How Much Should a Tradie Spend on Facebook Ads?

Choose the job you want before choosing a budget

Start with one service and the locations you can genuinely cover. An emergency repair, a scheduled installation and a renovation quote have different lead times, travel requirements and capacity constraints. A campaign that fills the diary with work you cannot deliver is not a useful result.

Write down the jobs you want, the jobs you will decline, your service area and the number of additional jobs your team can complete. Use those answers in the ad, landing page and qualification process. Do not make a suburb-specific promise your team cannot fulfil.

Work backwards from contribution, not the headline invoice

Estimate what remains from a completed job after the costs that change when you deliver it, including relevant labour, materials, subcontractors and travel. Then decide what must remain for overheads, profit and uncertainty. The difference is a planning allowance for acquiring that customer.

Keep your figures on a consistent basis. Do not assume every quoted job is won or every booking is completed. If repeat work is not documented, leave it out of the first calculation. The allowance is a planning constraint, not a recommendation to spend that amount.

A worked example using invented planning inputs

These are hypothetical AUD figures only: they are not Everest pricing, a client case study or an Australian advertising benchmark. Suppose a completed job contributes $200 before acquisition costs, and you want to retain $100. That leaves an all-in acquisition allowance of $100 per completed customer.

Assume, purely for planning, that one in four qualified enquiries becomes a completed paid job. The allowance is then $100 × 25% = $25 per qualified enquiry. If twenty qualified enquiries produce five completed jobs, the all-in allowance for that cohort is $500. This outcome is an assumption to test, not a forecast.

If $200 of that allowance is allocated to management, creative and setup work for the cohort, only $300 remains for media: $15 per qualified enquiry in this example. If real results cannot fit the allowance, change the economics, offer or process before increasing spend. Keep raw form submissions separate from qualified enquiries.

Turn assumptions into a one-page test plan

Record the service, service area, available capacity, contribution per completed job, retained contribution target and assumed qualified-enquiry-to-completed-job rate. Then record media, management, creative and setup costs separately. Name the person who responds to each enquiry and the person who records the eventual outcome.

Agree an affordable total learning limit, a review date and reasons to pause. A short trial can uncover broken tracking, unsuitable locations or a weak enquiry handoff. It cannot establish a dependable long-term acquisition cost. If the sample is small or jobs are still pending, say the evidence is inconclusive.

Check the actual platform spending controls

Meta offers daily and lifetime budgets at campaign or ad-set level, depending on the setup. Review the current controls and billing settings in your own account before launch. A planning spreadsheet does not enforce a spending limit inside Ads Manager.

Confirm the campaign dates, who can change the budget, who approves changes and how spend will be monitored. Read Meta’s current budget guidance below rather than treating a third-party article as the specification for your account. Advertising spend and an agency management fee are separate costs.

Review the same group of enquiries through to the outcome

Keep a simple sequence: received, contacted, qualified, quoted, booked and completed. Define qualified in advance, for example the right job type, a served location and workable timing. Record why unsuitable enquiries were declined so you can distinguish targeting problems from capacity or follow-up problems.

Compare costs and completed jobs from the same campaign cohort. Do not divide this week’s spend by last month’s completed jobs and call it a measured acquisition cost. If no jobs have completed, report spend and pending stages instead. Customer contact details belong in the controlled enquiry or CRM workflow, not general analytics event parameters.

What to do when the budget model does not work

If suitable enquiries are not contacted, fix ownership and response coverage. If quotes are not progressing, review the next step and follow-up. If most requests are outside your scope, improve the offer, service-area information and qualifying questions. Each problem needs a different response; buying more traffic is not a universal fix.

Bring your completed worksheet and the gaps in your data to a planning conversation. Everest can discuss Meta advertising and the enquiry journey, with optional CRM and automation work scoped separately. No management fee for the first two weeks of a suitable Meta engagement does not make media spend free, and results are not guaranteed.