How to Get Leads From Facebook Ads (Not Just Likes)

Your ad reached 9,200 people in your ZIP code. It picked up 43 likes, 11 comments, three shares. Your phone rang zero times. The problem is not your photo, your headline, or your budget. It is that you asked Meta for likes — and Meta is extremely good at delivering exactly what you ask for.

Most owners make that request once, spend $300 finding out, and conclude the channel is a scam. It is not. Knowing how to get leads from Facebook ads starts with understanding that "leads" is a setting you select, not a thing that happens once enough people see you.

Likes are not a metric. They are a receipt for the wrong purchase.

Meta asks you to pick an objective before you write a single word: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, Sales. That dropdown takes four seconds and is the most consequential decision in the process. Copy, image, and targeting matter maybe a third as much.

Here is why. Meta does not show your ad to "people in Tampa aged 35-65." It shows it to the people inside that group most likely to do the specific thing you selected. Pick Engagement and it hunts for the minority who reliably like and comment on local business posts — cheap to reach, and mostly retirees, neighbors, and your cousin. Pick Leads and it hunts for the smaller, pricier minority who fill out forms and answer the phone. Same budget, same radius, same ad — two completely different sets of human beings see it.

Run the math on $300 a month. On Engagement you pay roughly $0.03 to $0.20 per engagement: 1,500 to 3,000 likes. Feels amazing. Books nothing. On Leads, a roofing contractor pays roughly $40 to $80 per lead, so the same $300 buys 4 to 7 leads. Three answer, two let you out to measure, one signs a $9,000 job. One dropdown. Our complete Facebook ads guide for small business covers the rest of the setup; this page is only about the lead part.

The three ways to run it, compared honestly

Three routes, and a local owner realistically takes one of them.

The boosted post is the $500 mistake almost every owner makes first. The blue Boost button is built to buy engagement on an existing post — not broken, just a different product from the one you want. The mechanics are in boosted post vs Facebook ad. Short version: if your goal is a phone number, do not press the blue button.

The lead ad is the default answer for trades. Someone taps your ad, a form slides up inside Facebook or Instagram with their name and email already filled in, they confirm their phone, they tap Submit. Four seconds, no website, no leaving the app.

The landing page is right less often than the internet thinks — it wins on high-ticket, considered purchases where you must sell before they raise their hand, and loses on everything else.

Why the instant form beats the landing page for most trades

Count the steps. Landing page: tap ad, wait for a page to load on cellular, scroll, find the form, type name, email, phone, submit. Instant form: tap, confirm three pre-filled fields, submit.

That is not cosmetic. Roughly 75-85% of local ad traffic is on a phone, on a mediocre connection, mid-scroll. Every step leaks people. The instant form converts 10-25% of people who open it; a decent mobile landing page converts 2-8% of people who land on it. That 3x-5x gap shows up straight in your cost per lead — a plumber might pay $18 through an instant form and $55 for the same lead through a website.

Now the honest cost, because this is where most articles stop. Instant form leads are worth less individually. The person never left Instagram, never read your reviews, never saw pricing, and spent four seconds total. Expect a contact rate around 40-60% and a close rate roughly 20-40% lower than a website lead who typed their own number on purpose.

So the trade is: three times as many leads, each worth about a third less, at a third of the price. For nearly every trade that still wins — as long as you actually call them. With no site at all, the form is not a compromise, it is the entire play: see running Facebook ads without a website.

The one qualifying question that kills junk leads

Meta's form builder defaults to "More volume," the frictionless path. A second setting, "Higher intent," adds a review screen before submit — it typically cuts volume 20-40% and raises quality. Most owners should turn it on.

The bigger lever is adding exactly one custom question. Not four. One. The best are disqualifiers your business cares about:

• "Do you own the home?" — the highest-value question for roofing, HVAC, solar, and remodeling. Renters cannot buy a roof.
• "What is your ZIP code?" — catches people outside your drive radius, which Meta lets through more than you would like.
• "When do you want this done?" — This week / This month / Just researching. That last option does enormous work for you.
• "What is your budget range?" — brutal, effective, appropriate over $5,000.

Expect one question to cut lead volume 30-50% and junk by considerably more. Your cost per lead rises; your cost per booked job usually falls. A solar installer paying $35 for leads that close 1 in 20 is doing worse than one paying $85 for leads that close 1 in 6 — $700 per sale versus $510.

When is that trade not worth it? When you are small. Under 10 leads a month, do not add filters — you need volume to learn what your market looks like, and you can afford to hang up on a few renters. More on form construction in our Facebook lead ads guide.

