Meta Ads For Trades: What £25 A Day Actually Gets You

Ethan, Director·24 June 2026·4 min read

Every tradesperson has heard that Facebook ads are either a goldmine or a money pit, usually from two different blokes at the same merchant counter. Both are right. The difference isn't the platform, it's what you put in front of it. Here's what a real £25 a day budget is doing on an account we run right now.

The real numbers

A client of ours runs £25 a day on Meta, roughly £775 a month. Last month that produced 135 leads: names, numbers and job types, every one texted to the owner within seconds of the form being filled. That's under £6 a lead. They closed one in ten of them at an average job value of £2,000, which is around £27,000 of work from under £800 of ad spend. Call it a 34x return, from a budget most businesses would call pocket money.

Why the creative does the heavy lifting

On Google, people are already searching for you. On Meta, they're watching videos of dogs. The ad has to earn the interruption, and in the trades nothing earns it like a before and after. A pressure washing transformation, a rendered house front, a finished bathroom: the photo does the selling, the form just catches the hand that's already raised.

Where £25 a day dies

Three ways, and we see all of them in accounts we take over. One: sending clicks to a slow homepage instead of an instant form or a fast landing page. Two: leads sitting unanswered overnight, because a Meta lead that isn't contacted within an hour is a coin flip at best. Three: judging it after four days. Meta's learning phase needs a couple of weeks of consistent spend before the cost per lead settles.

When to scale

Once the cost per lead is stable and the diary is feeling it, budget increases of about 20% at a time protect the learning. The client above started at £25 a day and the numbers speak for themselves. The plan isn't to stay there, it's to prove the machine works before feeding it more.

If you want the honest version for your trade and your area, that's exactly what the sixty second funnel below is for. We'll tell you what Meta can realistically do at your budget, with numbers from businesses like yours, before you spend a penny.