In Glasgow, one Facebook ad cost £11.54 a lead, and in Dundee it cost £33.12

A glazing company in Scotland was running the exact same Facebook adverts in two places at once. One set of ads went out around Glasgow, the other around Dundee and Perth, and the pictures, the words and the offer were identical in both. In Glasgow, one of those adverts brought in a lead for £11.54. The same advert, over in Dundee and Perth, cost £33.12 a lead. That is nearly three times the price for what looked like the same job on paper, and it shows exactly where the money in an ad account goes.

Reading an account down to the town is a standard part of how we run Facebook ads for local businesses, and it is something you can check on your own account in about ten minutes. Most people who pay for ads never do.

The same three adverts, two very different prices

We were testing three adverts at the time, and every one of them ran in both places. It was the same image, the same words and the same offer in each town, and here is what a lead cost from each one, in Glasgow against Dundee and Perth:

• A heat loss advert: £11.54 a lead in Glasgow, and £33.12 in Dundee and Perth.

• A four windows and one door advert: £13.16 in Glasgow, and £34.12 in Dundee and Perth.

• A free home inspection advert: £13.10 in Glasgow, and £39 in Dundee and Perth.

Every one of those figures is what the account itself recorded for that advert in that town, and every advert came in between two and a half and three times cheaper in Glasgow. When you see a spread like that, the advert was never the thing holding you back. You were showing a perfectly good advert to the wrong town.

It was the town, not the advert

The instinct, when leads get dear, is to blame the advert. You redo the picture, you rewrite the words, you try a new offer. On this account all three adverts were already doing their job, because the very same ads were coming in cheap in Glasgow. What needed to change was where the budget was going.

Facebook doesn't hand you this on a plate, but it is sitting in the account if you know where to look. You break the results down by area, and the account tells you where leads are cheap and where they are dear. We had opened Glasgow as a second area only days before we pulled these numbers, and it was already bringing in 34% of the leads on 13% of the budget, so the account was pointing straight at where the money should go. The move from there is clear: put more of the budget behind the town where leads come cheap, and take it off the town that has already seen the ads too many times. You don't tear up a good advert that's already working. You stop paying a premium to run it in the wrong place.

Why the same advert cost more in Dundee and Perth

There is a second reason the gap was that wide, and it is one we watch on every account we run. The Glasgow ads were new, so they were landing in front of people who hadn't seen them before. The Dundee and Perth ads had been running a good while longer, and on the day we pulled the numbers that set had reached 11,620 people at a frequency of 5.61, which means the average person there had already seen the ad between five and six times. That isn't a tired advert. That is a small market that has run out of new people to show it to, and once you go past about four views you're mostly paying to reach people who have already made their minds up.

So the answer isn't to pour everything into Glasgow and forget the rest. A town has a bottom to it and you can empty it. The answer is to keep reading the account and keep the budget moving to wherever the next cheap lead is, which is a different place this month than it will be the next.

A cheap lead only counts once it turns into a job

A low cost per lead is only half the picture, so on this account we follow every lead through the client's own tracker, from the first call to the survey, the quote and the signed job. Of the 95 leads the account brought in between late June and 20 September, 14 have already turned into sold jobs, which is £214 of ad spend for every job sold, and the sold jobs with a value on record average just over £5,000 each. We've written up what this account's leads turned into in full. If nobody running your ads has ever asked you what a job is worth to you, they are chasing a number that doesn't mean anything.

The ten-minute check on your own account

You don't need any software for the thing that mattered most here. If you're already paying for Facebook ads, open the account this week and look at three breakdowns:

• Break the results down by area, and compare what a lead costs in each place you're targeting.

• Break them down by placement, and compare Reels against the main feed.

• Check the frequency on your biggest ad set. If it's above four, you've run out of town and you need a new audience, not a new picture.

If whoever runs your ads can't tell you those three numbers without going away to look them up, they haven't looked either. That's the test, and it costs you nothing to run it.

If you'd rather have someone read your account properly instead of guessing, book a call and we'll go through it with you and show you where the money is actually going.