By Brandon Aubey
Ask this question in a contractor forum and you get two answers, both delivered with total confidence. “Facebook ads are a waste of money for trades.” “Facebook ads built my business.”
Both people are telling the truth about their own experience. The difference is almost never the platform. It is what they advertised, and what happened in the ten minutes after someone raised their hand.
Do Facebook ads work for plumbers?
Yes, but not for the burst-pipe emergency you are probably imagining. Someone standing in two inches of water does not open Facebook. They search Google and call the first business that answers.
Facebook is interruption, not intent. Nobody on Facebook was looking for a plumber when your ad appeared. That makes it a poor tool for capturing today’s emergency and a good tool for two other jobs:
- Planned, higher-ticket work. Water heater replacement, repiping, water softeners, sewer line work. Things people know they need eventually and keep putting off.
- Being the name they already know. When the emergency does happen and they search, the business they recognize gets the call.
If you judge a Facebook campaign by how many 2am emergency calls it produced, you will conclude it does not work. Judge it by booked estimates on planned work and the answer changes.
How much does a Facebook lead cost for a plumbing business?
The most recent industry benchmark puts a Home and Home Improvement lead at $41.26 on Facebook lead campaigns.
That figure comes from WordStream by LocaliQ’s Facebook Ads Benchmarks, an annual study of more than 1,000 campaigns, last updated September 2025. Here is the full row for the Home and Home Improvement category:
| Metric | Home & Home Improvement |
|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $41.26 |
| Cost per click | $2.23 |
| Click-through rate | 1.94% |
| Conversion rate | 5.22% |
Two honest caveats before you build a budget on that. It is a category average, not a plumbing number, and it lumps you in with remodelers and furniture. And it is national, not El Paso. Treat it as a starting reference point, not a forecast.
The same study found Facebook lead campaigns averaged $27.66 per lead against $70.11 on Google Ads, and $1.92 per click against $5.26. Cheaper leads, colder leads. That trade is the whole story.
What does $25 a day actually buy?
At $25 a day you are spending about $750 a month, and at the benchmark numbers above that is roughly 18 leads.
Here is the arithmetic, so you can redo it with your own figures rather than trusting ours:
- $750 a month divided by $2.23 per click is about 336 clicks
- 336 clicks at a 5.22% conversion rate is about 17 to 18 leads
- $750 divided by the $41.26 cost per lead lands in the same place, about 18 leads
We recommend starting around $25 a day. That is a recommendation, not a minimum, and it is not a promise of 18 leads. It is the budget where the ad platform has enough data to learn who to show your ads to. Below that, campaigns tend to stall before they optimize.
What those leads are worth depends entirely on your close rate and your average job. A plumber closing a quarter of 18 leads on water heater work is in very different territory than one closing two of them on drain snakes. Run your own numbers.
Why do Facebook ads fail for so many plumbers?
Usually because nobody followed up fast enough, not because the targeting was wrong.
A Facebook lead is not a phone call. Somebody tapped a form while scrolling, half-interested, and then went back to scrolling. They have not committed to anything. If you call them back the next afternoon, they have forgotten they filled anything in, and often they have already booked someone else.
The other three common failures:
- Advertising the emergency. “24/7 emergency plumbing” is a Google message. On Facebook it reaches thousands of people whose plumbing is fine.
- Sending clicks to a homepage. The ad promised something specific. The homepage delivers a general contractor website. People leave.
- Killing it after two weeks. The campaign spends its early budget learning. Judging it before it has finished learning is judging the wrong thing.
How fast do you have to respond to a Facebook lead?
Faster than you think, and faster than any human watching a phone can reliably manage during a workday.
You are on a roof or under a sink. The lead comes in at 11:40am. You see it at 4pm. That gap is where most of the money leaks out of Facebook advertising for trades, and it has nothing to do with the ads.
This is why we do not sell ad management on its own. Ads that generate leads into a system nobody works are an expensive way to buy other people’s customers. Our Essentials plan handles the same problem on the phone side for $97 a month, and the follow-up system is included in every plan above it.
Facebook ads or Google Ads for a plumber?
Google if you need booked jobs this week, Facebook if you want a pipeline that is not entirely dependent on who happens to be searching today.
Google Ads catch existing demand. Someone typed “water heater repair El Paso” and is ready to call. That intent is why the benchmark cost per lead on Google is roughly two and a half times Facebook’s.
Facebook creates demand you did not have. It is cheaper per lead and slower to convert.
Most plumbers we talk to should be on Google first, then add Facebook once the phone side is reliably handled. If you can only do one thing this quarter, and your Google Business Profile is a mess, fix that before you spend a dollar on either.
What does it cost to have someone run this for you?
Our Paid Growth plan is $997 a month, plus ad spend you pay on the side. We do not mark it up.
That is deliberate. Your card. Your ad account. Your money. The $997 is for a steady flow of new job leads. Google or Meta — we pick what fits.
Ads only work if someone answers. Fix the phone first. Then turn the leads on.
We do not promise a lead count on this plan. The only plan that carries a guarantee is Dead River Complete, our flagship, which is the one where we run the entire system.
If you want the plumbing-specific version of all of this, we wrote one: plumber marketing in El Paso.
The benchmark figures above came from WordStream by LocaliQ in September 2025 and are linked so you can check them. Everything else is what we charge, published on the page.
Prices and plans mentioned in older articles may have changed. See current pricing.