Facebook & Instagram Ads for Contractors: What’s the Real Return?
Facebook and Instagram ads reach homeowners who aren’t actively searching yet: cheaper leads, lower intent, and a close rate the calculator’s own default already assumes is lower than Google’s. Here is the benchmark data to sanity-check your own numbers.
Last updated August 16, 2026
Facebook & Instagram ads reach homeowners scrolling their feed, not people actively searching for a flooring contractor, so leads tend to run cheaper than Google Ads but close at a lower rate. The calculator’s own defaults bake that in: an $800/month budget, 32 leads, and a 2-in-10 close rate (lower than Google or SEO’s 3-in-10 default) still works out to 6.4 jobs, $22,400 of work, and $28.00 back for every $1 spent, because raw lead volume runs higher. Real-world home improvement benchmarks run a higher cost per lead than the calculator’s $25.00 example, so treat the defaults as a demonstration, not a target.
How to read the inputs
Monthly Facebook Ad Budget
- Starts completely blank, so nothing calculates until you enter your real spend; $800 is only the placeholder shown, not a filled-in default
Leads Per Month
- Pre-fills to 32, the highest starting lead count of the three ad-channel calculators, which is consistent with Facebook’s cheaper-but-lower-intent reputation
Out of Every 10 Leads, How Many Become Jobs?
- Pre-fills to 2, not the 3 the on-screen hint text describes as “typical”. That hint is shared wording across all three channel calculators, but Facebook’s own default is deliberately lower
Average Job Value
- Pre-fills to $3,500, the same starting figure used by the Google Ads and SEO calculators, so swap in your own typical job value for an apples-to-apples comparison across channels
Worked example
Entering an $800/month Facebook & Instagram ad budget against the calculator’s own defaults (32 leads/month, a 2-in-10 close rate, and a $3,500 average job value) returns a $25.00 cost per lead, 6.4 jobs won/month, $22,400 of work won/month, and a $125.00 ad cost per job won. The summary line underneath spells out the whole funnel: “Spend $800/month → about 32 leads → 6.4 jobs → $22,400 of work. That’s $28.00 back for every $1 you spend.”
Turn your own Facebook & Instagram spend into a return
Enter your real monthly ad budget, lead count, close rate, and job value to see your own cost per lead, jobs won, and return per dollar.
Full tool shows your cost per lead, jobs won per month, work won per month, and ad cost per job won as soon as you enter a real budget.
Open the live calculator →Common mistakes
- Expecting Facebook & Instagram leads to close at Google Ads’ rate, when the calculator’s own defaults encode the difference (2-in-10 for Facebook versus 3-in-10 for Google and SEO) because Facebook reaches people who were not actively searching
- Judging a new campaign’s cost per lead off its first few days of spend, because Meta’s ad sets typically need around 50 conversion events in a rolling 7-day window to exit the platform’s “Learning Phase,” and costs are usually noisier before that
- Treating the on-screen “3 out of 10 is a typical close rate” hint as Facebook-specific advice. It is shared wording across all three channel calculators; Facebook’s own pre-filled default sits lower, at 2 out of 10, which is the more channel-appropriate number to anchor on
- Assuming an existing Facebook or Instagram Page following reaches your audience for free, when organic reach for business Pages has fallen to roughly the low single digits of followers per post, nowhere near a substitute for paid spend
- Running the same one or two ad creatives for months without rotating them. Facebook and Instagram repeatedly serve the same ad to the same in-feed audience, so creative fatigue sets in faster here than on a Google Search campaign that serves fresh per query
- Crediting a won job entirely to Facebook spend while running multiple channels at once, since Facebook commonly plays a supporting retargeting role for people who first found you through Google or organic search, and plugging the same job into more than one channel’s calculator double-counts the return
Use real benchmark data and your own campaign numbers to fill in the spend, lead, and close-rate fields. The calculator only does the funnel math once you give it real inputs, not the other way around. If you are running Google Ads or SEO alongside Facebook, see how to turn a total marketing budget into a per-day rate before splitting it across channels.
Wondering how a slower, compounding channel stacks up against paid social? see what SEO is actually worth to a flooring contractor before deciding where your next marketing dollar goes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a Facebook or Instagram lead actually cost for a home improvement business?
WordStream’s 2025 Facebook Ads Benchmarks report puts the average cost per lead for the “Home & Home Improvement” category at $41.26, against a $27.66 cross-industry average, which means home improvement runs an above-average cost per lead on Meta, not a below-average one. The same report shows a $2.23 cost per click and a 5.22% conversion rate for the category, both worse than the cross-industry $1.92 CPC and 7.72% CVR. The calculator’s own worked example assumes a $25.00 cost per lead, which is closer to the cross-industry number than the home-improvement one. That is a reason to plug in your own real spend and lead count rather than trusting the default as a benchmark.
Why does the calculator default Facebook’s close rate to 2 out of 10 when the on-screen hint says 3 out of 10 is typical?
That “3 out of 10 is a typical close rate” hint is one hardcoded line of text shared by the Facebook, Google, and SEO calculators alike, and it does not change per channel. But Facebook’s own pre-filled default for that field is 2 out of 10, not 3, while Google Ads and SEO both default to 3. That is a deliberate, Facebook-only difference: Facebook and Instagram reach homeowners scrolling their feed, not people actively searching for a flooring contractor, so a lower fraction of leads are expected to turn into real jobs. Anchor on the pre-filled 2-in-10 number for this channel, not the hint text sitting next to it.
How long should I run a new Facebook ad campaign before trusting its cost-per-lead number?
Meta’s own Business Help Center explains that an ad set typically needs to log around 50 optimization (conversion) events within a rolling 7-day window before it exits the platform’s “Learning Phase” and settles into stable, optimized delivery. Costs and lead volume tend to be noisier and less representative before that threshold is reached, and the count can reset if an ad set’s events drop back below 50 in any 7-day window later on. Judging a campaign off its first few days of spend is a common way to write off a channel that just has not stabilized yet.
If we already post on our business Facebook and Instagram Page, do we still need to pay for ads?
Posting for free and paying to reach people are two different things on Meta today. Organic reach for a business Page post has fallen to roughly the low single digits of a Page’s followers per post in recent industry reports, down from something closer to 16% back in 2012. A loyal following is still worth having (Facebook and Instagram ads also do double duty as retargeting, re-showing your work to people who already looked at your Page or website), but it is not a substitute for the paid budget this calculator is built around.