We've taken over plenty of ad accounts from trade businesses that tried running Facebook and Google ads themselves, or hired an agency that treated them like any other local business. The story is nearly always the same: high cost per lead, poor lead quality, and a sales process that lets good enquiries go cold.
01Mistake 1: Using stock photos
Nothing kills trust faster than a roofing ad with a stock photo of a model in a hard hat who's clearly never held a nail gun. Homeowners can tell the difference between real job-site photos and generic images, and it directly affects how many people trust the ad enough to click.
When Timber Tech Homes in Queenstown swapped stock renders for real job-site photography, their cost per lead dropped from $80 to $15 on the same budget. Our guide on what to film on site shows how easy it is to get the footage.
02Mistake 2: Boosting posts instead of running ads
The boost button is built to get likes, not jobs. Proper Facebook ads are set up in Ads Manager with a clear goal, like enquiries, so Meta goes looking for people likely to get in touch rather than people who like tapping thumbs up.
03Mistake 3: Targeting too broadly
"Homeowners in Auckland" is not a strategy. It's a guess. Good campaigns for trade businesses are built around the specific service, the price point and the urgency of the job, in the suburbs you actually want to work in, with creative that speaks straight to that situation.
04Mistake 4: No fast follow-up
This is the big one. A trade business can run a brilliant campaign and still lose most of the value if leads sit for hours before anyone calls. We've covered this in why the first 3 minutes decide whether you win the job, but the short version is that speed to lead matters more than almost anything else.
05What we do differently
Every campaign we run is built around real photos and video of your crew and job sites, tight local targeting, and a 3-minute call-back from a salesperson based in New Zealand. It's a simple formula, and it's behind results like Ritchie Building turning $2k of ad spend into $80k of closed jobs. Not because the ads are flashy, but because nothing falls through the cracks between the click and the booked job.
If you want to see how it works for builders specifically, read Facebook ads for builders in NZ, or check out our Facebook lead ads service.
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