Why Google leads feel better

A Google lead has intent. They searched. They typed in fence company near me. They are actually looking to buy right now. We call that bottom of funnel, the last stage before someone is ready to buy.

That is why everybody says the same thing about LSA leads: they are really good, very high intent, maybe a bit more expensive per estimate, but they close at such a higher rate. I just wish I could get more of them.

The catch nobody mentions

The problem with only selling to bottom of funnel is that your volume is capped. You are capped by how many reviews you have, capped by what LSA gives you, and capped by how many people in your city are actively searching for a fence today. That number is fixed and it is smaller than you think.

Why Facebook leads feel bad

There is almost zero intent on a Facebook lead form. These are not people searching for a fence company. You are hitting them in the middle of a doom scrolling session and trying to pull them out of that and into buying mode. That is much, much harder.

So you call and they do not want to talk to you, and you are asking yourself why they filled out the form at all. Did they do it by accident?

But the upside is real: the volume is unlimited. The more you spend, the more leads come in. You are only limited by how many people in your service area have a Facebook account, which is a lot.

Cost per lead does not matter

With Google, a lead is a call or a message. With Facebook, you decide what counts as a lead, and that changes the whole math.

Say fence company A gets $15 leads. They spend $1,500 and get 100 leads. Fifty answer the phone, so they are really paying $30 per conversation. Twenty of those agree to an in-person estimate. Three sign.

The $15 number on the dashboard was never the number that mattered. The one that matters is what you paid for those three.

You have to tell Facebook what a lead is

The Meta pixel is a signal you send back to Facebook about what you qualify as a lead. Every time a good one comes in, you tell Facebook you just got a lead, and Facebook goes and finds more people like that.

So what you reward it for is what you get more of:

  1. Reward the pixel for a form fill and you get more ghosts. People who fill out the form and then do nothing.
  2. Reward it for repair quotes and you get more repair submissions. You told Facebook a hinge replacement was a win, so it found you more of those.
  3. Reward it for financially qualified homeowners in your service area who need a new fence in the next three months, and Facebook starts showing your ad to more of exactly those people.

You can also stop rewarding it for leads outside your area, or leads that only want a repair. The filtering is the product.

Manufacturing demand instead of waiting for it

Google fills demand. If someone types fence company near me and you show up at the top, that is great, but you are always capped by how many people are searching today.

With Meta you can manufacture demand. When somebody’s dog gets out of the backyard, or their neighbor gets a new cedar fence installed, that is when they enter the market. They are just not at the bottom of the funnel yet.

Meta lets you reach them before that point and pull them down. Build a good funnel, reward the pixel for the signals that mean buyer, and you can sell the fence before they ever type anything into Google.