Speed to lead: the five minutes that decide everything

This is the most valuable section on this page, and it has nothing to do with advertising. The widely cited Lead Response Management study out of MIT found that contacting an inbound lead within 5 minutes rather than 30 made you about 21 times more likely to qualify them. A Harvard Business Review analysis of 2,241 US companies found firms responding within an hour were 7 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation than those who waited two, and 60 times more likely than those who waited 24 hours. The average first response took 42 hours.

1. Call. Do not text first, do not email first. Ring the phone. If they pick up, you have beaten roughly 80% of your competition before saying a word.
2. If no answer, hang up and text within 60 seconds. Short and human: "Hi Dana — Mike from Coastal Roofing, you just asked about a roof inspection on Facebook. Free to talk now, or is later today better?" Naming the ad stops the "who is this?" reflex.
3. Try again in 20 minutes, then tomorrow morning, then in three days. Most owners call once and quit. Attempts two through five recover leads you already paid for.
4. Book something on the call. Not "I'll send a quote." A time. A date. Anything on a calendar.

Speed is the cheapest performance gain you have. Moving from a next-day callback to a five-minute callback can roughly triple booked jobs on identical spend. No creative test does that.

Telling a real lead from a tire-kicker

You will get junk. Budget for roughly 20-35% of instant-form leads to be unusable — wrong number, renter, out of area, or someone who thought they were entering a giveaway. That is the price of the cheap route.

Real leads answer or call back, describe the problem, name a timeframe, and own the property. Tire-kickers ask for a price before describing the job, say "just gathering info," are 40 miles out, or want a $12,000 project quoted sight unseen.

What you do with them matters more than spotting them. Do not delete them and do not chase them. Drop the "just researching" people into a list and text once a month later — a photo of a finished job, a seasonal reminder. Buying cycles run 30 to 90 days, and a real share of those who said "not yet" in March buy in June. You already paid $40 for the name.

The ones to genuinely kill: wrong ZIP and renters. The same pattern twice in a week is your targeting talking. If you get clicks and form opens but nothing usable, work through getting clicks but no leads; the leak is almost never the ad.

The part everyone skips: getting the lead out of Meta

Here is the failure nobody warns you about. Your lead ad works. People submit. The leads sit in a CSV inside Meta Business Suite, and Meta does not chase you about it. No text, no call, and the in-app notification is buried under page likes. Owners routinely discover 30 leads they paid for and never saw, two weeks late. The lead has to reach a phone within seconds. Three ways:

• Manual download. Business Suite, Leads Center, export CSV. Free, and it fails the moment you get busy — which is the week your ads finally work.
• Email or CRM connection. Route new leads to your inbox or a CRM the second they submit, with phone notifications on. The minimum acceptable setup.
• A tool that hands you the number directly. This is the whole reason Leadria exists: describe your business in a sentence, and the AI writes the copy, generates the visual, sets the targeting, and publishes the campaign — each lead arrives with a phone number attached, so the next thing you do is dial. 7-day free trial, no credit card.

Whichever you pick, test it first: submit your own form and time how long the alert takes to reach your pocket. More than a minute, and that gap is where your budget dies.

When this will not work — read this before you spend a dollar

If you cannot answer the phone within an hour, do not run lead ads at all. Not "run them and try harder." Do not run them. A lead called back in six hours has maybe a 10-15% contact rate; you pay full price for every one and convert almost none. If you are a one-truck operation under a sink until 6pm with nobody covering the phone, your $500 goes further on a Google Business Profile and past-customer reviews. Fix the answering problem first — a spouse, an answering service, anything. This channel rewards the fast, not the good.

If your customer is in an emergency, they are not on Facebook. Burst pipe, no AC in August, locked out — those people open Google and call whoever picks up first. Nobody scrolls Instagram while water comes through the ceiling. Facebook wins on planned work: replacements, upgrades, remodels, maintenance plans, anything a homeowner chews on for three weeks. Point your budget there and your Google listing at the emergencies.

One more: if your job value is under about $150 and customers do not come back, the arithmetic rarely closes — a $25 lead closing at 25% costs $100 to acquire a $90 sale. Our breakdown of what Facebook ads actually cost has the numbers per trade.

The short version

Pick the Leads objective. Use an instant form unless your jobs clear $5,000. Add one qualifying question once you are drowning, not before. Route every lead to a phone that buzzes, and call within five minutes — that last part is what decides who gets the job.

The mechanics are the same across trades, but the offer and the value of a lead are not — see how this plays out for roofers, HVAC companies, plumbers, contractors, electricians, landscapers, dentists, gyms, restaurants, cleaning companies and realtors. If the leads come in but nothing books, why your Facebook ads aren't working ranks the usual culprits, and how to budget for Facebook ads sanity-checks the spend behind them. And if you are not yet sure Facebook is even the right channel for your work, Facebook ads vs Google ads settles it.