Retargeting for tradespeople: cheap wins

What retargeting is, in trade terms

Cold advertising is knocking on doors in a street you have never worked in. Retargeting is going back to the houses where someone opened the door, had a chat and said they would think about it.

On Meta, it means showing ads only to people who have already interacted with you: watched a video, visited your page, opened your lead form, clicked through to your site. They are a small audience, so the ads cost little, and they already know your name, so they respond far more often.

Why it is cheap

Two reasons. The audience is tiny, perhaps a few hundred to a few thousand people in a local area, so you cannot physically spend much reaching them. And Meta charges less to show ads to people who engage, because engagement is what it is optimising for anyway.

A typical local trades retargeting set runs happily at £3 to £8 a day. Treat that figure as a planning number, not a promise. The point is that it is a rounding error next to a cold campaign, and it often produces a disproportionate share of the booked jobs.

The five audiences you already have

The form-opener audience is the one to start with

Someone tapped your ad, the form opened, they looked at it and closed it. That is a hot lead with cold feet. Maybe the form asked too much. Maybe their partner walked in. Maybe they just wanted to see a price first.

Build an audience of people who opened the form but did not submit in the last 14 days. Show them one ad: the same job photo, a 'from' price, and a tap-to-call button instead of a form. You have removed the thing that stopped them.

This audience is small, often under a hundred people a month for a sole trader, so set it at £2 to £3 a day and leave it running forever. Our guide on instant forms versus landing pages for trade leads covers why form drop-off happens in the first place.

Video viewers: the sequence that sells high-ticket jobs

If you run video ads, and you should, every viewer is sorted automatically by how long they watched. Someone who watched three seconds is a stranger. Someone who watched 75% of a 30-second clip about your extension work has effectively sat through your pitch.

Show that second group a different video. Not the same one again. If the first showed the finished extension, the second shows the customer standing in it saying what it was like to have you in the house for eight weeks. The third, a week later, is you talking about price ranges and timescales.

Three videos, three weeks, a few pounds a day. For bathroom, kitchen and extension trades, this sequence does the job a brochure used to do. The agencies in our video-led Facebook ads agencies for trades guide structure campaigns this way as standard, and our piece on ad creative that works for trades describes the formats that suit each step.

Past customers: the audience nobody uses

You have a list of every customer you have ever invoiced. Upload it (name, phone, email, postcode) and Meta will match a decent share of them. Now you can show ads to people who have already paid you and, in most cases, liked you.

What do you show them? Not 'we do bathrooms'. They know. Show them the thing they have not bought yet. The decorator shows the exterior woodwork offer in spring. The heating engineer shows the service reminder in September. The landscaper shows the patio clean and re-sand in March.

And ask for the review. A 15-second video of you saying 'if we did work for you and you were happy, a Google review takes a minute and makes a huge difference to a small firm like ours' with the link in the ad. Cheap, and it builds the asset every other ad leans on.

Chasing quotes without picking up the phone

Upload the list of people you have quoted in the last 90 days as its own audience. Then show them, for about a pound a day, a rotating set of your recent finished jobs and customer comments.

Nobody in that audience will think of it as advertising. They will think 'oh, that's the roofer, he's done another one round here'. When they finally decide to go ahead, you are the name in their head. It is the gentlest chase there is and it complements the direct system in our guide to following up Facebook leads fast.

Exclusions: the other half of retargeting

Every retargeting audience should also be an exclusion from your cold campaign. People who already enquired should not see the cold ad asking them to enquire. Customers who paid you last month should not see 'driveways from £6,500'. It wastes money and it looks careless.

Set it once in each cold ad set: exclude form submitters (30 days), exclude the customer list, exclude site visitors who hit a thank-you page. Five minutes' work, and it quietly lowers your cold cost per lead.

Frequency: do not become the annoying roofer

Small audiences mean the same people see your ad often. That is the point, up to a limit. Past four or five views a week it tips from familiar to irritating, and comments turn sour.

Check frequency in your report weekly. Rotate the creative every two to three weeks. Cap the budget rather than letting Meta spend on a 300-person audience until they have each seen you twenty times. Our guide to reading your Meta ads report shows where the frequency figure sits.

A £5-a-day starting setup

• Ad set 1: form openers, last 14 days, £2 a day, one ad with a price and tap-to-call
• Ad set 2: video viewers 50%+, last 30 days, £2 a day, a customer testimonial video
• Ad set 3: past customers and quotes, uploaded list, £1 a day, seasonal offer or review ask
• All three excluded from your cold campaign
• Creative rotated every fortnight, frequency checked weekly

Frequently asked questions