way a builder’s advertising goes wrong. The ads run, the enquiries arrive, and they are all for the small jobs you took on to keep the lads busy in January.

The fix is upstream. Each campaign advertises one kind of work, with photographs of that work, to a radius that makes sense for that work. You will drive further for a loft conversion than for a patio, so the radius should not be the same.

The season starts before the season

Enquiries for spring work arrive in January and February, because people think about the house over Christmas and want it done before summer. By the time the weather is good the diary is already being filled by firms who advertised in the cold.

That lag is worth planning around. It also means the first month of advertising is rarely the month that pays for it, which is worth knowing before you judge it.

Where the enquiry lands

The page they arrive on should be about the job in the advert and nothing else. One heading, a few photographs, four fields, and your number large enough to tap.

Then answer it quickly. An enquiry is worth a great deal less on Thursday than it was on Monday, because by Thursday they have rung somebody else.

What it costs to try

One setup fee to build the account, the campaigns, the creative and the landing page. Your ad budget paid directly to Meta on your own card. Then eight per cent of the work the ads win you, and nothing at all if they win you none.