Facebook Ads Cost in the UK: Planning a Local Business Budget

What goes into the total cost?

Ad spend pays for advertising delivery. Agency fees pay for work such as campaign setup, management and review. Content costs cover the videos, photographs and copy used in the adverts. Enquiry follow-up may be another part of the scope. A quote should make clear which of those items are included and which are separate.

A £500 total marketing budget and £500 of ad spend are not interchangeable. If some of your budget pays for management or creative, that money is not also buying advertising placements. Ask for the breakdown before comparing proposals.

Clicks, leads and customers are different costs

Cost per click is ad spend divided by clicks. Cost per lead is ad spend divided by enquiries. Neither is the same as the cost of winning a paying customer. If you include management and content in your calculation, label it as the total marketing cost per customer rather than the ad-only acquisition cost.

Suppose a campaign receives many inexpensive clicks but few relevant enquiries. The low click cost does not establish that it is good value. Equally, a higher-priced enquiry may still be worthwhile if it turns into the kind of job you want. Keep the job outcome alongside the enquiry record.

A worked example using job margins

This is an illustrative calculation, not a Reforge client result or a recommended budget. Imagine total marketing costs of £600, 30 enquiries and six new paying customers. The total cost per enquiry is £20 and the total cost per new customer is £100.

If each of those six jobs leaves £150 after the direct cost of delivering it, they contribute £900 before marketing. Deduct the £600 marketing cost and £300 remains before other overheads and tax. If only three enquiries become customers, the same campaign costs £200 per customer and the six-customer conclusion no longer holds.

Use your own numbers: total marketing cost ÷ new paying customers = marketing cost per customer. Compare that with contribution per job, not just sales revenue. Repeat purchases may matter, but do not assume repeat business you have not measured.

Set a testing budget you can afford

Start with the jobs you want to sell, the area you can serve and the amount you can afford to spend while learning. Agree what will be measured and when you will review the evidence. There is no universal spend that makes every local business profitable, and increasing a budget does not fix an unclear service or a slow response process.

Before changing spend, inspect the path from advert to enquiry to booked work. If people click but do not enquire, consider whether the next step is clear. If enquiries arrive but are not booked, look at relevance, response and quoting. These are diagnostic questions, not a promise that a particular change will improve results.

What to ask an agency before agreeing a price

Ask what is included in the fee, what ad spend is additional, who produces the content, who handles new enquiries and which results appear in the report. Check the contract term and who controls the advertising account.

Reforge manages Meta ads, content and enquiry follow-up for local service businesses. Ongoing pricing depends on the scope; email Ollie for a quote. We do not publish a standard monthly fee or an unverified UK cost-per-lead benchmark.