If you’ve ever hit the blue “Boost Post” button under one of your Facebook posts, you’ve run an ad. Just not a very good one.
Boosting optimises for the wrong thing. Facebook will show your boosted post to people likely to like, comment, or share it — because that’s what the Boost button is built to get you. None of that pays your bills. What pays your bills is someone picking up the phone or filling in a form.
The structure you actually need
Real Facebook advertising happens in Ads Manager, not from the post itself, and it’s built in three layers:
- Campaign — what you’re trying to achieve
- Ad set — who sees it, and your budget
- Ad — the actual image, video, and words
The layer that trips most small business owners up is the campaign objective. Facebook offers several: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, Sales. For a trades or service business trying to get the phone to ring, the objective that matters is Leads (or, for some setups, Calls).
Why objective choice changes everything
Choose Traffic, and Facebook finds people who click links — window shoppers. Choose Engagement, and it finds people who like and comment — great for your ego, useless for your diary. Choose Leads, and Facebook specifically hunts for people who are likely to complete a form or make contact. Same budget, completely different result.
Instant Forms are worth setting up properly
Under the Leads objective, you can use an Instant Form — a short form that opens inside Facebook, pre-filled with the user’s details, so they never have to leave the app or load your website. For trades, keep it to three or four fields: name, phone number, and one qualifying question relevant to the job (budget band, timeframe, or type of work). Skip the phone number field and you’ll get leads you can only reach by Messenger, which slows everything down.
The part people skip
None of this works if nobody follows up fast. A lead sitting in the Leads Centre for two days is a lead who’s already booked someone else. If you’re going to run ads properly, the notification and callback process needs to be sorted before the ad goes live, not after the first lead arrives.
Getting the ad right is only half the job — the website or form it sends people to needs to be built to actually capture and convert them. That’s the part worth getting an outside eye on before you spend a pound on ads.
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