Why didn't my Facebook ads work?

Most of the time the advertising ran fine and nothing behind it had been built. The leads arrived, somebody called them once about two days later, and that was the whole process. Metcalf Media puts the lead flow and the follow-up in before a dollar reaches a platform, because buying attention a business isn't set up to answer is how the money disappears.

Was it the ads that failed, or what happened next?

Usually the ads worked. That's the uncomfortable part.

Leads came in and then they sat. One call went out two days after the form was filled, nobody picked up, and that was the whole process. No second attempt. No text. No record of who had been contacted and who hadn't. By the time anyone rang, the customer had booked whoever answered first.

It's an easy failure to misread from the inside. The report shows a cost per lead and the cost per lead looks reasonable. Nothing in the ad account tells you the leads went nowhere, because the ad account's job ends at the form. So the business concludes the leads were junk, switches the campaign off, and tells people at the counter that advertising doesn't work.

It's worth sitting with, because almost every owner describing a campaign that did nothing is describing some version of that same week — and none of it's visible from inside the ad account.

How do I tell whether it was the ads or what happened after?

Three questions, answerable this afternoon without any software.

• How many leads actually came in? Count them by hand. Not the platform's number, the ones that reached a human.
• How long until the first contact attempt? Measure it in minutes from submission to first dial or text, across the last batch of leads.
• How many times was each one contacted? If the answer is once, that's the finding.

A lead answered in minutes closes at several times the rate of one called back the next day, because the customer contacted more than one company and the first to respond usually books it by default. If your average first response is measured in hours, the campaign was never the variable under test.

Metcalf Media texts every lead back inside sixty seconds, day or night, and wires missed-call text-back on every unanswered call, before any campaign goes live. Not as an add-on afterwards. First.

Does boosting a post count as advertising?

No, and the distinction isn't snobbery. Boosting takes something already written for people who follow you and pays to show it to people who don't, with none of the targeting, none of the offer and none of the creative testing that makes paid social work.

Nobody wrote it for a stranger. Nobody filmed anything for it. Nobody watched the numbers afterwards or changed anything when they moved. Most owners who say they tried Facebook ads and nothing happened are describing that.

Real campaigns are built to a service area, run against creative made for the job, and paced daily. Facebook and Instagram advertising run that way looks almost nothing like a boosted post from the outside, and nothing at all like one from the inside.

How much do I have to spend before I know anything?

Less than most owners assume, which is the genuinely good news in this.

A mobile detailing business here in Tulsa started at ten dollars a day. He booked $2,500 of work in his first week. Across six months he spent $4,000 on advertising against $40,000+ in contracted work.

Two things about that are worth stating plainly. Contracted is the honest word, because that figure is work booked rather than money already in the bank, and those are different numbers in any service business. And $10 a day wasn't a clever trick. It was enough budget to learn what the account would do, in a market small enough to reach on it, with somebody answering every lead immediately.

A business that can't say what one booked job is worth has no way to judge whether any of this worked. That figure comes before the budget, every time.

What numbers should I be looking at?

Not likes. Not reach. Not the platform's own estimate of results, which counts whatever it has been told to count.

• Cost per booked job, rather than cost per lead. A cheap lead that never becomes work costs more than an expensive one that does.
• Speed to first response, in minutes.
• Close rate on the leads that were contacted properly, held separately from the ones nobody reached.
• What one job is worth, so that everything above can be judged against something real.

Most monthly reports contain none of these, which is what makes them readable and useless.

When is the honest answer that I shouldn't be advertising at all?

Below roughly $750,000 a year in revenue, or any time nobody is able to answer the phone when it rings. Turning the phone on for a business that can't answer it doesn't help that business. It spends money making people angry and produces a run of one-star reviews from customers who never got called back.

A website, a properly built profile and a working follow-up system do more for a company at that stage than paid traffic does, and cost less. Metcalf Media says so on the call rather than after the invoice, because a campaign sold into a business that's not ready to receive it fails in a way that gets blamed on advertising for years afterwards.