Facebook ads management in Dundee, Perth and Glasgow: how £2,996 sold 14 jobs

In our first three months managing a Scottish glazing company's Facebook ads around Dundee, Perth and Glasgow, we brought in 95 leads at £31.54 each, against £44.29 a lead across everything that had run in the account over about a year before us. Those leads have already turned into 14 sold jobs from £2,996 of ad spend.

That is what paying someone to run your ads should get you, and below is exactly how we got there, so you can hold your own account to the same standard.

What the numbers say

Here is everything that had run in the account before we took it over:

• £30,204 spent, 682 leads, £44.29 a lead.

Their main lead campaign on its own, running for about ten months, came in at £43.37 a lead with a 1.12% click rate. Here is ours, over three months:

• £2,996 spent, 95 leads, £31.54 a lead, at a 1.76% click rate.

Every one of those figures is what the account itself recorded, pulled on 20 September. The clearest way to see the gap is in leads rather than pounds: at the main campaign's £43.37 a lead, the money we have put through the account would have bought 69 leads. It bought 95.

What we changed

Three things did the work.

First, we let the account tell us where the budget should go. The money had been spread thinly over a lot of near-identical ads, so we read the account's own breakdowns, found the few ads that were bringing leads in cheap and put the budget behind those. Five of the ten ads in there shared exactly the same body text, and Facebook treats near-copies as one ad and throttles them, so half the account had been working against itself.

Second, we cleared out what should never have been left running. A dormant campaign that had never spent was still switched on with a £655-a-day budget, enough to burn more than a fifth of our entire three months' spend in a single day if it had ever started delivering. One live ad had the wrong button on it, set to "book travel" on a glazing advert. Neither of those shows up in a monthly screenshot, and finding them is the difference between an account somebody is minding and one that has been left alone.

Third, we put the budget behind the ad with the price on it. The best creative in the account prints a flat £2,450 for four windows and a door right on the image. Most owners want the price kept off so they can "sell it on the call", but hiding it means paying for clicks from people who were never going to spend two grand. With the price printed, everyone who enquires has already seen the number and still wants to talk, and that ad carries the best click rate in the account, 2.58% in Glasgow.

What the Dundee, Perth and Glasgow leads turned into

A cost per lead only means something once you know what the leads become, so we hold the ad account up against the business's own sales tracker, lead by lead, from the first call through the survey and the quote to the signed job. All 95 leads the account recorded are logged there.

Of those 95, 42 have already booked a survey, taken a quote or bought. Fourteen are sold jobs, and another 22 are sitting on a quote. Sold jobs at this business come in at just over £5,000 each. The business keeps its own score as well, and its monthly marketing results put £68,490 against our name across August and September.

Set those jobs against the spend and the answer is plain. £2,996 of advertising has sold 14 jobs, which is £214 of ad spend for every job sold, on work worth five grand a time. That is the number that decides whether an ad account is working, and an agency that reports your cost per lead and stops there is handing you a vanity figure.

So is Facebook ads management worth paying for?

Yes, when whoever runs the account reads it, moves the budget to what works, clears out what does not, and can tell you what your leads turned into. That is how we run Facebook ad accounts for local businesses. It is not worth it when they set it live, send you a screenshot once a month and leave it.

You can tell which one you have got in about ten minutes. Ask them where your cheapest leads are coming from, and how many of last month's leads became jobs. If they have to go away and look, they have not been looking. On this same account we found the same advert costing two to three times more in one town than in another, and we have broken down exactly why.

If you are spending on Facebook ads and nobody has ever told you, in plain numbers, what your account is doing and what it is selling, book a call. We will open your account up with you and go through where your cheapest leads come from, what is wasting budget and what your leads are turning into.